Download or read book Post Human Futures written by Mark Carrigan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2023-01-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume defends the notion of humankind in the face of artificial intelligence. Responding to anti-humanist challenges to traditional arguments establishing human worth in nature, it defends humanity with the argument that technological 'advances' introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities.
Download or read book Perfecting Human Futures written by J. Benjamin Hurlbut and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans have always imagined better futures. From the desire to overcome death to the aspiration to dominion over the world, imaginations of the technological future reveal the commitments, values, and norms of those who construct them. Today, the human future is thrown into question by emerging technologies that promise radical control over human life and elicit corollary imaginations of human perfectibility. This interdisciplinary volume assembles scholars of science and technology studies, sociology, philosophy, theology, ethics, and history to examine imaginations of technological progress that promises to transcend the constraints of human body and being. Attending in particular to transhumanist and posthumanist visions, the volume breaks new ground by exploring their utopian and eschatological dimensions and situating them within a broader context of ideas, institutions, and practices of innovation. The volume invites specialists and general readers to explore the stakes of contemporary imaginations of technological innovation as a source of progress, a force of social and historical transformation, and as the defining essence of human life.
Download or read book HR Futures 2030 written by Isabelle Chappuis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-09 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This design for future-ready human resources is a futurist guide to the challenges and changes lying ahead in the world of work and offers a way forward. The world of work is evolving at an exponential rate, and significant shifts are expected. COVID-19 was a warm-up lap and an accelerator of changes, but many still lie ahead. Those changes are rarely addressed in current general HR thinking. At the same time, the growing complexity is making employees and employers alike anxious about the future of work. This is an academic-grade book backed up by evidence-based trends and signals and offers pragmatic upskilling pathways. It is priceless in such an environment for forward-looking scholars and present-oriented, pragmatic industry captains and HR leaders compelled to find answers for their inevitably obsolescing, inorganically morphing workforce. The book was written by the former Director of HEC Lausanne’s Executive MBA and founder of Executive Education of HEC Lausanne, with 12 years’ experience in leading and designing educational programs, together with a NATO- and U.S.-awarded futurist with experience in academic teaching and executives training. This volume offers metaphors to help convey the messages, a clear structure to plan for the decade to come, and several guidelines to follow.
Download or read book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism written by Shoshana Zuboff and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
Download or read book Human Rights Futures written by Stephen Hopgood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With authoritarian states and global culture wars threatening human rights, this volume weighs hopes the for effective human rights advocacy.
Download or read book Post Human Futures written by Mark Carrigan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-12 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence. With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading some to claim we are coming ever closer to the long-sought artificial general intelligence, it defends humanity with the argument that technological ‘advances’ introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities. Against the challenge presented by the possibility that advanced artificial intelligence will be fully capable of original thinking, creative self-development and moral judgement and therefore have claims to legal rights, the authors advance a form of ‘essentialism’ that justifies providing a ‘decent minimum life’ for all persons. As such, while the future of the human is in question, the authors show how dispensing with either the category itself or the underlying reality is a less plausible solution than is often assumed.
Download or read book Design For More Than Human Futures written by Martín Tironi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-18 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the work of important authors in the search for a transition towards more ethical design focused on more-than-human coexistence. In a time of environmental crises in which the human species threatens its own survival and the highest level of exacerbation of the idea of a future and technological innovation, it is important to discard certain anthropocentric categories in order to situate design beyond the role that it traditionally held in the capitalist world, creating opportunities to create more just and sustainable worlds. This book is an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by ethics of more-than-human coexistence that breaks with the unsustainability installed in the designs that outfit our lives. Questioning the notion of human-centered design is central to this discussion. It is not only a theoretical and methodological concern, but an ethical need to critically rethink the modern, colonialist, and anthropocentric inheritance that resonates in design culture. The authors in this book explore the ideas oriented to form new relations with the more-than-human and with the planet, using design as a form of political enquiry. This book will be of interest to academics and students from the world of design and particularly those involved in emerging branches of the field such as speculative design, critical design, non-anthropocentric design, and design for transition.
Download or read book Physics of the Future written by Michio Kaku and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The renowned theoretical physicist and national bestselling author of The God Equation details the developments in computer technology, artificial intelligence, medicine, space travel, and more, that are poised to happen over the next century. “Mind-bending…. [An] alternately fascinating and frightening book.” —San Francisco Chronicle Space elevators. Internet-enabled contact lenses. Cars that fly by floating on magnetic fields. This is the stuff of science fiction—it’s also daily life in the year 2100. Renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku considers how these inventions will affect the world economy, addressing the key questions: Who will have jobs? Which nations will prosper? Kaku interviews three hundred of the world’s top scientists—working in their labs on astonishing prototypes. He also takes into account the rigorous scientific principles that regulate how quickly, how safely, and how far technologies can advance. In Physics of the Future, Kaku forecasts a century of earthshaking advances in technology that could make even the last centuries’ leaps and bounds seem insignificant.
Download or read book See Yourself X written by Madeline Schwartzman and published by Black Dog Pub Limited. This book was released on 2018 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: See Yourself X (SYX) is the second volume of Madeline Schwartzman's timely series that look at the human perception and the sensory apparatus.See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception (2011)the first of the series, is a collection of fifty years of futuristic proposals for the body and the senses.See Yourself X focuses in on our fundamental perceptual domainthe human headpresenting an array of conceptual and constructed ideas for extending ourselves physically into space. What will be the physical future of the head and the sensory apparatus in fifty years time, as the mechanisms for how we communicate and sense change and become obsolete, prompted, possibly, by the advancement of brain-to-brain communication? SYX looks at where we are now, in the hope of projecting into that future. SYX explores all forms of physical head augmentation, including new organs, hair extensions and dos, masks, head constructions and gear, headdresses, prosthetics and helmets by artists, designers, inventors, scientists, and world cultures, as well as technological extensions into space. Conceptual topics include the obliteration of the face in fashion, art and folk wedding costume; the politics of hair extension from 18th century hair rolls to contemporary fashion; surrealistic juxtapositions of objects and the head; gender, ritual and identity in contemporary art hair and hair constructions; space-age architectural helmets of the 60s, and conceptual projects that highlight, analyse or deny the internal or perceived functioning of the head and brain. Everyone with a head should be interested in this book. SYX had inauspicious origins. In March 2012 Schwartzman was involved in an airplane crash on the way to a book talk. The wing of her Delta MD-80 knocked over a shuttle bus at over 150 miles per hour while landing in Detroit. Luckily no one was hurt. But it did spark an investigation: do pilots feel the width of their wings? If so, this would mean that the head was effectively approximately 150 feet wide? This was the catalyst for SYX: to look across art practices and contemporary culture at all ways of extending the head into space, and to move headlong into the future. See Yourself Sensing has been used widely at design institutions across the world.See Yourself X, like its predecessor, will be both an exhibition in book form, and an academic book, with examples of Schwartzman's innovative head-centred design projects from Columbia University and Parsons.
Download or read book Anticipation Sustainability Futures and Human Extinction written by Bruce E. Tonn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-16 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the philosophical underpinnings, policy foundations, institutional innovations, and deep cultural changes needed to ensure that humanity has the best chance of surviving and flourishing into the very distant future. Anticipation of threats to the sustainability of human civilization needs to encompass time periods that span not just decades but millennia. All existential risks need to be jointly assessed, as opposed to addressing risks such as climate change and pandemics separately. Exploring the potential events that are likely to cause the biggest risks as well as asking why we should even desire to thrive into the distant future, this work looks at the ‘biggest picture possible’ in order to argue that futures-oriented decision-making ought to be a permanent aspect of human society and futures-oriented policy making must take precedent over the day-to-day policy making of current generations in times of great peril. The book concludes with a discourse on the truly fundamental bottom-up changes needed in our personal psychologies and culture to support these top-down recommendations. This book is of great interest to philosophers, policy analysts, political scientists, economists, psychologists, planners, and theologians.
Download or read book The Coevolution written by Edward Ashford Lee and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us? Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In this book, Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet. Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do—be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored—may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a “dataist” faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans—and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology.
Download or read book Robot Futures written by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-08-21 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A roboticist imagines life with robots that sell us products, drive our cars, even allow us to assume new physical form, and more. With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings. Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh examines the underlying technology and the social consequences of each scenario. He also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.
Download or read book The Ethics of Invention Technology and the Human Future written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world increasingly governed by technology—but to what end? Technology rules us as much as laws do. It shapes the legal, social, and ethical environments in which we act. Every time we cross a street, drive a car, or go to the doctor, we submit to the silent power of technology. Yet, much of the time, the influence of technology on our lives goes unchallenged by citizens and our elected representatives. In The Ethics of Invention, renowned scholar Sheila Jasanoff dissects the ways in which we delegate power to technological systems and asks how we might regain control. Our embrace of novel technological pathways, Jasanoff shows, leads to a complex interplay among technology, ethics, and human rights. Inventions like pesticides or GMOs can reduce hunger but can also cause unexpected harm to people and the environment. Often, as in the case of CFCs creating a hole in the ozone layer, it takes decades before we even realize that any damage has been done. Advances in biotechnology, from GMOs to gene editing, have given us tools to tinker with life itself, leading some to worry that human dignity and even human nature are under threat. But despite many reasons for caution, we continue to march heedlessly into ethically troubled waters. As Jasanoff ranges across these and other themes, she challenges the common assumption that technology is an apolitical and amoral force. Technology, she masterfully demonstrates, can warp the meaning of democracy and citizenship unless we carefully consider how to direct its power rather than let ourselves be shaped by it. The Ethics of Invention makes a bold argument for a future in which societies work together—in open, democratic dialogue—to debate not only the perils but even more the promises of technology.
Download or read book Responsibility Beyond Growth written by de Saille, Stevienna and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critically assessing growth-based models of innovation policy, this enlightening study sparks new debate on the role and nature of responsible innovation. Drawing on insights from economics, politics, and science and technology studies, it proposes the concept of 'responsible stagnation' as an expansion of present discussions about growth, degrowth, responsibility and innovation within planetary limitations. This important intervention explores real-world relationships between the political economy, innovation policy and concepts of responsibility, and will be an invaluable resource for individuals and civil society organizations who seek to promote responsible innovation.
Download or read book Talking to Robots written by David Ewing Duncan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning journalist David Ewing Duncan considers 24 visions of possible human-robot futures—Incredible scenarios from Teddy Bots to Warrior Bots, and Politician Bots to Sex Bots—Grounded in real technologies and possibilities and inspired by our imagination. What robot and AI systems are being built and imagined right now? What do they say about us, their creators? Will they usher in a fantastic new future, or destroy us? What do some of our greatest thinkers, from physicist Brian Greene and futurist Kevin Kelly to inventor Dean Kamen, geneticist George Church, and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, anticipate about our human-robot future? For even as robots and A.I. intrigue us and make us anxious about the future, our fascination with robots has always been about more than the potential of the technology–it’s also about what robots tell us about being human.
Download or read book Virtual Futures written by Joan Broadhurst Dixon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-20 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual Futures explores the ideas that the future lies in its ability to articulate the consequences of an increasingly synthetic and virtual world. New technologies like cyberspace, the internet, and Chaos theory are often discussed in the context of technology and its potential to liberate or in terms of technophobia. This collection examines both these ideas while also charting a new and controversial route through contemporary discourses on technology; a path that discusses the material evolution and the erotic relation between humans and machines. Virtual Futures brings together diverse fields such as cyberfeminism, materialist philosophy, postmodern fiction, computing culture and performance art, with essays by Sadie Plant, Stelarc and Manuel de Landa (to name a few). The collection heralds the death of humanism and the ride of posthuman pragmatism. The contested zone of debate throughout these essays is the notion of the posthuman, or the possibility of the cyborg as the free human. Viewed by some writers as a threat to human life and humanism itself, others in the collection describe the posthuman as a critical perspective that anticipates the next step in evolution: the integration or synthesis of humans and machines, organic life and technology. This view of technology and information is heavily influenced by Anglo American literature, especially cyberpunk, Pynchon and Ballard, as well as the materialist philosophies of Freud, Deleuze, and Haraway, Virtual Futures provides analyses by both established theorists and the most innovative new voices working in conjunction between the arts and contemporary technology.
Download or read book Far Futures written by Gregory Benford and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-08-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of five hard science fiction novellas, all set at least ten thousand years in the future that confront the issues of cosmology, astronomy, evolution, and biology.
