There are some things computers can’t teach us

CORK cloud computing has made banner headlines, as did the demonstration for Queen Elizabeth of its leadership in the fields of nano-electronics and photonics, and we are all applauding these magnificent achievements and of course hoping that lots of jobs will follow for our eager young men and women.

But those who have the capacity to grasp it all and thus build their livelihood upon it must surely have the capacity and urge to ask: is that all there is to life? In a quiet moment of reflection surely some of those high achievers on coming out of the rarified atmosphere of the nano-chip clean room must go further and ask: have the so-called “productive” disciplines of technological and economic studies taken over exclusively in all third-level institute and universities?

Am I right in surmising that there is even a growing tendency to reduce the human horizon to a measurable level and even to eliminate the fundamental dimension and question of meaning from systematic and critical knowledge? I would say this tendency is spilling over into second level and even into primary. Surely there are articulate people out there who don’t hold that meaning is what you can measure with some ruler.