Download or read book Confronting Technology written by Matthew T. Prior and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are living through a digital revolution which already touches every area of life and will continue to shape the future in as yet unforeseen ways. Digital technologies are an ordinary part of daily life, and yet they also present an unprecedented challenge to Christians to articulate a biblical, theological framework to navigate times of rapid change. The work of the French theologian Jacques Ellul is a theological time-bomb primed for times like these. Accounts of Ellul’s career often divide off his sociology and theology, but this book argues that Ellul conceived a single project of bringing technology into confrontation with the Word of God, tackling the phenomenon he named technique, the pursuit of maximal power and efficiency implicit in the technological enterprise, with a profound depth of biblical and ethical insight. Centering himself on the apocalypse or revelation of Jesus Christ in history, Ellul offers a monumental, timely (though far from flawless) contribution to contemporary ethical debates about the uses and abuses of technologies. His work blazes a trail that Christians and all concerned for the future would do well to follow, as we avoid both the naivety of “technological neutrality” and the dread of “technological determinism.”
Download or read book Confronting Technology written by David Skrbina and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected readings and essays in the philosophy of technology
Download or read book Confronting Climate Gridlock written by Daniel S. Cohan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An atmospheric scientist explains why global climate change mitigation and energy decarbonization demand American diplomacy, technology, and policy "Daniel Cohan makes a compelling case that the problem of climate change is solvable. Fixing the gridlock on global action requires fixing the gridlock here in the United States of America. Cohan shows how that can be done."--David Victor, University of California, San Diego Professor of environmental engineering Daniel Cohan argues that escaping the gravest perils of climate change will first require American diplomacy, technological innovation, and policy to catalyze decarbonization globally. Combining his own expertise along with insights from more than a hundred interviews with diplomats, scholars, and clean-technology pioneers, Cohan identifies flaws in previous efforts to combat climate change. He highlights opportunities for more successful strategies, including international "climate clubs" and accelerated development of clean energy technologies. Grounded in history and emerging scholarship, this book offers a forward-looking vision of solutions to confronting climate gridlock and a clear-eyed recognition of the challenges to enacting them.
Download or read book Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology written by John P. McCormick and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to German political and social theory, Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology provides fresh insight into the thought of many of the most influential intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Its essays detail the manner in which a wide range of German intellectuals grappled with the ramifications and implications of democracy, technology, knowledge, and control from the late Kaisserreich to the Weimar Republic, from the Third Reich and the Federal Republic through recently unified Germany. Scholars representing the fields of political science, philosophy, history, law, literature, and cultural studies devote essays to the work of Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Lukács, Schmitt, Marcuse, Adorno, and Habermas. They also discuss the writings of such figures as Brecht and Freud, who are not primarily thought of as political theorists, and explore the thought of Helmut Plessner and reformist theorists from East Germany who have been little studied in the English language. In the process of debating the nature and responsibilities of the modern state in an era of mass politics, unparalleled military technology, capacity for surveillance, and global media presence, the contributors question whether technology is best understood as an instrument of human design and collective control or as an autonomous entity that not only has a will and life of its own but one that forms the very fabric of modern humanity. Contributors. Seyla Benhabib, Richard J. Bernstein, Peter C. Caldwell, Richard Dienst, David Dyzenhaus, Andrew Feenberg, Nancy S. Love, John P. McCormick, Jan-Werner Müller, Gia Pascarelli, William E. Scheuerman, Steven B. Smith, Tracy B. Strong, Richard Wolin
Download or read book The Technological Society written by Jacques Ellul and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in 1954, Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed. Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology—which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind—threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that meets its own ends. No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book. "A magnificent book . . . He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process.”—Harper's “One of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth-century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself—unless we take necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that 'technique' is creating to meet its own needs.”—The Nation “A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance.”—Los Angeles Free Press
Download or read book Confronting Consumption written by Thomas Princen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays that offer ecological, social, and political perspectives on the problem of overconsumption.
Download or read book Confronting Inequality written by Jonathan D. Ostry and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inequality has drastically increased in many countries around the globe over the past three decades. The widening gap between the very rich and everyone else is often portrayed as an unexpected outcome or as the tradeoff we must accept to achieve economic growth. In this book, three International Monetary Fund economists show that this increase in inequality has in fact been a political choice—and explain what policies we should choose instead to achieve a more inclusive economy. Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Andrew Berg demonstrate that the extent of inequality depends on the policies governments choose—such as whether to let capital move unhindered across national boundaries, how much austerity to impose, and how much to deregulate markets. While these policies do often confer growth benefits, they have also been responsible for much of the increase in inequality. The book also shows that inequality leads to weaker economic performance and proposes alternative policies capable of delivering more inclusive growth. In addition to improving access to health care and quality education, they call for redistribution from the rich to the poor and present evidence showing that redistribution does not hurt growth. Accessible to scholars across disciplines as well as to students and policy makers, Confronting Inequality is a rigorous and empirically rich book that is crucial for a time when many fear a new Gilded Age.
Download or read book Confronting Climate Change written by Irving M. Mintzer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-06-11 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting Climate Change is a guide to the risks, dilemmas, and opportunities of the emerging political era, in which the impacts of a global warming could affect all regional, public and even individual decisions. Written by a renowned group of scientists, political analysts and economists, all with direct experience in climate change related deliberations, Confronting Climate Change is a survey of the best available answers to three vital questions: What do we know so far about the foreseeable dangers of climate change? How reliable is our knowledge? What are the most rewarding ways to respond? The book begins by exploring the key linkages and feedbacks that connect the risks of rapid climate change to other important environmental, economic and political problems of our time. Recognizing persistent uncertainties in the scientific understanding of climate change, the book draws attention to those areas of research which may reveal surprises which could change the sense of political urgency surrounding the climate problem - as did the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole. It explores the geological record of climate change over the Earth's history, seeking a better understanding of how the climate has changed rapidly in countries while minimizing the long-term environmental damages which otherwise will result from continuing the current patterns of energy supply and use. The book is written to cross discipline boundaries, so that policy makers, economists, scientists, risk assessors, environmentalists and development advocates may understand each other's concerns. It shows how the international debate on managing the risks of rapid climate change may be re-shaped for the benfit of people in every nation on the planet.
Download or read book The Future of Violence Robots and Germs Hackers and Drones written by Benjamin Wittes and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The terrifying new role of technology in a world at war
Download or read book Confronting Suburban Poverty in America written by Elizabeth Kneebone and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been nearly a half century since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Back in the 1960s tackling poverty "in place" meant focusing resources in the inner city and in rural areas. The suburbs were seen as home to middle- and upper-class families—affluent commuters and homeowners looking for good schools and safe communities in which to raise their kids. But today's America is a very different place. Poverty is no longer just an urban or rural problem, but increasingly a suburban one as well. In Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube take on the new reality of metropolitan poverty and opportunity in America. After decades in which suburbs added poor residents at a faster pace than cities, the 2000s marked a tipping point. Suburbia is now home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country and more than half of the metropolitan poor. However, the antipoverty infrastructure built over the past several decades does not fit this rapidly changing geography. As Kneebone and Berube cogently demonstrate, the solution no longer fits the problem. The spread of suburban poverty has many causes, including shifts in affordable housing and jobs, population dynamics, immigration, and a struggling economy. The phenomenon raises several daunting challenges, such as the need for more (and better) transportation options, services, and financial resources. But necessity also produces opportunity—in this case, the opportunity to rethink and modernize services, structures, and procedures so that they work in more scaled, cross-cutting, and resource-efficient ways to address widespread need. This book embraces that opportunity. Kneebone and Berube paint a new picture of poverty in America as well as the best ways to combat it. Confronting Suburban Poverty in America offers a series of workable recommendations for public, private, and nonprofit leaders seeking to modernize po
Download or read book Problems Confronting Small Manufacturers in Automating Their Facilities written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Small Business. Subcommittee on Innovation, Technology, and Productivity and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Confronting Nuclear Addiction written by Frederick R. Strain and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pursuing the Endless Frontier written by Charles M. Vest and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The former president of MIT discusses challenges and policy issues confronting academia, science and technology, and the world at large. In his fourteen years as president of MIT, Charles Vest worked continuously to realize his vision of rebuilding America's trust in science and technology. In a time when the federal government dramatically reduced its funding of academic research programs and industry shifted its R&D resources into the short-term product-development process, Vest called for new partnerships with business and government. He called for universities to meet the intellectual challenges posed by the innovation-driven, globally connected needs of industry even as he reaffirmed basic academic values and the continuing need for longer-term scientific inquiry. In Pursuing the Endless Frontier, Vest addresses these and other issues in a series of essays written during his tenure as president of MIT. He discusses the research university's need to shift to a broader, more international outlook, the value of diversity in the academic community, the greater leadership role for faculty outside the classroom, and the boundless opportunity of new scientific and technological developments even when coupled with financial constraints. In the provocative essay "What We Don't Know," Vest reminds us of what he calls "the most critical point of all," that science is driven by a deep human need to understand nature, to answer the "big questions"—that what we don't know is more important than what we do. In another essay, on the future of MIT, he celebrates MIT's strengths as being extraordinarily well-suited to the needs of an era of unprecedented change in science and technology. In "Disturbing the Educational Universe: Universities in the Digital Age—Dinosaurs or Prometheans," he describes MIT's innovative OpenCourseWare initiative, which builds on the fundamental nature of the Internet as an enabling and liberating technology. Vest, who is stepping down from MIT's presidency in the fall of 2004, writes with clarity and insight about the issues facing academic institutions in the twenty-first century. His essays in Pursuing the Endless Frontier offer inspiration to educators and researchers seeking the way forward.
Download or read book Confronting the Education Complex Catalysts for Advancing Pre K 12 Systems written by Matthew Weber and published by Miraclaire Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transforming education for equity requires courageous innovation within the present system. This book is intentionally broad so educational leaders at the state and local level can implement the catalysts for systemic change related to regional circumstances. The desired outcomes from this book are (1) the increased use and investment in educational research, (2) spending increased time on the issues that make a difference for student success, and (3) rethinking the profile of skills and competencies for graduates. These three far-reaching objectives are embedded with consistent use of data, analytics, and systems for stability. Select chapters afford education decision-makers practical ideas in prioritizing their efforts. From the pragmatic options presented, leaders can determine relevance to local issues and plan for targeted enhancement. The text identifies the major catalysts for systemic improvement, presents a rationale why each is important, and offers practical implementation solutions. By prioritizing strategies and systems based on district needs, short and long-term benefits are realized. Frameworks, models, and recommendations address the most significant issues facing decision makers in education.
Download or read book Geoengineering Discourse Confronting Climate Change written by Brynna Jacobson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geoengineering, the idea of addressing climate change through large-scale technological projects, stands out among contested technologies in the degree to which its scope of possibilities and its premise are characterized by global existential risks. Despite controversy, this field has been shifting toward mainstream consideration. Geoengineering Discourse Confronting Climate Change: The Move from Margins to Mainstream in Science, News Media, and Politics examines the trajectory of geoengineering through critical discourse analysis of three key genres: science policy reports, news journalism, and congressional hearings. Brynna Jacobson explores how reports from distinguished scientific societies have constructed certain notions of legitimacy around geoengineering, how narratives within news coverage have reflected and shaped the public discourse and understanding of geoengineering, and how geoengineering has garnered political support from both major political parties in the United States. Through analysis of discursive conventions within these genres, the author reveals the evolution of notions of normalcy, legitimacy, and imperative around the field of geoengineering.
Download or read book Confronting the Climate written by V. Jankovic and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the social origins of the Western preoccupation with health and environmental hazards. It looks at the rise of the dichotomy between the vulnerable 'in' and the threatening 'out' by examining the pathologies associated with weather, domestic space, ventilation, clothing, and travel in Britain at the turn of the 19th century.
Download or read book Confronting the Machine written by Boris Magrini and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-03-20 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artists who work with new media generally adopt a critical media approach in contrast to artists who work with traditional art media. Where does the difference lie between media artists and artists who produce modern art? Which key art objects illustrate this trend? The author investigates the relationship between art and technology on the basis of work produced by Edward Ihnatowicz and Harald Cohen, and on the basis of the pioneering computer art exhibition at Dokumenta X in 1997. His line of argument counters the generally held view that computer art straddles the gap between art and technology. Instead, he is seeking a genuine interpretation of the origin of media art, and to develop new perspectives for it.
