The Real World of Technology (CBC Massey Lectures series) Revised Edition

By Ursula M. Franklin

In this accelerated variation of her bestselling 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, well known Canadian scientist and humanitarian Ursula M. Franklin examines the effect of expertise upon our lives and addresses the extreme alterations within the bit sphere because the actual global of know-how used to be first released. In 4 new chapters, Franklin tackles contentious concerns, equivalent to the dilution of privateness and highbrow estate rights, the influence of the present expertise on executive and governance, the shift from buyer capitalism to funding capitalism, and the effect of the net upon the craft of writing.

Show description

Quick preview of The Real World of Technology (CBC Massey Lectures series) Revised Edition PDF

Similar Technology books

Effective Ruby: 48 Specific Ways to Write Better Ruby (Effective Software Development Series)

If you’re an skilled Ruby programmer, potent Ruby may also help you harness Ruby’s complete strength to jot down extra powerful, effective, maintainable, and well-performing code. Drawing on approximately a decade of Ruby adventure, Peter J. Jones brings jointly forty eight Ruby top practices, professional assistance, and shortcuts—all supported by way of real looking code examples.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

For over 3 a long time, Ray Kurzweil has been essentially the most revered and provocative advocates of the position of expertise in our destiny. In his vintage The Age of non secular Machines, he argued that pcs may quickly rival the whole variety of human intelligence at its most sensible. Now he examines the next move during this inexorable evolutionary approach: the union of human and laptop, within which the data and abilities embedded in our brains might be mixed with the significantly higher means, pace, and knowledge-sharing skill of our creations.

Return From the Stars

Hal Bregg is an astronaut who returns from an area project within which in basic terms 10 organic years have handed for him, whereas 127 years have elapsed on the earth. He reveals that the Earth has replaced past attractiveness, jam-packed with humans who've been medically neutralized. How does an astronaut sign up for a civilization that shuns possibility?

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

From the books of H. G. Wells to the click releases of NASA, we're awash in clichéd claims approximately excessive technology's skill to alter the process heritage. Now, within the surprise of the outdated, David Edgerton bargains a startling new and clean mind set in regards to the heritage of expertise, significantly revising our rules concerning the interplay of expertise and society long ago and within the current.

Extra info for The Real World of Technology (CBC Massey Lectures series) Revised Edition

Show sample text content

Related methods are present in the making of warp-determined textiles and likely pottery productions. I’ve argued that the traditionally very early acculturation of chinese language humans into prescriptive paintings techniques needs to be considered as a formative think about the emergence of chinese language social and political concept and behavior. 12 This comprises the early emergence of a chinese language paperwork in its all-encompassing types, the Imperial examinations, and the strain on li — the proper means of doing anything. Today’s genuine global of know-how is characterised by means of the dominance of prescriptive applied sciences. Prescriptive applied sciences aren't limited to fabrics construction. they're utilized in administrative and monetary actions and in lots of points of governance, and on them rests the genuine international of know-how during which we are living. whereas we should always no longer overlook that those prescriptive applied sciences are frequently incredibly potent and effective, they arrive with an important social personal loan. The loan implies that we are living in a tradition of compliance, that we're ever extra conditioned to just accept orthodoxy as basic, and to just accept that there's just one method of doing “it. “ As time went on progressively more holistic applied sciences have been supplanted through prescriptive applied sciences. After the economic Revolution, whilst machines started to be extra to the crew, prescriptive applied sciences unfold like an oil slick. And this day, the temptation to layout kind of every little thing based on prescriptive and broken-up applied sciences is so robust that it's even utilized to these projects that are meant to be carried out in a holistic manner. Any projects that require being concerned, no matter if for individuals or nature, any projects that require rapid suggestions and adjustment, are most sensible performed holistically. Such initiatives can't be deliberate, coordinated, and regulated the best way prescriptive projects needs to be. whilst winning, prescriptive applied sciences do yield predictable effects. They yield items in numbers and features that may be set previously, and so expertise itself turns into an agent of ordering and structuring. (This point of expertise is definitely underestimated through those that see expertise as typically the appliance of medical wisdom to real-life wishes and difficulties. ) The ordering that prescriptive applied sciences has triggered has now moved from ordering at paintings and the ordering of labor, to the prescriptive ordering of individuals in a wide selection of social events. for only a glimpse of the level of such advancements, imagine for a second concerning the new “smart” constructions. those that paintings within the structures have a card with a barcode that permits them to get into the parts of the development the place they've got paintings to do yet excludes them from anyplace else. right here we now have what Langdon Winner, in his publication The Whale and the Reactor,13 calls so properly “the digitalized footprints of social transactions,” because the expertise will be manage not just to incorporate and exclude members, but additionally to teach precisely the place any one has spent his or her time. you may — simply in a flight of fancy — think what may have occurred if Adam and Eve had no longer lived in a backyard yet in a sensible construction.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.66 of 5 – based on 21 votes