Technology
Hannah Arendt, "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man"
In "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man," Arendt suggests that the twentieth century's deluge of "fabulous instruments and ever more ingenious machinery" risks a sort of alienation, in which we forget the human origins of these seemingly inhuman/beyond-human technologies. These constant advances
makes it more unlikely every day that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise.
The astronaut, trapped in a space capsule, becomes a symbol of man, as "the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything by himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropocentric considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him."
To this point, Arendt imagines a future world where "look down upon ... what is going on on earth" and mistake scientific and technological advances as simply natural, inevitable, an almost biological part of (human?) life.
"All our pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of mutation of the human race."
Source: Hannah Arendt, "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man" in Between Past and Future.
Schaecter made her immersive glass dome, “Super/Natural," largely without reference material. Towards the end of an interview with the New York Times, she says that she is hardly anti-AI but warns against forgetting human capacity for invention. In this sense, she sings with Arendt, but in the key of a provocation/exhortation:
I really appreciate all technology, so when I say that I wanted to do something for the field of craft with the dome, it’s not at the expense of, say, A.I., necessarily. But I do think that people fall in love with these technologies and devalue others. Never forget that we invented A.I., never forget what we can do with our hands and our own brains. That’s why I didn’t use a lot of reference material for the dome. I mean, I’m 64, and all my references are in my head now.