Daily Quaker

 I'm subscribed to the Daily Quaker Message from https://DailyQuaker.Com. The thought for today was, 

"Although data can transform how we live, work and think, its usage doesn’t happen in a vacuum — it relies on a model. In one sense, that model is a statistical approach. But in a deeper sense, it is a mental model: a way of looking at the world. So using one 'frame,' a rainforest is worth more when it’s cut for timber than when it’s acting as the lungs of the planet. 

How we look at the world is essential, to apply AI in useful ways…. We can do things machines cannot because of our capacity for the transcendent…. AI uses information: humans at our best, find answers in the still, small voice within."

— Kenneth Cukier, 2024

Quaker journalist

Readers of the message were invited to answer the query, "When have you had a spiritual experience that was made possible by technology?"

My answer:

Almost every day I have a spiritual experience that is made possible by technology.

I see entire ecosystems of plants and animals too small to see with the unaided eye. I see the churning of the clouds in the atmosphere of Saturn. I see a human heart beating inside a human chest.

I look at a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and remember my mother's observation that modern people can't appreciate him the way his contemporaries could, since we have been spoiled by the microscope and the fossil.

I watch a video on the Internet and learn that chemical traces have been found in captured fog that suggest some fogbanks may develop living ecosystems -- and the same might be true for the upper atmosphere of Venus.

The Magic Eight-Ball says: These are the days of miracle and wonder.