Technology and the End of Authority

Technology and the End of Authority
Author: Jason Kuznicki
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9783319486918

This book provides a critical survey of Western political philosophy from a classical liberal perspective, paying particular attention to knowledge problems and the problem of political authority. Its central argument is that the state is a tool for solving a historically changing set of problems, and that, as a tool, the state is frequently deficient on both moral and practical grounds. Government action can be considered as a response to a set of problems, all of which may conceivably be solved in some other manner as well. The book examines in particular the relationship between the state and technology over time. Technological developments may make the state more or less necessary over time, which is a consideration that is relatively new in the history of political philosophy, but increasingly important. The book is organized chronologically and concludes with an essay on trends in the history of political philosophy, as well as its surprisingly bright prospects for future development.

The Paradox of Scientific Authority

The Paradox of Scientific Authority
Author: Wiebe E. Bijker
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262026589

Assessing the influence of scientific advice in societies that increasingly question scientific authority and expertise. Today, scientific advice is asked for (and given) on questions ranging from stem-cell research to genetically modified food. And yet it often seems that the more urgently scientific advice is solicited, the more vigorously scientific authority is questioned by policy makers, stakeholders, and citizens. This book examines a paradox: how scientific advice can be influential in society even when the status of science and scientists seems to be at a low ebb. The authors do this by means of an ethnographic study of the creation of scientific authority at one of the key sites for the interaction of science, policy, and society: the scientific advisory committee. The Paradox of Scientific Authority offers a detailed analysis of the inner workings of the influential Health Council of the Netherlands (the equivalent of the National Academy of Science in the United States), examining its societal role as well as its internal functioning, and using the findings to build a theory of scientific advising. The question of scientific authority has political as well as scholarly relevance. Democratic political institutions, largely developed in the nineteenth century, lack the institutional means to address the twenty-first century's pervasively scientific and technological culture; and science and technology studies (STS) grapples with the central question of how to understand the authority of science while recognizing its socially constructed nature.

Appropriating Technology

Appropriating Technology
Author: Ron Eglash
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2004
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780816634279

From the vernacular engineering of Latino car design to environmental analysis among rural women to the production of indigenous herbal cures-groups outside the centers of scientific power persistently defy the notion that they are merely passive recipients of technological products and scientific knowledge. This is the first study of how such "outsiders" reinvent consumer products-often in ways that embody critique, resistance, or outright revolt.Contributors: Richard M. Benjamin, Miami U; Hank Bromley, SUNY, Buffalo; Massimiano Bucchi, U of Trento, Italy; Carmen M. Concepcin, U of Puerto Rico; Virginia Eubanks, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Lisa Gitelman, Catholic U; David Albert Mhadi Goldberg, California College of Arts and Crafts; Samuel M. Hampton; Michael K. Heiman, Dickinson College; Linda Price King; Valerie Kuletz; Lisa Jean Moore, College of Staten Island, CUNY; Brian Martin Murphy, Niagra U; Paul Rosen, U of York; Michael Scarce, Peter Taylor, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Turtle Heart.Ron Eglash is assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Jennifer Croissant is associate professor at the University of California. Giovanna Di Chiro is assistant professor at Allegheny College. Rayvon Fouch is assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Technologies of Power

Technologies of Power
Author: Michael Thad Allen
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2001-05-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780262511247

This collection explores how technologies become forms of power, how people embed their authority in technological systems, and how the machines and the knowledge that make up technical systems strengthen or reshape social, political, and cultural power. The authors suggest ways in which a more nuanced investigation of technology's complex history can enrich our understanding of the changing meanings of modernity. They consider the relationship among the state, expertise, and authority; the construction of national identity; changes in the structure and distribution of labor; political ideology and industrial development; and political practices during the Cold War. The essays show how insight into the technological aspects of such broad processes can help synthesize material and cultural methods of inquiry and how reframing technology's past in broader historical terms can suggest new directions for science and technology studies.The essays were written in honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, whose spirit of inquiry they seek to continue. Contributors Janet Abbate, Michael Thad Allen, W. Bernard Carlson, Gabrielle Hecht, Erik P. Rau, Eric Schatzberg, Amy Slaton, John Staudenmaier, Edmund N. Todd, Hans Weinberger

Better Off

Better Off
Author: Eric Brende
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2004-08-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0060570040

On a mission to prove that modern technological advances make lives more inconvenient and less healthy, Brende and his wife lived for 12 months among an energy-free farming community.

Power to the People

Power to the People
Author: Audrey Kurth Cronin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190882166

Never have so many possessed the means to be so lethal. The diffusion of modern technology (robotics, cyber weapons, 3-D printing, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence) to ordinary people has given them access to weapons of mass violence previously monopolized by the state. In recent years, states have attempted to stem the flow of such weapons to individuals and non-state groups, but their efforts are failing. As Audrey Kurth Cronin explains in Power to the People, what we are seeing now is an exacerbation of an age-old trend. Over the centuries, the most surprising developments in warfare have occurred because of advances in technologies combined with changes in who can use them. Indeed, accessible innovations in destructive force have long driven new patterns of political violence. When Nobel invented dynamite and Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, each inadvertently spurred terrorist and insurgent movements that killed millions and upended the international system. That history illuminates our own situation, in which emerging technologies are altering society and redistributing power. The twenty-first century "sharing economy" has already disrupted every institution, including the armed forces. New "open" technologies are transforming access to the means of violence. Just as importantly, higher-order functions that previously had been exclusively under state military control - mass mobilization, force projection, and systems integration - are being harnessed by non-state actors. Cronin closes by focusing on how to respond so that we both preserve the benefits of emerging technologies yet reduce the risks. Power, in the form of lethal technology, is flowing to the people, but the same technologies that empower can imperil global security - unless we act strategically.

Technology and Power

Technology and Power
Author: David Kipnis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1461232945

There is a dark side to human nature that is nurtured by the control of power. In an earlier book, The Powerholders, I I described several psychological principles that appear to govern the behavior of people who control and use social power. In particular, I examined how the successful use of power transformed, for the worse, the values and behavior of the influencing agent. My interest in the relation between technology and power grew out of reading David Howarth's Tahiti: A Paradise Lost,2 a description of the almost causal ways in which Western technology was used by early explorers and traders to obliterate the Tahitian civilization. In reflecting on what happened in Tahiti, what struck me was the similarity in the behavior of these explorers and traders to the behavior of the husbands, wives, and businessmen, in positions of power, that I wrote about in my earlier book. Technology and Power is concerned with the issue of how the added power provided by technology changes the behavior of people who control it. I describe these changes among managers at work, psychologists, physicians, and colonists. What unifies these disparate areas is the implacable logic of power. The seeming ease with which power promotes the derogation of those controlled by power provides, I believe, a needed perspective for viewing the many social problems generated by technology.

Technology and Social Power

Technology and Social Power
Author: Graeme Kirkpatrick
Publisher: Red Globe Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2008-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Technology is an increasingly important dimension of social life. This title discusses the impact of technology and science on our lives, exploring how power is demonstrated and reinforced by technological innovation.