Peter Galison

I'm certainly not trying to, you know, create any unnecessary fear or anything like that.

But when you think about the history of classified military technology, it really should get you thinking, because there was a Harvard historian of science, Peter Galison.

In 2004, he published an article, and he'd done some estimates on the proportion of classified scientific research to scientific research which is available in the public domain, and he estimated that the classified research, there was about five to 10 times as much of, as, of that as there is in the public domain.

Wow.

He came out of the only place where the surroundings were such that you would have thought these thoughts.

This is associated with a historian of science named Peter Galison, among others, who wrote a book called Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré's Maps, to try and demonstrate how the practical work these people were doing influenced their theoretical work.

Yes? Well, no.

Was he triggered by one particular event? What prompted him to think about this was a whole series of experiments that had been carried out, all of which, as I mentioned last time, one way or another

The corpus that technologists want to rewrite is the shared cultural output of billions of people over thousands of years.

Computism sees this collective output as a complicated mass of data, an unclaimed natural resource to be refined, freed from contradictions and subjectivity, until the knowledge, in the words of the historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison, is finally free from the knower.

Computists believe this capitulation to raw information is the solution, that it will lead to the discovery of new truths, a utopian future in which the computer no longer needs an operator and humans no longer need to be human or solve human problems.

Over and over again, when we can't figure out how to reconcile the subject and the object, we simply remove the subject.