The Nature of Tomorrow

The Nature of Tomorrow
Author: Michael Rawson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2021-11-16
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0300262779

An examination of how Western visions of endless future growth have contributed to the global environmental crisis For centuries, the West has produced stories about the future in which humans use advanced science and technology to transform the earth. Michael Rawson uses a wide range of works that include Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, the science fiction novels of Jules Verne, and even the speculations of think tanks like the RAND Corporation to reveal the environmental paradox at the heart of these narratives: the single-minded expectation of unlimited growth on a finite planet. Rawson shows how these stories, which have long pervaded Western dreams about the future, have helped to enable an unprecedentedly abundant and technology-driven lifestyle for some while bringing the threat of environmental disaster to all. Adapting to ecological realities, he argues, hinges on the ability to create new visions of tomorrow that decouple growth from the idea of progress.

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture
Author: Gregory Jerome Hampton
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2015-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0739191462

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday's Slave with Tomorrow's Robot is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to investigate and speculate about the relationship between technology and human nature. It is a timely and creative analysis of the ways in which we domesticate technology and the manner in which the history of slavery continues to be utilized in contemporary society. This text interrogates how the domestic slaves of the past are being re-imaged as domestic robots of the future. Hampton asserts that the rhetoric used to persuade an entire nation to become dependent on the institution of chattel slavery will be employed to promote the enslavement of technology in the form of humanoid robots with Artificial Intelligence. Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture makes the claim that science fiction, film, and popular culture have all been used to normalize the notion of robots in domestic spaces and relationships. In examining the similarities of human slaves and mechanical or biomechanical robots, this text seeks to gain a better understanding of how slaves are created and justified in the imaginations of a supposedly civilized nation. And in doing so, give pause to those who would disassociate America’s past from its imminent future.

Imagining Tomorrow

Imagining Tomorrow
Author: Joseph J. Corn
Publisher: Mit Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 1986
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9780262031158

Looks at past predictions of the future, discusses how x-rays, radio, nuclear energy, and plastic were expected to change the future, and considers the impact of skyscrapers, computers, and electricity

A History of the Future

A History of the Future
Author: Peter J. Bowler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2017-11-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1107148731

A wide-ranging survey of predictions about the future development and impact of science and technology through the twentieth century.

Imagining Flight

Imagining Flight
Author: A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2004
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9781585443000

Imagining Flight is a history of the air age as the rest of us have experienced it: on the pages of books, the screens of movie theaters, and the front pages of newspapers. It focuses on the United States, but also contrasts American ideas and attitudes with those of other air-minded nations, including Britain, France, Germany and Japan.

Future Park

Future Park
Author: Amalie Wright
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2013-09-19
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0643106626

The first public parks were created on urban 'greenfields'. Once these designated sites had been used, cities looked towards post-industrial sites, and built parks in places that had suffered from environmental degradation, neglect, abandonment and conflict. With finite stocks of urban post-industrial land now also approaching exhaustion, more ways of making parks are required to create inclusive, accessible and resilient urban places. Future Park invites Australian built environment professionals and policymakers to consider the future of parks in our cities. Including spectacular images of public spaces throughout the world, the book describes the economic, social and environmental benefits of urban parks, and then outlines the threats and challenges facing cities and communities in an age when more than half the world's population are urban dwellers. Future Park introduces the need to embrace new public park thinking to ensure that benefits continue to be realised. Future Park illustrates imaginative and resourceful responses to real challenges by highlighting recent proposals and projects. These projects coalesce around four broad themes – linkages, obsolescences, co-locations and installations – responding to contemporary urban paradoxes, and ensuring parks continue to play a vital role in the lives of our cities.

Eschatology and the Technological Future

Eschatology and the Technological Future
Author: Michael S. Burdett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2014-12-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317576640

The rapid advancement of technology has led to an explosion of speculative theories about what the future of humankind may look like. These "technological futurisms" have arisen from significant advances in the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology and are drawing growing scrutiny from the philosophical and theological communities. This text seeks to contextualize the growing literature on the cultural, philosophical and religious implications of technological growth by considering technological futurisms such as transhumanism in the context of the long historical tradition of technological dreaming. Michael Burdett traces the latent religious sources of our contemporary technological imagination by looking at visionary approaches to technology and the future in seminal technological utopias and science fiction and draws on past theological responses to the technological future with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Jacques Ellul. Burdett’s argument arrives at a contemporary Christian response to transhumanism based around the themes of possibility and promise by turning to the works of Richard Kearney, Eberhard Jüngel and Jürgen Moltmann. Throughout, the author highlights points of correspondence and divergence between technological futurisms and the Judeo-Christian understanding of the future.

Picturing Personhood

Picturing Personhood
Author: Joseph Dumit
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0691236623

By showing us the human brain at work, PET (positron emission tomography) scans are subtly--and sometimes not so subtly--transforming how we think about our minds. Picturing Personhood follows this remarkable and expensive technology from the laboratory into the world and back. It examines how PET scans are created and how they are being called on to answer myriad questions with far-reaching implications: Is depression an observable brain disease? Are criminals insane? Do men and women think differently? Is rationality a function of the brain? Based on interviews, media analysis, and participant observation at research labs and conferences, Joseph Dumit analyzes how assumptions designed into and read out of the experimental process reinforce specific notions about human nature. Such assumptions can enter the process at any turn, from selecting subjects and mathematical models to deciding which images to publish and how to color them. Once they leave the laboratory, PET scans shape social debates, influence courtroom outcomes, and have positive and negative consequences for people suffering mental illness. Dumit follows this complex story, demonstrating how brain scans, as scientific objects, contribute to our increasing social dependence on scientific authority. The first book to examine the cultural ramifications of brain-imaging technology, Picturing Personhood is an unprecedented study that will influence both cultural studies and the growing field of science and technology studies.

Imagining Tomorrow

Imagining Tomorrow
Author: Marjorie Mayo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 172
Release: 1997
Genre: Adult education
ISBN: 9781862010062

A study of the increasing importance of community and workplace adult education in the First and Third Worlds. Marjorie Mayo looks at the impact of globalisation, economic restructuring and the enhanced role of community and voluntary organisations. She presents the case for wider understanding of the context and possibilities for local development as part of longer-term strategies for transformation. Marjorie Mayo examines the implications of adult learning for sustainable development for social justice, defined by local communities themselves. She takes case studies from Tanzania, Cuba, India and Nicaragua as well as from the industrialized 'North' to illustrate her themes. The book concludes by focusing on issues of culture, identity, diversity and changing consciousness; and the role of community education in strengthening collective confidence to effect social transformation.

Culture and Sustainability in European Cities

Culture and Sustainability in European Cities
Author: Svetlana Hristova
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2015-04-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317677153

European cities are contributing to the development of a more sustainable urban system that is capable of coping with economic crises, ecological challenges and social disparities in different nation-states and regions throughout Europe. This book reveals in a pluralistic way how European cities are generating new approaches to their sustainable development, and the special contribution of culture to these processes. It addresses both a deficit of attention to small and medium-sized cities in the framework of European sustainable development, and an underestimation of the role of culture, artistic expression and creativity for integrated development of the city as a prerequisite to urban sustainability. On the basis of a broad collection of case studies throughout Europe, representing a variety of regionally specific cultural models of sustainable development, the book investigates how participative culture, community arts, and more generally, creativity of civic imagination are conducive to the goal of a sustainable future of small and medium-sized cities. This is an essential volume for researchers and postgraduate students in urban studies, cultural studies, cultural geography and urban sociology as well as for policymakers and practitioners wanting to understand the specificity of European cities as hubs of innovation, creativity and artistic industriousness.