"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." This truism--by the media-scholar John Culkin about the work of Marshall McLuhan--is more potent than ever in the age of data and algorithms. The technology is having a profound effect on how people live and think. Some of those changes are documented in "Re-Engineering Humanity" by two technology thinkers from different academic backgrounds: Brett Frischmann is a law professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania and Evan Selinger teaches philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.

Humanoid robot'Sophia' is presented during the'Impact 2018' digital economy forum on June 13, 2018 in Krakow, Poland. Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who worked on the question of technological and automaton bodies, confirming that the model of the human body is neither purely physical, nor purely mechanical, writing in "Machine and Organism": Indeed, the problem of the relations between machine and organism has generally been studied only in one direction: almost always, the attempt has been to explain the structure and function of the organism on the basis of the structure and function of an already-constructed machine. Only rarely has anyone sought to understand the very construction of the machine on the basis of the structure and function of the organism. Canguilhem looks to René Descartes who uses machines to explain bodies as matter born from technology which gave way to a tradition of philosophers and scientists using mechanical models to explain organisms. Canguilhem demonstrates how the human body during the Industrial Revolution was mediated as if it were a machine in the effort to make more efficient the labor process.

The early part of the twentieth century saw a book written by a management consultant and mechanical engineer named Frederick Taylor, titled The Principles of Scientific Management. Workplace inefficiency, Taylor's book argued, was one of the greatest crimes in America; it robbed both workers and employers alike of prosperity levels they deserved to achieve. For example, Taylor noted the "deliberate loafing" the bricklayers' union forced on its workers at the time by limiting them to just 275 bricks per day when working on a city contract, and 375 per day on private work. In the interests of efficiency he believed that every single act performed by a workforce could be modified and modified to make it more efficient, "as though it were a physical law like the Law of Gravity." Others took up Taylor's dream of an efficient, almost mechanised workforce.

The definition of civility typically revolves around the rules, mores and assumptions for how we deal with each other. The previous talks in this series have focused on that kind of civility in a variety of human activities including sports, education, business and law enforcement. But I'm going to be talking about something that is not human--the increasingly clever computing technology that surrounds us. And how we think about, relate to and interact with this technology. For the title of this talk, I chose the most evocative term, artificial intelligence, or AI for short. It was "cooked up," as its author the mathematician John McCarthy once told me, for a grant proposal he wrote in 1955. He was seeking funds for a conference the following summer at Dartmouth College. It was a brainy marketing pitch.