[Max Goodman]

This thread has attracted some thoughtful and thought-provoking responses.

Suddenly, everything I read seems to touch on the idea that changes in the world are changing human nature. Suggested culprits include television

Originally Posted by David Foster Wallace, examining in 1988 the work of young writers

It may be that, through hyper- and atrophy, our mental capacities themselves are different [from those of previous generations]: the breadth of our attentions greater as attention spans themselves shorten. Raised on an activity at least partly passive, we experience a degree of manipulation as neutral, a fact of life.

and quantum mechanics

Originally Posted by a character in Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World

it was mathematics--not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare, or our climate Armageddon--which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.