Download or read book Against Technology written by Steven E. Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the question of what it might mean today to be a Luddite--that is, to take a stand against technology. Steven Jones here explains the history of the Luddites, British textile works who, from around 1811, proclaimed themselves followers of "Ned Ludd" and smashed machinery they saw as threatening their trade. Against Technology is not a history of the Luddites, but a history of an idea: how the activities of a group of British workers in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire came to stand for a global anti-technology philosophy, and how an anonymous collective movement came to be identified with an individualistic personal conviction. Angry textile workers in the early nineteenth century became romantic symbols of a desire for a simple life--certainly not the original goal of the actions for which they became famous. Against Technology is, in other words, a book about representations, about the image and the myth of the Luddites and how that myth was transformed over time into modern neo-Luddism.
Download or read book Race After Technology written by Ruha Benjamin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide here.
Download or read book Artificial Unintelligence written by Meredith Broussard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right. In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right. Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it's just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can't pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.
Download or read book Science and Technology Against Microbial Pathogens written by A. Méndez-Vilas and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2011 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antimicrobial susceptibility profile and effect of stem bark extracts of Curtisia dentata on multi-drug resistant verotoxic Escherichia coli and Acinetobacter spp. isolates obtained from water and wastewater samples / Hamuel James Doughari [und weitere]. Antimicrobial utilization in intensive care units of a private tertiary care hospital / Pramil Tiwari, Vani Yadav and Shilpi Singh. Bacterial clearance from blood in mice infected by S. pneumoniae (penicillin MIC = 16 ug/ml) presenting specific IgG (non-protective levels) and treated with sub-therapeutic regimens of cefditoren (a highly bound cephalosporin) / Fabio Cafini [und weitere]. Characterisation of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolates from hospitalised patients / Vladimir Kmet, Daniela Ohlasova and Milan Niks. Characterization of methicillin-resistant coagulase-negative Staphylococci isolates from blood cultures in a Brazilian University Hospital / Valeria Cataneli Pereira and Maria de Lourdes Ribeiro de Souza da Cunha. Control of bacterial contamination in boar semen doses / J.M. Morrell and Margareta Wallgren. Diffusion of extended-spectrum B-lactamase producing Enterobacter cloacae in a kidney transplantation unit / S. Hammami [und weitere]. Effect of antifungal agents on non-Candida albicans Candida species enzymatic activity / M. Negri [und weitere]. Effect of chitosan, nisin and storage time on the growth of Listeria innocua and Shewanella putrefaciens in fish homogenates / L.I. Schelegueda, M.F. Gliemmo and C.A. Campos. ESBL-producing Enterobacteriaceae in the northern Portugal - antimicrobial susceptibility and molecular epidemiology / R. Fernandes and C. Prudencio. Observations on the antimicrobial susceptibility of Staphylococcus pseudintermedius following the introduction of cefovecin for clinical use in Europe / Y. Chaudhry, A. Robinson and K.S. Godinho. Oxacillin resistance among Staphylococcus aureus isolated from peritoneal dialysis related peritonitis / C.H. Camargo [und weitere]. Resistance detection and susceptibility profile in Staphylococcus spp. isolated from patients with urinary tract infection (UTI) / Adriano Martison Ferreira [und weitere]. Resistance distribution profile of MBL, ESBL and multidrug resistant Gram negatives isolated at a tertiary care hospital in India / K.H. Bhutada and V.R. Shende
Download or read book Philosophy and Technology written by P.T. Durbin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only recently has the phenomenon of technology become an object of in terest for philosophers. The first attempts at a philosophy of technology date back scarcely a hundred years - a span of time extremely short when com pared with the antiquity of philosophical reflections on nature, science, and society. Over that hundred-year span, speculative, critical, and empiricist approaches of various sorts have been put forward. Nevertheless, even now there remains a broad gap between the importance of technology in the real world and the sparse number of philosophical works dedicated to the under standing of modern technology. As a result of the complex structure of modern technology, it can be dealt with in very different ways. These range from metaphysical exposition to efforts aimed at political consensus. Quite naturally, within such a broad range, certain national accents can be discovered-; they are shaped by a com mon language, accepted philosophical traditions, and concrete problems requiring consideration. Even so, the worldwide impact of technology, its penetration into all spheres of individual, social, and cultural life, together with the urgency of the problems raised in this context - all these demand a joint philosophical discussion that transcends the barriers of language and cultural differences. The papers printed here are intended to exemplify such an effort at culture-transcending philosophical discussion.
Download or read book Against Reduction written by Noelani Arista and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provocative, hopeful essays imagine a future that is not reduced to algorithms. What is human flourishing in an age of machine intelligence, when many claim that the world’s most complex problems can be reduced to narrow technical questions? Does more computing make us more intelligent, or simply more computationally powerful? We need not always resist reduction; our ability to simplify helps us interpret complicated situations. The trick is to know when and how to do so. Against Reduction offers a collection of provocative and illuminating essays that consider different ways of recognizing and addressing the reduction in our approach to artificial intelligence, and ultimately to ourselves. Inspired by a widely read manifesto by Joi Ito that called for embracing the diversity and irreducibility of the world, these essays offer persuasive and compelling variations on resisting reduction. Among other things, the writers draw on indigenous epistemology to argue for an extended “circle of relationships” that includes the nonhuman and robotic; cast “Snow White” as a tale of AI featuring a smart mirror; point out the cisnormativity of security protocol algorithms; map the interconnecting networks of so-called noncommunicable disease; and consider the limits of moral mathematics. Taken together, they show that we should push back against some of the reduction around us and do whatever is in our power to work toward broader solutions.
Download or read book Can Science Fix Climate Change written by Mike Hulme and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-06-04 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change seems to be an insurmountable problem. Political solutions have so far had little impact. Some scientists are now advocating the so-called 'Plan B', a more direct way of reducing the rate of future warming by reflecting more sunlight back to space, creating a thermostat in the sky. In this book, Mike Hulme argues against this kind of hubristic techno-fix. Drawing upon a distinguished career studying the science, politics and ethics of climate change, he shows why using science to fix the global climate is undesirable, ungovernable and unattainable. Science and technology should instead serve the more pragmatic goals of increasing societal resilience to weather risks, improving regional air quality and driving forward an energy technology transition. Seeking to reset the planet’s thermostat is not the answer.
Download or read book Technology and the Politics of University Reform written by E. Hamilton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do new technologies mean the end of the university as we know it? Or can they be shaped in a way that balances innovation and tradition? This volume explores these questions through a critical history of online education.
Download or read book To Save Everything Click Here written by Evgeny Morozov and published by . This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of The Net Delusion shows how the radical transparency we've become accustomed to online may threaten the spirit of real-life democracy
Download or read book Technology of the Oppressed written by David Nemer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Brazilian favela residents engage with and appropriate technologies, both to fight the oppression in their lives and to represent themselves in the world. Brazilian favelas are impoverished settlements usually located on hillsides or the outskirts of a city. In Technology of the Oppressed, David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.
Download or read book Race Against the Machine written by Erik Brynjolfsson and published by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. This book was released on 2011 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how information technologies are affecting jobs, skills, wages, and the economy.
Download or read book Technology Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 774 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Jim Crow written by Michelle Alexander and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
Download or read book The Technology Trap written by Carl Benedikt Frey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping account of the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society's members. As the author shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were devastating for large swaths of the population.These trends broadly mirror those in our current age of automation. But, just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the potential to do the same. Benedikt Frey demonstrates that in the midst of another technological revolution, the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present. --From publisher description.
Download or read book The Salmon of Doubt written by Douglas Adams and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2005-04-26 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A fitting eulogy to the master of wacky words and even wackier tales . . . Salmon leaves no doubt as to Adams’s lasting legacy.”—Entertainment Weekly With an introduction to the introduction by Terry Jones Douglas Adams changed the face of science fiction with his cosmically comic novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its classic sequels. Sadly for his countless admirers, he hitched his own ride to the great beyond much too soon. Culled posthumously from Adams’s fleet of beloved Macintosh computers, this selection of essays, articles, anecdotes, and stories offers a fascinating and intimate portrait of the multifaceted artist and absurdist wordsmith. Join Adams on an excursion to climb Kilimanjaro . . . dressed in a rhino costume; peek into the private life of Genghis Khan—warrior and world-class neurotic; root for the harried author’s efforts to get a Hitchhiker movie off the ground in Hollywood; thrill to the further exploits of private eye Dirk Gently and two-headed alien Zaphod Beeblebrox. Though Douglas Adams is gone, he’s left us something very special to remember him by. Without a doubt. “Worth reading and even cherishing, if only because it’s the last we’ll hear from the master of comic science fiction.”—The Star-Ledger
Download or read book Carl Schmitt s Critique of Liberalism written by John P. McCormick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first in-depth critical appraisal in English of the political, legal, and cultural writings of Carl Schmitt, perhaps this century's most brilliant critic of liberalism. It offers an assessment of this most sophisticated of fascist theorists without attempting either to apologise for or demonise him. Schmitt's Weimar writings confront the role of technology as it finds expression through the principles and practices of liberalism. Contemporary political conditions such as disaffection with liberalism and the rise of extremist political organizations have rendered Schmitt's work both relevant and insightful. John McCormick examines why technology becomes a rallying cry for both right- and left-wing intellectuals at times when liberalism appears anachronistic, and shows the continuities between Weimar's ideological debates and those of our own age.
Download or read book The Fourth Industrial Revolution written by Klaus Schwab and published by Currency. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wearable sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manufacturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individuals. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frameworks that advance progress.
