The Nature of Technology

Author: W. Brian Arthur
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439165785
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.

The Nature of Technology

Author: Michael P. Clough
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9462092699
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
How does technology alter thinking and action without our awareness? How can instantaneous information access impede understanding and wisdom? How does technology alter conceptions of education, schooling, teaching and what learning entails? What are the implications of these and other technology issues for society? Meaningful technology education is far more than learning how to use technology. It entails an understanding of the nature of technology — what technology is, how and why technology is developed, how individuals and society direct, react to, and are sometimes unwittingly changed by technology. This book places these and other issues regarding the nature of technology in the context of learning, teaching and schooling. The nature of technology and its impact on education must become a significant object of inquiry among educators. Students must come to understand the nature of technology so that they can make informed decisions regarding how technology may influence thinking, values and action, and when and how technology should be used in their personal lives and in society. Prudent choices regarding technology cannot be made without understanding the issues that this book raises. This book is intended to raise such issues and stimulate thinking and action among teachers, teacher educators, and education researchers. The contributions to this book raise historical and philosophical issues regarding the nature of technology and their implications for education; challenge teacher educators and teachers to promote understanding of the nature of technology; and provide practical considerations for teaching the nature of technology.

Nature, Technology, and Society

Author: Victor Ferkiss
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814726178
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
Ferkiss (emeritus, government, Georgetown U.) delves thoughtfully into how various civilizations and cultures, including Western civilization, have historically looked at humanity, nature, and technology. He then looks at the conflicting attitudes of contemporary thinkers, seeking a balance, but maintaining a bias toward reverence for nature and an unwillingness to allow technology and its owners to set all the terms. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Earth Has a Soul

Author: Carl G. Jung
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 9781556433795
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
Discover a new side to Carl Jung in this beautiful collection of his writings, speeches, seminars, and letters on nature and our connection to the natural world. Join Jung as he rediscovers the original unity of nature, and the spirits inside matter come to life once again. These selections, not just from his published writings, but also from speeches, obscure seminars, interview, and letters, show a less familiar side of the famous Swiss psychiatrist, whose deep concern over the loss of our emotional and mythic relationship with Nature is expressed in moving, poetic terms. Included are excerpts from Memories, Dreams, Reflections among Jung’s other works. While never losing sight of the rational, cultured mind, Jung speaks for the natural mind, source of the evolutionary experience and accumulated wisdom of our species. Through his own example, Jung shows how healing our own living connection with Nature contributes to the whole. TABLE OF CONTENTS • Jung’s Own Relationship with Nature • Consciousness Slipped from Its Natural Foundation • Nature Was Once Fully Spirit and Matter • The Primitive Knows How to Converse with the Soul • We Have Conquered Nature is Merely a Slogan • Our Civilizing Potential Has Led Us Down the Wrong Path • We Know Nothing of Man • Nature Must Not Win but Cannot Lose

Nature, Technology and the Sacred

Author: Bronislaw Szerszynski
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405137770
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
This provocative and timely book argues that contemporary ideas and practices concerning nature and technology remain closely bound up with religious ways of thinking and acting. Using examples from North America, Europe and elsewhere, it reinterprets a range of 'secular' phenomena in terms of their conditioning by a complex series of transformations of the sacred in Western history. The contemporary practices of environmental politics, technological risk behaviour, alternative medicine, vegetarianism and ethical consumption take on new significance as sites of struggle between different sacral orderings. Nature, Technology and the Sacred introduces a radically new direction for today's critical discourse concerning nature and technology – one that reinstates it as a moment within the ongoing religious history of the West.

NEXT NATURE

Author: Koert van Mensvoort
Publisher: Next Nature Network
ISBN: 9493213080
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Think of nature and you’re likely to picture a forest, not a freeway. But how natural is nature really? We live in a world of constructed wildlife reserves, rainbow tulips, designer babies and cultured meat. We control a tomato’s biology so precisely, you can hardly call it natural anymore. Meanwhile, our grip on the Internet and the financial markets has grown so slight that they’re coming to resemble forces of nature. Using countless well-known examples and scientific insights, Koert van Mensvoort shows how a technosphere is evolving on top of a biosphere billions of years old. He’ll take you on an epic journey full of businesses that breathe, woods that smell like shampoo, and creatures that live on plastic. Along the way, a totally new view of the natural world will unfurl – one that’s not only more realistic but infinitely more creative, exciting and beautiful. To cope with the immense challenges facing the world today, we need to go forward, not back, to nature.

Diffusive Spreading in Nature, Technology and Society

Author: Armin Bunde
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319677985
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
This book deals with randomly moving objects and their spreading. The objects considered are particles like atoms and molecules, but also living beings such as humans, animals, plants, bacteria and even abstract entities like ideas, rumors, information, innovations and linguistic features. The book explores and communicates the laws behind these movements and reports about astonishing similarities and very specific features typical of the given object under considerations. Leading scientists in disciplines as diverse as archeology, epidemics, linguistics and sociology, in collaboration with their colleagues from engineering, natural sciences and mathematics, introduce the phenomena of spreading as relevant for their fields. An introductory chapter on “Spreading Fundamentals” provides a common basis for all these considerations, with a minimum of mathematics, selected and presented for enjoying rather than frustrating the reader.

The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future

Author: Sheila Jasanoff
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393253856
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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.

The Illusory Boundary

Author: Martin Reuss
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813929881
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
This compelling new book challenges the view that a clear and unwavering boundary exists between nature and technology. Rejecting this dichotomy, the contributors show how the history of each can be united in a constantly shifting panorama where definitions of "nature" and "technology" alter and overlap.

Design in Nature

Author: Adrian Bejan
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307744345
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the constructal law, accounts for the evolution of these and many other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical “flowcharts” or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies. All are governed by the same principle, known as the constructal law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.