["The

Bremmike here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast."

A few weeks ago, I had futurist Kevin Kelly on the podcast to discuss the technological

trends that are shaping our future.

From driverless cars to artificial intelligence, they'll make new scientific discoveries.

Kevin paints a pretty rosy picture of what's to come.

My guest today sees a different side of the coin, and argues that the future envisioned

by many in Silicon Valley is well, kind of creepy.

His name is Nicholas Carr, and he's the author of several books that critique the wide-eyed

utopianism of technologists, and his book The Shadows reported on the research that shows

how Google is making us dumber.

In the glass cage, he explored the science and why outsourcing our work and chores to

computers and robots might actually make us miserable and unsatisfied in life.

And in his latest book Utopia is creepy.

Car pulls together all the essays he's written over the years on how the rapid changes

in technology we've seen in the past few decades might be robbing us of the very things

that make us human.

Today on the show, Nicholas and I discuss why he thinks our Utopian future is creepy,

how the internet is making us dumber, and why doing mundane tasks that we otherwise would

outsource to robots or computers is actually a source of satisfaction and human flourishing.

We finish our discussion by outlining a middle path approach technology, one that doesn't

reject it fully, but simultaneously seeks to mitigate its potential downsides.

...