Speculations in Science and Technology

Speculations in Science and Technology PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 682

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Book Description

Speculations in Science and Technology

Speculations in Science and Technology PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 682

Get Book Here

Book Description


Technologies of Speculation

Technologies of Speculation PDF Author: Sun-ha Hong
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479802107
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
An inquiry into what we can know in an age of surveillance and algorithms Knitting together contemporary technologies of datafication to reveal a broader, underlying shift in what counts as knowledge, Technologies of Speculation reframes today’s major moral and political controversies around algorithms and artificial intelligence. How many times we toss and turn in our sleep, our voluminous social media activity and location data, our average resting heart rate and body temperature: new technologies of state and self-surveillance promise to re-enlighten the black boxes of our bodies and minds. But Sun-ha Hong suggests that the burden to know and to digest this information at alarming rates is stripping away the liberal subject that ‘knows for themselves’, and risks undermining the pursuit of a rational public. What we choose to track, and what kind of data is extracted from us, shapes a society in which my own experience and sensation is increasingly overruled by data-driven systems. From the rapidly growing Quantified Self community to large-scale dragnet data collection in the name of counter-terrorism and drone warfare, Hong argues that data’s promise of objective truth results in new cultures of speculation. In his analysis of the Snowden affair, Hong demonstrates an entirely new way of thinking through what we could know, and the political and philosophical stakes of the belief that data equates to knowledge. When we simply cannot process all the data at our fingertips, he argues, we look past the inconvenient and the complicated to favor the comprehensible. In the process, racial stereotypes and other longstanding prejudices re-enter our newest technologies by the back door. Hong reveals the moral and philosophical equations embedded into the algorithmic eye that now follows us all.

Higher Speculations

Higher Speculations PDF Author: Helge Kragh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191003344
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Throughout history, people have tried to construct 'theories of everything': highly ambitious attempts to understand nature in its totality. This account presents these theories in their historical contexts, from little-known hypotheses from the past to modern developments such as the theory of superstrings, the anthropic principle, and ideas of many universes, and uses them to problematize the limits of scientific knowledge. Do claims to theories of everything belong to science at all? Which are the epistemic standards on which an alleged scientific theory of the universe - or the multiverse - is to be judged? Such questions are currently being discussed by physicists and cosmologists, but rarely within a historical perspective. This book argues that these questions have a history and that knowledge of the historical development of 'higher speculations' may inform and qualify the current debate on the nature and limits of scientific explanation.

Rhetorical Speculations

Rhetorical Speculations PDF Author: Scott Sundvall
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607328313
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The future of writing studies is fundamentally tied to advancing technological development—writing cannot be done without a technology and different technologies mediate writing differently. In Rhetorical Speculations, contributors engage with emerging technologies of composition through “speculative modeling” as a strategy for anticipatory, futural thinking for rhetoric and writing studies. Rhetoric and writing studies often engages technological shifts reactively, after the production and reception of rhetoric and writing has changed. This collection allows rhetoric and writing scholars to explore modes of critical speculation into the transformative effect of emerging technologies, particularly as a means to speculate on future shifts in the intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional frameworks of the field. In doing so, the project repositions rhetoric and writing scholars as proprietors of our technological future to come rather than as secondary receivers, critics, and adjusters of the technological present. Major and emerging voices in the field offer a range of styles that include pragmatic, technical, and philosophical approaches to the issue of speculative rhetoric, exploring what new media/writing studies could be—theoretically, pedagogically, and institutionally—as future technologies begin to impinge on the work of writing. Rhetorical Speculations is at the cutting edge of the subject of futures thinking and will have broad appeal to scholars of rhetoric, literacy, futures studies, and material and popular culture. Contributors: Bahareh Brittany Alaei, Sarah J. Arroyo, Kristine L. Blair, Geoffrey V. Carter, Sid Dobrin, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Steve Holmes, Kyle Jensen, Halcyon Lawrence, Alexander Monea, Sean Morey, Alex Reid, Jeff Rice, Gregory L. Ulmer, Anna Worm

Speculative Aesthetics

Speculative Aesthetics PDF Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0957529570
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
An examination of the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the planetary media network and of the aesthetic as an enabler of new modes of knowledge. This series of interventions on the ramifications of Speculative Realism for aesthetics ranges from contemporary art's relation to the aesthetic, to accelerationism and abstraction, logic and design. From varied perspectives of philosophy, art, and design, participants examine the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the massive planetary media network within which it now exists and consider how the aesthetic enables new modes of knowledge by processing sensory data through symbolic formalisms and technological devices. Speculative Aesthetics anticipates the possibility of a theory and practice no longer invested in the otherworldly promise of the aesthetic, but acknowledging the real force and traction of images in the world today, experimentally employing techniques of modelling, formalisation, and presentation so as to simultaneously engineer new domains of experience and map them through a reconfigured aesthetics that is inseparable from its sociotechnical conditions.

Practices of Speculation

Practices of Speculation PDF Author: Jeanne Cortiel
Publisher: Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner
ISBN: 9783837647518
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe shapes public discourse. Its chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential.

Speculations in Science and Technology

Speculations in Science and Technology PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 674

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Book Description


Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology PDF Author: Bc Crandall
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262531375
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Technology is becoming molecularly precise. Nanotechnology, otherwise known as molecular engineering, will soon create effective machines as small as DNA. This capacity to manipulate matter—to program matter—with atomic precision will utterly change the economic, ecological, and cultural fabric of our lives. This book, which is accessible to a broad audience while providing references to the technical literature, presents a wide range of potential applications of this new material technology. The first chapter introduces the basic concepts of molecular engineering and demonstrates that several mutually reinforcing trends in current research are leading directly into a world of surprisingly powerful molecular machines. Nine original essays on specific applications follow the introductory chapter. The first section presents applications of nanotechnology that interact directly with the molecular systems of the human body. The second presents applications that function, for the most part, outside the body. The final section details the mechanisms of a universal human-machine interface and the operation of an extremely high resolution display system.

The UFO Experience Reconsidered

The UFO Experience Reconsidered PDF Author: Moon Books Schooner Moon Books
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0615190456
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This book was inspired by, and is loosely based on, "The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry" (1972) by the late Dr. J Allen Hynek. Dr. Hynek's book is generally considered to be the most influential book ever written about UFOs, but much has happened since 1972. This new book not only brings us up-to-date, but extrapolates on current science whenever possible. Perspectives are offered in three basic categories: natural causes, domestic technology, and alien technology. But perhaps more importantly a new way of looking at the phenomena is proposed that has been largely overlooked by other authors, and which finds itself at home in any of these three possibilities. The reader will not find discussion of conspiracy theories, accounts of abductions, or metaphysical and supernatural hypotheses. However, one will find speculations about possible alien visitations, what alien technology might be capable of, or what the distant future might hold.

Speculation

Speculation PDF Author: Gayle Rogers
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553498
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
In the modern world, why do we still resort to speculation? Advances in scientific and statistical reasoning are supposed to have provided greater certainty in making claims about the future. Yet we constantly spin out scenarios about tomorrow, for ourselves or for entire societies, with flimsy or no evidence. Insubstantial speculations—from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles—often provoke fierce backlash, even when they prove prophetic for the world we come to inhabit. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy? In this cultural, literary, and intellectual history, Gayle Rogers traces debates over speculation from antiquity to the present. Celebrated by Boethius as the height of humanity’s mental powers but denigrated as sinful by John Calvin, speculation eventually became central to the scientific revolution’s new methods of seeing the natural world. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Jane Austen used the concept to diagnose the marriage market, redefining speculation for the purpose of social critique. Speculation fueled the development of modern capitalism, spurring booms, busts, and bubbles, and recently artificial intelligence has automated the speculation previously done by humans, with uncertain and troubling consequences. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future. Recasting centuries of contests over the power to anticipate tomorrow, this book reveals the crucial role speculation has played in how we create—and potentially destroy—the future.