Albion Or Oblivion? with Theodore Roszak, Ph.D.

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In 1981, long before the subject of the perils of AI and technology, Roszak was warning society. He speaks of living in a technological society: satellites, computers, pocket calculators, nuclear energy, microprocessors, video recorders, space probes, smart phones, and more-all have become a part of the culture we live in. Is this technology a blessing or a curse? Perhaps a little bit of both. Ever since he wrote Making of a Counterculture, Theodore Rosak has been recognized as a cultural visionary and someone who is asking probing questions about the ever-expanding trend towards technology. With his book Person/Planet he further described his overview of the personal human experience within the urban industrial world. Survival, ethics, values, the environment are only a few of the major issues raised by Rosak, as we pursue technology at a frenetic frenzy. Rosak has written his first novel, Bugs which is an extraordinary blend of the mystical versus the technological, wrapped up in the mythical. Subtitled A Novel of Terror in the Computer Age, Rosak has created an imaginative and provocative vision of the potential consequences in a society where technology has become the ruling force. Here we explore the computer technological age from a different vantage point. (hosted by Michael Toms)

Bio

Theodore Roszak (1933-2011) was a cultural historian, social critic, and visiting professor of humanities at San Francisco State University. He rose to international attention with the book, The Making of a Counter Culture, which named and defined a generation's revolt against technocratic society, and continued his inquiry into personhood and industrial life in Person/Planet. Widely regarded as a cultural visionary, he spent decades questioning the human costs of runaway technology and the values we surrender to it.

Theodore Roszak is the author of many books including: 

• The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Doubleday & Company 1969)
• Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Doubleday & Company 1972)
• Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness (Harper & Row 1975)
• Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (Anchor Press Doubleday 1978)
• Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (Simon & Schuster 1992)
• The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking (Pantheon Books 1994)
• Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (Allen D Kanner) (Sierra Club Books 1995)
• The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (Random House 1995)
• Bugs, A Novel of Terror In The Computer Age (Doubleday 1981)
• Flicker: A Novel ( Summit Books reissued 2005)

Topics explored in this dialogue include:

• Concentration of data and political control in massive computer facilities
• Threats to privacy, credit-rating blacklisting, and the "the computer says…" problem
•  Fragility of systems we bet our lives on — from WIMEX to nuclear weapons control
•  Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason and the "black box" problem
• Alien intelligence: machines that lack bodies, emotions, family, flaws — and human judgment
• The premise of the novel Bugs: a psychic child, Daphne, and Earthrite nature mystics
•  Government appropriation of parapsychology as a weapon
• The cashless society and dehumanized transactions
•  Information overload vs. information privation
• The crucial distinction between information and ideas — culture needs ideas, not just data
•  A dual future for computer technology: glowing and dismal, shaped by whose interests prevail

Host: Michael Toms     Interview Date: 10/27/1981   Program Number: 1638