The Ignorance Explosion

The Ignorance Explosion PDF Author: J. Lukasiewicz
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780886292379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The author reveals the darker side of Western society's adoption of, and adaptation to, modern technology. Despite his portrayal of an increasingly complex, artificial and dehumanized technological environment, Lukasiewicz writes with humour and humanism and makes an enlightening contribution to the habitually grim literature on this subject.

The Ignorance Explosion

The Ignorance Explosion PDF Author: J. Lukasiewicz
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780886292379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The author reveals the darker side of Western society's adoption of, and adaptation to, modern technology. Despite his portrayal of an increasingly complex, artificial and dehumanized technological environment, Lukasiewicz writes with humour and humanism and makes an enlightening contribution to the habitually grim literature on this subject.

The Two Cultures

The Two Cultures PDF Author: C. P. Snow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107606144
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.

Man and Natural Resources

Man and Natural Resources PDF Author: Cedric Stanton Hicks
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000869032
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Originally published in 1975, yet prophetic in its wisdom this book deals with major aspects of man’s ecological destruction in an industrial framework. As well as discussing the destruction of forests by early civilizations the book examines the rate and extension of environmental deterioration in more recent times and the importance of the integrated ‘feed-back’ controls which maintain stability in the ecosphere of which humankind forms a part. Examining the role of entropy, energy quanta and indeterminacy in overthrowing both science and economic theory, the book provides examples from the 20th Century of the uncontrolled demands for energy and material resources, as well as of increasing toxic hazard in the biosphere.

The Virtues of Ignorance

The Virtues of Ignorance PDF Author: Bill Vitek
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813138760
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Human dependence on technology has increased exponentially over the past several centuries, and so too has the notion that we can fix environmental problems with scientific applications. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge proposes an alternative to this hubristic, shortsighted, and dangerous worldview. The contributors argue that uncritical faith in scientific knowledge has created many of the problems now threatening the planet and that our wholesale reliance on scientific progress is both untenable and myopic. Bill Vitek, Wes Jackson, and a diverse group of thinkers, including Wendell Berry, Anna Peterson, and Robert Root-Bernstein, offer profound arguments for the advantages of an ignorance-based worldview. Their essays explore this philosophy from numerous perspectives, including its origins, its essence, and how its implementation can preserve vital natural resources for posterity. All conclude that we must simply accept the proposition that our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge and always will. Rejecting the belief that science and technology are benignly at the service of society, the authors argue that recognizing ignorance might be the only path to reliable knowledge. They also uncover an interesting paradox: knowledge and insight accumulate fastest in the minds of those who hold an ignorance-based worldview, for by examining the alternatives to a technology-based culture, they expand their imaginations. Demonstrating that knowledge-based worldviews are more dangerous than useful, The Virtues of Ignorance looks closely at the relationship between the land and the future generations who will depend on it. The authors argue that we can never improve upon nature but that we can, by putting this new perspective to work in our professional and personal lives, live sustainably on Earth.

A Glimpse of Hell

A Glimpse of Hell PDF Author: Charles C. Thompson
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393047141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Probes the explosion of the center gun on the USS Iowa, a disaster that killed several sailors onboard instantly, and the fouled investigation that took followed, resulting in a large-scale cover-up that almost ruined forever the reputation of innocent men.

AI

AI PDF Author: Roman V. Yampolskiy
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1003846912
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Delving into the deeply enigmatic nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable explores the various reasons why the field is so challenging. Written by one of the founders of the field of AI safety, this book addresses some of the most fascinating questions facing humanity, including the nature of intelligence, consciousness, values and knowledge. Moving from a broad introduction to the core problems, such as the unpredictability of AI outcomes or the difficulty in explaining AI decisions, this book arrives at more complex questions of ownership and control, conducting an in-depth analysis of potential hazards and unintentional consequences. The book then concludes with philosophical and existential considerations, probing into questions of AI personhood, consciousness, and the distinction between human intelligence and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Bridging the gap between technical intricacies and philosophical musings, AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable appeals to both AI experts and enthusiasts looking for a comprehensive understanding of the field, whilst also being written for a general audience with minimal technical jargon.

Powermatics

Powermatics PDF Author: Marike Finlay - de Monchy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317367251
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Originally published in 1987. This critical work is an exploration of new communications technology in its social context, as a social discourse determined by other forms of inter-play. The author refers to Weber, Innis, Habermas and Foucault to develop her argument.

Ignorance

Ignorance PDF Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847796729
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Andrew Bennett argues in this fascinating book that ignorance is part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. He sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing. From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, including their own. Bennett argues that there is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of ignorance: literature’s agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human. This exciting approach to literary theory will be of interest to lecturers and students of literary theory and criticism.

Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association

Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association PDF Author: National Fire Protection Association
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fire
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description


Critical Terms in Futures Studies

Critical Terms in Futures Studies PDF Author: Heike Paul
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030289877
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This volume provides the essential vocabulary currently employed in discourses on the future in 50 contributions by renowned scholars in their respective fields, which examine future imaginaries across cultures and time. Not situated in the field of “futurology” proper, it comes at future studies ‘sideways’ and offers a multidisciplinary treatment of a critical futures’ vocabulary. The contributors have their disciplinary homes in a wide range of subjects – history, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, media studies, American studies, Japanese studies, Chinese studies, and philosophy – and critically illuminate numerous discourses about the future (or futures), past and present. In compiling such a critical vocabulary, this book seeks to foster conversations about futures in study programs and research forums and offers a toolbox for discussing them with an adequate degree of complexity.