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 The Ethics of Invention written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 0 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 Transforming Nature written by Michael E. Gorman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1998-02-28 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is but the draft of a draft, as Melville said of Moby Dick. There is no prose here to match Melville's, but the scope is worthy of the great white whale. No one could possibly write a comprehensive, authoritative book on ethics, invention and discovery. I have not tried to, though I hope my bibliography will be a useful starting point for other explorers, and the cases and ideas presented here will keep people arguing for years. Although this book is nothing like a textbook, it is written for my students. I was trained as a teacher of psychology in graduate school and ended-up, by one of those happy chances of the job market, teaching psychology to engineering students rather than psyche majors. My dissertation and early research were in the psychology of scientific hypothesis-testing (see Chapter 2). When I team-taught a course with W. Bernard Carlson, a historian of technology, I saw how cognitive psychology might be applied to the study of invention. Bernie and I received funding from the National Science Foundation for three years of research on the invention of the telephone; a portion of that work is described in Chapter 3.
Download or read book Tropologies written by Ryan McDermott and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tropologies is the first book-length study to elaborate the medieval and early modern theory of the tropological, or moral, sense of scripture. Ryan McDermott argues that tropology is not only a way to interpret the Bible but also a theory of literary and ethical invention. The “tropological imperative” demands that words be turned into works—books as well as deeds. Beginning with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, then treating monuments of exegesis such as the Glossa ordinaria and Nicholas of Lyra, as well as theorists including Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and others, Tropologies reveals the unwritten history of a major hermeneutical theory and inventive practice. Late medieval and early Reformation writers adapted tropological theory to invent new biblical poetry and drama that would invite readers to participate in salvation history by inventing their own new works. Tropologies reinterprets a wide range of medieval and early modern texts and performances—including the Patience-Poet, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, the York and Coventry cycle plays, and the literary circles of the reformist King Edward VI—to argue that “tropological invention” provided a robust alternative to rhetorical theories of literary production. In this groundbreaking revision of literary history, the Bible and biblical hermeneutics, commonly understood as sources of tumultuous discord, turn out to provide principles of continuity and mutuality across the Reformation’s temporal and confessional rifts. Each chapter pursues an argument about poetic and dramatic form, linking questions of style and aesthetics to exegetical theory and theology. Because Tropologies attends to the flux of exegetical theory and practice across a watershed period of intellectual history, it is able to register subtle shifts in literary production, fine-tuning our sense of how literature and religion mutually and dynamically informed and reformed each other.
Download or read book The Invention of Journalism Ethics Second Edition written by Stephen J.A. Ward and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does objectivity exist in the news media? In The Invention of Journalism Ethics, Stephen Ward argues that given the current emphasis on interpretation, analysis, and perspective, journalists and the public need a new theory of objectivity. He explores the varied ethical assertions of journalists over the past few centuries, focusing on the changing relationship between journalist and audience. This historical analysis leads to an innovative theory of pragmatic objectivity that enables journalists and the public to recognize and avoid biased and unbalanced reporting. Ward convincingly demonstrates that journalistic objectivity is not a set of absolute standards but the same fallible but reasonable objectivity used for making decisions in other professions and public institutions. Considered a classic in the field since its first publication in 2004, this second edition includes new chapters that bring the book up to speed with journalism ethics in the twenty-first century by focusing on the growing dominance of online journalism and calling for a radical approach to journalism ethics reform. Ward also addresses important developments that have occurred in the last decade, including the emergence of digital journalism ethics and global journalism ethics.
Download or read book The Invention of Autonomy written by Jerome B. Schneewind and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an epilogue the author discusses Kant's view of his own historicity, and of the aims of moral philosophy. In its range, in its analyses of many philosophers not discussed elsewhere, and in revealing the subtle interweaving of religious and political thought with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the evolution of Kant's ethics.
Download or read book John Gregory and the Invention of Professional Medical Ethics and the Profession of Medicine written by Laurence B. McCullough and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-07-23 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best things in my Ufe have come to me by accident and this book results from one such accident: my having the opportunity, out of the blue, to go to work as H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. 's, research assistant at the Institute for the Medical Humanities in the University of Texas Medi cal Branch at Galveston, Texas, in 1974, on the recommendation of our teacher at the University of Texas at Austin, Irwin C. Lieb. During that summer Tris "lent" me to Chester Bums, who has done important schol arly work over the years on the history of medical ethics. I was just finding out what bioethics was and Chester sent me to the rare book room of the Medical Branch Library to do some work on something called "medical deontology. " I discovered that this new field of bioethics had a history. This string of accidents continued, in 1975, when Warren Reich (who in 1979 made the excellent decisions to hire me to the faculty in bioethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and to persuade Andre Hellegers to appoint me to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics) took Tris Engelhardt's word for it that I could write on the history of modem medical ethics for Warren's major new project, the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Warren then asked me to write on eighteenth-century British medical ethics.
Download or read book Invention written by Norbert Wiener and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insider's view of the history of discovery and invention.
Download or read book Our Final Invention written by James Barrat and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elon Musk named Our Final Invention one of 5 books everyone should read about the future A Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013 Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI's Holy Grail—human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine. Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?
Download or read book Machine Ethics written by Michael Anderson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new field of machine ethics is concerned with giving machines ethical principles, or a procedure for discovering a way to resolve the ethical dilemmas they might encounter, enabling them to function in an ethically responsible manner through their own ethical decision making. Developing ethics for machines, in contrast to developing ethics for human beings who use machines, is by its nature an interdisciplinary endeavor. The essays in this volume represent the first steps by philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers toward explaining why it is necessary to add an ethical dimension to machines that function autonomously, what is required in order to add this dimension, philosophical and practical challenges to the machine ethics project, various approaches that could be considered in attempting to add an ethical dimension to machines, work that has been done to date in implementing these approaches, and visions of the future of machine ethics research.
Download or read book Right Wrong written by Juan Enriquez and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and entertaining guide to ethics in a technological age. Most people have a strong sense of right and wrong, and they aren't shy about expressing their opinions. But when we take a polarizing stand on something we regard as an eternal truth, we often forget that ethics evolve over time. Many shifts in the right versus wrong pendulum are driven by advances in technology. Our great-grandparents might be shocked by in vitro fertilization; our great-grandchildren might be shocked by the messiness of pregnancy, childbirth, and unedited genes. In Right/Wrong, Juan Enriquez reflects on what happens to our ethics as technology makes the once unimaginable a commonplace occurrence.
Download or read book The Invention of Duty Stoicism as Deontology written by Jack Visnjic and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-01-11 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where did the notion of 'moral duty' come from? In The Invention of Duty: Stoicism as Deontology, Jack Visnjic argues that it was the Stoics who first developed a robust notion of duty as well as a deontological ethics.
Download or read book Can Science Make Sense of Life written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the discovery of the structure of DNA and the birth of the genetic age, a powerful vocabulary has emerged to express science’s growing command over the matter of life. Armed with knowledge of the code that governs all living things, biology and biotechnology are poised to edit, even rewrite, the texts of life to correct nature’s mistakes. Yet, how far should the capacity to manipulate what life is at the molecular level authorize science to define what life is for? This book looks at flash points in law, politics, ethics, and culture to argue that science’s promises of perfectibility have gone too far. Science may have editorial control over the material elements of life, but it does not supersede the languages of sense-making that have helped define human values across millennia: the meanings of autonomy, integrity, and privacy; the bonds of kinship, family, and society; and the place of humans in nature.
Download or read book The Ethics of Life Writing written by Paul John Eakin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our lives are increasingly on display in public, but the ethical issues involved in presenting such revelations remain largely unexamined. How can life writing do good, and how can it cause harm? The eleven essays here explore such questions.
Download or read book The Greatest Invention written by Silvia Ferrara and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.
Download or read book Ethics in the AI Technology and Information Age written by Michael Boylan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-05-11 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly, technology, the Internet and social media are playing a major part in our lives. What should we think about the ethical issues that arise, such as the changing role of intelligent machines in this Information Age? The impact of technology upon society is a perennial question, but the power of computing and artificial intelligence has ratcheted up the ethical implications of this relationship. It merits careful consideration. Ethics in the AI, Technology, and Information Age brings together a cohort of international scholars to explore the ethical ramifications of the latest technologies and their effects on our lives. This it does in three parts: (1) theoretical considerations, (2) practical applications, and (3) challenges. Beginning with theoretical essays, the book investigates the relationship between technology and nature, the limits of being “human” versus “machine,” and the moral implications of artificial intelligence. The book then examines key questions; such as ownership of technology, artificial intelligence’s replacement of human jobs and functions, privacy and cybersecurity, the ethics of self-driving cars, and the problematic aspects of drone warfare. With an appendix of films and documentaries to inspire further discussion on these topics, students and scholars will find Ethics in the AI, Technology, and Information Age an essential and engaging resource both in the classroom and in their daily technology-filled lives.
Download or read book Salomon Maimon s Theory of Invention written by Idit Chikurel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-06-22 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we invent new certain knowledge in a methodical manner? This question stands at the heart of Salomon Maimon's theory of invention. Chikurel argues that Maimon's contribution to the ars inveniendi tradition lies in the methods of invention which he prescribes for mathematics. Influenced by Proclus' commentary on Elements, these methods are applied on examples taken from Euclid's Elements and Data. Centering around methodical invention and scientific genius, Maimon's philosophy is unique in an era glorifying the artistic genius, known as Geniezeit. Invention, primarily defined as constructing syllogisms, has implications on the notion of being given in intuition as well as in symbolic cognition. Chikurel introduces Maimon's notion of analysis in the broader sense, grounded not only on the principle of contradiction but on intuition as well. In philosophy, ampliative analysis is based on Maimon's logical term of analysis of the object, a term that has yet to be discussed in Maimonian scholarship. Following its introduction, a new version of the question quid juris? arises. In mathematics, Chikurel demonstrates how this conception of analysis originates from practices of Greek geometrical analysis.
