Confronting Technology

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 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 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 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 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