Human Futures

Human Futures PDF Author: Andy Miah
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
The long-term future of humanity has become of particular concern to various governance bodies and scholarly institutions. This book combines scholarly essays, images, interviews, design products, artistic artefacts, and creative writing. It investigates the expectations and actualities of human future as they emerge within the social sphere.

Human Futures

Human Futures PDF Author: Andy Miah
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book

Book Description
The long-term future of humanity has become of particular concern to various governance bodies and scholarly institutions. This book combines scholarly essays, images, interviews, design products, artistic artefacts, and creative writing. It investigates the expectations and actualities of human future as they emerge within the social sphere.

Perfecting Human Futures

Perfecting Human Futures PDF Author: J. Benjamin Hurlbut
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3658110449
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
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.

HR Futures 2030

HR Futures 2030 PDF Author: Isabelle Chappuis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000423956
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
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.

Post-Human Futures

Post-Human Futures PDF Author: Mark Carrigan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367761431
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

Post-Human Futures

Post-Human Futures PDF Author: Mark Carrigan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135118993X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
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.

Design For More-Than-Human Futures

Design For More-Than-Human Futures PDF Author: Martín Tironi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000954765
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
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.

Human Rights Futures

Human Rights Futures PDF Author: Stephen Hopgood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107193354
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
With authoritarian states and global culture wars threatening human rights, this volume weighs hopes the for effective human rights advocacy.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism PDF Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395700
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description
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.

Anticipation, Sustainability, Futures and Human Extinction

Anticipation, Sustainability, Futures and Human Extinction PDF Author: Bruce E. Tonn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000358887
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
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.

The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future

The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future PDF Author: Sheila Jasanoff
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393253856
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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.