1953

“The Bernards and Abelards of our time will be, perhaps, not people but machines: great, brilliant, temperamental computers. One of these days the most brilliant computer will take offense. Then watch!”

-Thomas Merton, 1953

Overheard at the World Economic Forum in Davos: 

[AXIOS]

“The speed of advanced technologies, in particular artificial intelligence and automation, is already making the transition more disruptive than prior epochal shifts — and may prolong it. Shifts rivaling “modern social, political and economic transformations, such as the post-Gilded Age of the early 1900s, the global Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s.”

And.

“Three-quarters of people living in developed countries feel they are not getting a fair shake, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.

Real pay for all but the richest people has been almost flat for at least three decades. And when Americans have lost a job, nearly half  have moved to a lower-paying one, jeopardizing their place in the middle class.”

As a hedge fund CEO described the zeitgeist: “We need to get in front of this problem or it’s going to get in front of us.”

St. Bernard represented the settled, orthodox, traditional teaching of the Church, which was an impregnable fortress for him, while Abelard was the very embodiment of a bold, outspoken, albeit exceedingly plausible, rationalistic spirit. Indeed he is called by the distinguished French writer, Cousin, “the father of modern rationalism.”

More at https://newspapers.bc.edu/?a=d&d=BOSTONSH18941215-01.2.41

“Underlying most of the protests were old grievances that took on new forms and a new urgency. There was a widespread feeling that something is working with our economic system, and the political as well, because rather than correcting our economic system, it reinforced the failures. The gap between what our economic and political system is supposed to do–what we were told that it did do–and what it actually does became too large too be ignored…Universal vales of freedom and fairness had been scarified to the greed of the few.”

2012, Nobel Laureate Economist Joseph Stiglitz

Introduction: The World Wakes,” in Anya Schiffrin and Eamon Kircher-Allen, eds., From Cairo to Wall Street: Voices from the Global Spring (New York: The New Press, 2012), 2.