Download or read book Enlightenment Now written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
Download or read book Digital Enlightenment Now written by Tim Cole and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Enlightenment of the 18th century societies in Europe threw of oppressive regimes, freed cities from the bondage of the medieval estate-based society, and defined a set of basic human rights that helped shape their sense of self to this day. Today, we as citizens of an increasingly digitized and networked world are in a similar situation. We, too, need the muster the confidence and creativity to rethink rules, values and categories that define our society and the courage to dare to think for ourselves, as Immanuel Kant, the father of modern Enlightenment, demanded in his famous dictum “sapere aude!”
Download or read book Towards Digital Enlightenment written by Dirk Helbing and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection of essays follows in the footsteps of the successful volume Thinking Ahead - Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society, published at a time when our societies were on a path to technological totalitarianism, as exemplified by mass surveillance reported by Edward Snowden and others. Meanwhile the threats have diversified and tech companies have gathered enough data to create detailed profiles about almost everyone living in the modern world - profiles that can predict our behavior better than our friends, families, or even partners. This is not only used to manipulate peoples’ opinions and voting behaviors, but more generally to influence consumer behavior at all levels. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are rapidly heading towards a cybernetic society, in which algorithms and social bots aim to control both the societal dynamics and individual behaviors. span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: However there are also silver linings: most of the threats that have accumulated over the past years have been identified and regulations are on the way to being introduced. Furthermore, entirely novel approaches based on blockchain technology and other developments derived from complexity science offer the possibility of entirely redefining collective trust and building platforms to support our core societal values. span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: This book conveys an encouraging vision of the future and provides a sketch of how it may look: The road to digital enlightenment is still open, but it needs to be taken now./pbrp
Download or read book The Stuff of Thought written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-09-11 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This New York Times bestseller is an exciting and fearless investigation of language from the author of Rationality, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Sense of Style and Enlightenment Now. "Curious, inventive, fearless, naughty." --The New York Times Book Review Bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books - including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate - have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important popular science writers. In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker presents a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. Considering scientific questions with examples from everyday life, The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Download or read book Your Post Has Been Removed written by Frederik Stjernfelt and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access monograph argues established democratic norms for freedom of expression should be implemented on the internet. Moderating policies of tech companies as Facebook, Twitter and Google have resulted in posts being removed on an industrial scale. While this moderation is often encouraged by governments - on the pretext that terrorism, bullying, pornography, "hate speech" and "fake news" will slowly disappear from the internet - it enables tech companies to censure our society. It is the social media companies who define what is blacklisted in their community standards. And given the dominance of social media in our information society, we run the risk of outsourcing the definition of our principles for discussion in the public domain to private companies. Instead of leaving it to social media companies only to take action, the authors argue democratic institutions should take an active role in moderating criminal content on the internet. To make this possible, tech companies should be analyzed whether they are approaching a monopoly. Antitrust legislation should be applied to bring those monopolies within democratic governmental oversight. Despite being in different stages in their lives, Anne Mette is in the startup phase of her research career, while Frederik is one of the most prolific philosophers in Denmark, the authors found each other in their concern about Free Speech on the internet. The book was originally published in Danish as Dit opslag er blevet fjernet - techgiganter & ytringsfrihed. Praise for 'Your Post has been Removed' "From my perspective both as a politician and as private book collector, this is the most important non-fiction book of the 21st Century. It should be disseminated to all European citizens. The learnings of this book and the use we make of them today are crucial for every man, woman and child on earth. Now and in the future." Jens Rohde, member of the European Parliament for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe "This timely book compellingly presents an impressive array of information and analysis about the urgent threats the tech giants pose to the robust freedom of speech and access to information that are essential for individual liberty and democratic self-government. It constructively explores potential strategies for restoring individual control over information flows to and about us. Policymakers worldwide should take heed!" Nadine Strossen, Professor, New York Law School. Author, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship.
Download or read book Tolerance written by Caroline Warman and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2016-01-04 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by Voltaire’s advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.
Download or read book Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment written by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume consider the interplay of science and spectacle in eighteenth-century Europe, describing the variety of public demonstrations of science in sites ranging from academies and laboratories to shops and streets.
Download or read book The Better Angels of Our Nature written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.
Download or read book New Dark Age written by James Bridle and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the highly acclaimed author of WAYS OF BEING. We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.
Download or read book Enlightenment Now written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Bristles with pure, crystalline intelligence, deep knowledge and human sympathy' Richard Dawkins Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible? If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred, and irrationality. Yet Steven Pinker shows that this is an illusion - a symptom of historical amnesia and statistical fallacies. If you follow the trendlines rather than the headlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer, happier, more peaceful, more stimulating and more prosperous - not just in the West, but worldwide. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent and inspiring value system that many of us embrace without even realizing it. These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress. The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past; it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. In making the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century, Pinker shows how we can use our faculties of reason and sympathy to solve the problems that inevitably come with being products of evolution in an indifferent universe. We will never have a perfect world, but - defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction - we can continue to make it a better one.
Download or read book Towards a New Enlightenment written by and published by Turner. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses key issues in understanding the decade 2008-2018 and its impact on the societies of the future. Brings together the articles B28of twenty-two prestigious international experts in different fields of thought. Through an informative approach, the essays form a transversal view of today's thinking. This is the tenth title of the Open Mind essay collection published by BBVA. A27.0We are living through years of great importance, marked by the unstoppable evolution of technology, science and the information society. This book brings together twenty-two essays written by prestigious researchers from the world's leading universities on areas as diverse as crucial to our future: climate change, artificial intelligence, economics, cyber-security and geopolitics, democracy, anthropology, new media, astrophysics and cosmology, nanotechnology, biomedicine, globalisation, gender theory and the cities of the future.
Download or read book Digital State written by Simon Pont and published by Kogan Page Publishers. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the Digital State? What is our Digital State of Mind? What does this Digital State mean for brands and for businesses? Big data, new distribution platforms, content collaboration, geo-targeting, crowdsourcing, viral marketing, mobile apps - the technological revolution has transformed the way society communicates and understands itself, and unleashed a whirlwind of new possibilities for marketers, as well as new risks. Mirroring the 'collaborative play space' Tim Berners-Lee first envisaged for the internet, Digital State brings together Simon Pont and 13 thought-leaders drawn from the worlds of advertising, marketing, media, publishing, law, finance and more, to explore what the digital age means for us as individuals, and the implications for the brands seeking to engage with us. Edited and part-written by Simon Pont, Digital State explores the possibilities and pitfalls of our digital age, an age where people can be brought together and new opportunities explored like never before. Contributors include: Faris Yakob, Strategist, creative director, writer, public speaker & geek; former Chief Innovation Officer (MDC Partners); Judd Labarthe, Former Executive Planning Director, Argonauten; Bettina Sherick, SVP, Digital Strategic Marketing, 20th Century Fox International; Austen Kay, Co-founder & Joint Managing Director, w00t! Media; Christian Johnsen, Global Strategy Director, Aegis North America, and cocreator of This Place; Hans Andersson, Senior Partner, Forsman & Bodenfors; Tamara Quinn, Head of Intellectual Property, Berwin Leighton Paisner; Nicholas Pont, SVP, PIMCO; Vicki Connerty, Head of Newcast, ZenithOptimedia Australia; Malcolm Hunter, Brand & Communications Consultant, former Chief Strategy Officer (Aegis); Greg Grimmer, Co-founder, Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer (HDMG); Stefan Terry, Founder of Leap of Being; former Managing Partner, Heavenly Group Ltd
Download or read book When We Are No More written by Abby Smith Rumsey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our memory gives the human species a unique evolutionary advantage. Our stories, ideas, and innovations--in a word, our "culture"--can be recorded and passed on to future generations. Our enduring culture and restless curiosity have enabled us to invent powerful information technologies that give us invaluable perspective on our past and define our future. Today, we stand at the very edge of a vast, uncharted digital landscape, where our collective memory is stored in ephemeral bits and bytes and lives in air-conditioned server rooms. What sources will historians turn to in 100, let alone 1,000 years to understand our own time if all of our memory lives in digital codes that may no longer be decipherable? In When We Are No More Abby Smith Rumsey explores human memory from pre-history to the present to shed light on the grand challenge facing our world--the abundance of information and scarcity of human attention. Tracing the story from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls, to movable type, books, and the birth of the Library of Congress, Rumsey weaves a compelling narrative that explores how humans have dealt with the problem of too much information throughout our history, and indeed how we might begin solve the same problem for our digital future. Serving as a call to consciousness, When We Are No More explains why data storage is not memory; why forgetting is the first step towards remembering; and above all, why memory is about the future, not the past. "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create? We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it." --Vint Cerf, Chief Evangelist at Google, at a press conference in February, 2015.
Download or read book Towards Digital Enlightenment written by Dirk Helbing and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-27 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection of essays follows in the footsteps of the successful volume Thinking Ahead - Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society, published at a time when our societies were on a path to technological totalitarianism, as exemplified by mass surveillance reported by Edward Snowden and others. Meanwhile the threats have diversified and tech companies have gathered enough data to create detailed profiles about almost everyone living in the modern world - profiles that can predict our behavior better than our friends, families, or even partners. This is not only used to manipulate peoples’ opinions and voting behaviors, but more generally to influence consumer behavior at all levels. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are rapidly heading towards a cybernetic society, in which algorithms and social bots aim to control both the societal dynamics and individual behaviors. span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: However there are also silver linings: most of the threats that have accumulated over the past years have been identified and regulations are on the way to being introduced. Furthermore, entirely novel approaches based on blockchain technology and other developments derived from complexity science offer the possibility of entirely redefining collective trust and building platforms to support our core societal values. span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: This book conveys an encouraging vision of the future and provides a sketch of how it may look: The road to digital enlightenment is still open, but it needs to be taken now./pbrp
Download or read book Organizing Enlightenment written by Chad Wellmon and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of how the research university emerged in the early nineteenth century at a similarly fraught moment of cultural anxiety about revolutionary technologies and their disruptive effects on established institutions of knowledge.
Download or read book The Power of Now written by Eckhart Tolle and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2004 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donation Jan/03 Forward by Russell E. DiCarlo replaced Sept.05.
Download or read book Remaking the World the Age of Global Enlightenment written by Anh Tuan Nguyen and published by . This book was released on 2021-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Remaking the World - the Age of Global Enlightenment" proposes pathways toward a more humane, peaceful, and secure world, largely by harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, and other Digital Age technologies. A key proposal is the adoption of an AI International Accord that would bind nations to constructive uses of AI and prohibit destructive uses. The book proposes a Social Contract for the AI Age as the theoretical and ethical foundation of the Accord. The book also proposes the AI World Society (AIWS) as a vehicle through which individuals and civic organizations can help foster an Age of Global Enlightenment.
