Edward Tenner is author of The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do, Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity, and Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. He is a distinguished scholar of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center, a visiting scholar in the Rutgers University department of history, and a research affiliate of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.
The humanities may have suddenly mattered more than ever, but their support was also as fragile as it had been for decades.
Algorithms may not have destroyed cultural authority, but they have subverted it in a way that television never did.