Robert Mitchell, “Smartness, Contemplation, and Slow Research.”

摘要

We live in a world that increasingly aspires to be smart. A smart world is in part onecharacterized by a growing number of smart devices – for example, smartphones, smartcities, and smart electrical grids – that link many users through sensors and real-timecomputation. These devices purportedly add a new kind of intelligence to both workand leisure, sometimes by blurring the distinction between those two activities.Moreover, as evidenced by the examples of smart cities and smart electrical grids, thisnew mode of intelligence is often presented as essential to solving otherwiseoverwhelming ecological dilemmas, such as human-induced climate change. Theexplosion of the language of smartness is thus one component of what colleagues and Ihave described elsewhere as a “smartness mandate”: the demand that every humanprocess become smart, so that smartness can lead us to resilient and sustainablerelationships to our ecologically fragile and politically unpredictable environments(Halpern et al.).