Author: Purnendu Ghosh
Publisher: New India Publishing Agency
ISBN: 9389571812
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 4
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Book Description
We live in the world where nothing is difficult, if there is market. There is therefore the dilemma of want and need. Technology wants, what life wants. Using technologies, it seems, it is possible to do anything and produce anything. The centre of gravity of engineering profession is shifting. The world wants confident engineers who can foresee and manage the unknown and unexpected problems. Engineers are expected to understand global issues, and the nuances of working in a culturally diverse space. They are expected to appreciate, more than before, the human dimensions of emerging technologies. There are many questions, such as - Do I take pride in designing a thing and manufacturing it, as I take pride in packaging it? Are we cultivating the right kind of engineering mindset? What a general engineering toolkit must contain? Are there enough challenging jobs in the manufacturing industry to attract good engineers? Is it right to allow the creation of future elites who have augmented themselves with artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, without inventing a way to manage their superhuman abilities? Can there be better engineering than life itself? Should we be optimistic about the future of technology? Are we working harder than we are required to work? Can technology improve work-life balance? Is the society ready to accept the exponential development challenges? These, and many such issues are the concerns of science, engineering, technology and society. This book is an attempt to deliberate upon these issues for the welfare of humankind.
Author: Purnendu Ghosh
Publisher: Nipa
ISBN: 9788119103478
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The world wants confident engineers who can foresee and manage the unknown and unexpected problems.
Author: N. Dane Scott
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331996027X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
This book describes specific, well-know controversies in the genetic modification debate and connects them to deeper philosophical issues in philosophy of technology. It contributes to the current, far-reaching deliberations about the future of food, agriculture and society. Controversies over so-called Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) regularly appear in the press. The biotechnology debate has settled into a long-term philosophical dispute. The discussion goes much deeper than the initial empirical questions about whether or not GM food and crops are safe for human consumption or pose environmental harms that dominated news reports. In fact, the implications of this debate extend beyond the sphere of food and agriculture to encompass the general role of science and technology in society. The GM controversy provides an occasion to explore important issues in philosophy of technology. Researchers, teachers and students interested in agricultural biotechnology, philosophy of technology and the future of food and agriculture will find this exploration timely and thought provoking.
Author: Daniel Cardoso Llach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317755960
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Builders of the Vision traces the intellectual history and contemporary practices of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Numerical Control since the years following World War II until today. Drawing from primary archival and ethnographic sources, it identifies and documents the crucial ideas shaping digital design technologies since the first numerical control and CAD systems were developed under US Air Force research contracts at MIT between 1949 and 1970: the cybernetic theorization of design as a human-machine endeavor; the vision of computers as "perfect slaves" taking care of the drudgery of physical labor; the techno-social utopias of computers as vehicles of democracy and social change; the entrepreneurial urge towards design and construction integration; and the managerial ideologies enabling today’s transnational geographies of practice. Examining the contrasting, and often conflicting, sensibilities that converge into CAD and BIM discourses - globalism, utopianism, entrepreneurialism, and architects’ desires for aesthetic liberation - Builders of the Vision shows that software systems and numerically controlled machines are not merely "instruments," or "tools," but rather versatile metaphors reconfiguring conceptions of design, materiality, work, and what it means to be creative. Crucially, by revealing software systems as socio-technical infrastructures that mediate the production of our built environments, author Daniel Cardoso Llach builds a strong case for the fields of architecture, media, and science and technology studies to critically engage with both the politics and the poetics of technology in design. Builders of the Vision will be essential reading for scholars and practitioners across disciplines interested in the increasingly complex socio-technical systems that go into imagining and building of our artifacts, buildings, and cities.
Author: Mark P. Mills
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 164177231X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming. The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the “new normal,” where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it’s going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. We’ve seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single inventions don’t drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes convergent revolutions in technology’s three core spheres—information, materials, and machines. Over history, that’s only happened a few times. We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.
Author: Matthew Wisnioski
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262304260
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
An account of conflicts within engineering in the 1960s that helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history. In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to remake their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. In Engineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict within engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology and American life. The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, society—influenced by the antitechnology writings of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford—began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers themselves were seen as conformist organization men propping up the military-industrial complex. A dissident minority of engineers offered critiques of their profession that appropriated concepts from technology's critics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by conservatives who regarded them as countercultural Luddites. And yet, as Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professional elite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating force that our institutions are ill-equipped to handle. The negative consequences of technology spring from its very nature—and not from engineering's failures. “Sociotechnologists” were recruited to help society adjust to its technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to the challenges posed by critics within their profession, engineers in the 1960s helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.
Author: Steen Hyldgaard Christensen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319161725
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice.
Author: Klaus Schwab
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 1524758876
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
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.
Author: Nicholas Agar
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262038749
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
An argument in favor of finding a place for humans (and humanness) in the future digital economy. In the digital economy, accountants, baristas, and cashiers can be automated out of employment; so can surgeons, airline pilots, and cab drivers. Machines will be able to do these jobs more efficiently, accurately, and inexpensively. But, Nicholas Agar warns in this provocative book, these developments could result in a radically disempowered humanity. The digital revolution has brought us new gadgets and new things to do with them. The digital revolution also brings the digital economy, with machines capable of doing humans' jobs. Agar explains that developments in artificial intelligence enable computers to take over not just routine tasks but also the kind of “mind work” that previously relied on human intellect, and that this threatens human agency. The solution, Agar argues, is a hybrid social-digital economy. The key value of the digital economy is efficiency. The key value of the social economy is humanness. A social economy would be centered on connections between human minds. We should reject some digital automation because machines will always be poor substitutes for humans in roles that involve direct contact with other humans. A machine can count out pills and pour out coffee, but we want our nurses and baristas to have minds like ours. In a hybrid social-digital economy, people do the jobs for which feelings matter and machines take on data-intensive work. But humans will have to insist on their relevance in a digital age.
Author: Sang Lee
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040135366
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
This book offers a novel perspective on contemporary architecture, exploring its position in mediatization, attained through technological apparatuses. It introduces the novel concepts of apparatus-centricity and mediatization of architecture, which have significant disciplinary and cultural ramifications. Highlighting key technological and theoretical developments, the book’s narrative traces the transformation of architecture from the modernist era to the present, digital age. En route, it reflects on how architecture becomes a crucial element of shifting dispositives through its confluence with technologies of aestheticization and virtualization, and by emblematizing ecological ideals. It also illuminates the reconfiguring of architectural practice through examining surprising interactions and analogies between architecture and music, whose developments in notation and codification continually change the relationship between composer and performer. The book explores how architecture is reshaped by broader theory and practice in media and ultimately serves as a cognitive agent. It underscores that architecture profoundly influences our phantasmagoric, image-driven affective world through its increasingly apparatus-centric approach to conception, design, production, and mediatization. Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies brings into focus the behavior of architecture in mediatization for researchers and advanced students in architectural design, theory, and history. As an investigation into the interdisciplinary impact of architecture in a mediatized culture at large, it also provides a valuable resource for cultural and media studies.
