Skip to main content

A New Leaf for the Looking Glass 2026/27

Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
Post a Comment

On the Modern-day Pandora’s Box: 0. An Introduction

What it Means to be Human in a Technological World 


Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

[Arthur C. Clarke] 

HAROUN DUGSIE

Consider a criterion originally proposed by, and often attributed to, esteemed author Arthur C Clarke: the belief that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. This belief is one that governs a world where such magic frequently occurs, and occurs with an alarmingly increasing prevalence. We are living in a world governed by this very belief.  

We live in a world where Clarke’s idea of magic is enchanted all around us. And woven into this magical membrane are strings, threads, and seams spooled from the fibres of ancient and modern intellectual ideas, forming a technological tapestry granting, concocting, and conjuring unimaginable and seemingly magical spells and enchantments: the power and dominion of the seas and the skies, telecommunication, long-distance transportation, and the twin gifts of prophecy & foresight. 

Some people might reasonably be forgiven in comparing or equating our newly-crafted powers and abilities with the powers and abilities ordained and bestowed by the Old Gods of the Ancient World. Others, however, might see these powers through the various familiars and forms they take: mobile phones, email and social messaging apps; aeroplanes, buses and trains; and meteorological forecast software used to predict weather patterns for the upcoming future. 

But like one of Nietzsche’s more infamous adages, when one tries to control these technological tools, one “should see to it that, in the process, one does not become” controlled by these tools themselves. And make no mistake, these technological tools are rapidly gaining power, covertly weaving their threads of influence into the very fabric of human life itself. 

So in this essay series, we will endeavour to explore how these various forms of technology have changed, influenced, and defined our behaviours and beliefs across the span of human development and across all different fields and aspects of our life. These essays will strive to explore the developing forms of various technological spheres affecting all of us throughout our collective history, and thus the influence of technology upon: politics and political theory, culture and societal structures, and our own unknown future. And these essays will try to understand what it means to be human in a technological world through the progression and development of human politics, culture, societal structures, and the unknown future of human life and civilization. 

So to begin this essay series proper, we will start our far-reaching exploration with the delicate tiptoeing and cautious crossing of a volatile minefield that we call politics.

WBGS Looking Glass will be serialising Haroun's work over the coming month, so please return next week for the first installment. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A New Leaf for the Looking Glass 2026/27

Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Chomsky Hierarchy and Automata in Computer Science

  This article placed third in the inaugural Fuller Research Prize competition 2021 HAMISH STARLING Even the least technical among us are familiar with programming languages in a loose sense: purposefully invented syntaxes constructed from keywords, symbols and identifiers used to tell a computer what to do. These confections power our modern world. From the operating system on which you are reading this article to the aeroplane which just passed overhead, most things are now controlled by code. So to fully comprehend the scope, characteristics and limitations of computers, it was realised in the 1950s that understanding the computational structures behind language was critical. In this piece I’ll discuss the Chomsky Hierarchy, a mathematical classification of languages into 4 types - regular, context-free, context-sensitive and recursively enumerable - explaining what each means. We’ll also discuss why this concept is relevant in the real world and how it links to “Automata”. Lang...
Post a Comment
Read more

Politics: Attention Spans, Politics and Populism – Why Does It Work?

Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago.  The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse.  To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
Post a Comment
Read more