Post-Human Futures PDF Download

Author: Mark Carrigan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367761431
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume defends the notion of humankind in the face of artificial intelligence. Responding to anti-humanist challenges to traditional arguments establishing human worth in nature, it defends humanity with the argument that technological 'advances' introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities.

Author: J. Benjamin Hurlbut
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3658110449
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Humans have always imagined better futures. From the desire to overcome death to the aspiration to dominion over the world, imaginations of the technological future reveal the commitments, values, and norms of those who construct them. Today, the human future is thrown into question by emerging technologies that promise radical control over human life and elicit corollary imaginations of human perfectibility. This interdisciplinary volume assembles scholars of science and technology studies, sociology, philosophy, theology, ethics, and history to examine imaginations of technological progress that promises to transcend the constraints of human body and being. Attending in particular to transhumanist and posthumanist visions, the volume breaks new ground by exploring their utopian and eschatological dimensions and situating them within a broader context of ideas, institutions, and practices of innovation. The volume invites specialists and general readers to explore the stakes of contemporary imaginations of technological innovation as a source of progress, a force of social and historical transformation, and as the defining essence of human life.

Author: Isabelle Chappuis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000423956
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This design for future-ready human resources is a futurist guide to the challenges and changes lying ahead in the world of work and offers a way forward. The world of work is evolving at an exponential rate, and significant shifts are expected. COVID-19 was a warm-up lap and an accelerator of changes, but many still lie ahead. Those changes are rarely addressed in current general HR thinking. At the same time, the growing complexity is making employees and employers alike anxious about the future of work. This is an academic-grade book backed up by evidence-based trends and signals and offers pragmatic upskilling pathways. It is priceless in such an environment for forward-looking scholars and present-oriented, pragmatic industry captains and HR leaders compelled to find answers for their inevitably obsolescing, inorganically morphing workforce. The book was written by the former Director of HEC Lausanne’s Executive MBA and founder of Executive Education of HEC Lausanne, with 12 years’ experience in leading and designing educational programs, together with a NATO- and U.S.-awarded futurist with experience in academic teaching and executives training. This volume offers metaphors to help convey the messages, a clear structure to plan for the decade to come, and several guidelines to follow.

Author: Stephen Hopgood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107193354
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
With authoritarian states and global culture wars threatening human rights, this volume weighs hopes the for effective human rights advocacy.

Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395700
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Author: Mark Carrigan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135118993X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This volume engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence. With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading some to claim we are coming ever closer to the long-sought artificial general intelligence, it defends humanity with the argument that technological ‘advances’ introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities. Against the challenge presented by the possibility that advanced artificial intelligence will be fully capable of original thinking, creative self-development and moral judgement and therefore have claims to legal rights, the authors advance a form of ‘essentialism’ that justifies providing a ‘decent minimum life’ for all persons. As such, while the future of the human is in question, the authors show how dispensing with either the category itself or the underlying reality is a less plausible solution than is often assumed.

Author: Martín Tironi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000954765
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book explores the work of important authors in the search for a transition towards more ethical design focused on more-than-human coexistence. In a time of environmental crises in which the human species threatens its own survival and the highest level of exacerbation of the idea of a future and technological innovation, it is important to discard certain anthropocentric categories in order to situate design beyond the role that it traditionally held in the capitalist world, creating opportunities to create more just and sustainable worlds. This book is an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by ethics of more-than-human coexistence that breaks with the unsustainability installed in the designs that outfit our lives. Questioning the notion of human-centered design is central to this discussion. It is not only a theoretical and methodological concern, but an ethical need to critically rethink the modern, colonialist, and anthropocentric inheritance that resonates in design culture. The authors in this book explore the ideas oriented to form new relations with the more-than-human and with the planet, using design as a form of political enquiry. This book will be of interest to academics and students from the world of design and particularly those involved in emerging branches of the field such as speculative design, critical design, non-anthropocentric design, and design for transition.

Author: Alex Epstein
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593420411
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels draws on the latest data and new insights to challenge everything you thought you knew about the future of energy For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing--including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people. And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency,” reality has proven Epstein right: Fact: Fossil fuels are still the dominant source of energy around the world, and growing fast—while much-hyped renewables are causing skyrocketing electricity prices and increased blackouts. Fact: Fossil-fueled development has brought global poverty to an all-time low. Fact: While fossil fuels have contributed to the 1 degree of warming in the last 170 years, climate-related deaths are at all-time lows thanks to fossil-fueled development. What does the future hold? In Fossil Future, Epstein, applying his distinctive “human flourishing framework” to the latest evidence, comes to the shocking conclusion that the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come. The path to global human flourishing, Epstein argues, is a combination of using more fossil fuels, getting better at “climate mastery,” and establishing “energy freedom” policies that allow nuclear and other truly promising alternatives to reach their full long-term potential. Today’s pervasive claims of imminent climate catastrophe and imminent renewable energy dominance, Epstein shows, are based on what he calls the “anti-impact framework”—a set of faulty methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values that have caused the media’s designated experts to make wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last fifty years. Deeply researched and wide-ranging, this book will cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the future of our energy use, our environment, and our climate.

Author: Edited by the Human Animal Research Network Editorial Collective
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743324391
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Much of the discussion on the Anthropocene has centred upon anthropogenic global warming and climate change and the urgency of political and social responses to this problem. Animals in the Anthropocene: critical perspectives on non-human futures shows that assessing the effects of human activity on the planet requires more than just the quantification of ecological impacts towards the categorisation of geological eras. It requires recognising and evaluating a wide range of territories and terrains, full of non-human agents and interests and meanings, exposed to the profound forces of change that give their name to the Anthropocene. It is from the perspective of ‘the animal question’ – asking how best to think and live with animals – that Animals in the Anthropocene seeks to interrogate the Anthropocene as a concept, discourse, and state of affairs. The term Anthropocene is a useful device for drawing attention to the devastations wreaked by anthropocentrism and advancing a relational model for human and non-human life. The effects on animals of human political and economic systems continue to expand and intensify, in numerous domains and in ways that not only cause suffering and loss but that also produce new forms of life and alter the very nature of species. As anthropogenic change affects the more-than-human world in innumerable ways, we must accept responsibility for the damage we have caused, and the debt we owe to non-human species.

Author: Madeline Schwartzman
Publisher: Black Dog Pub Limited
ISBN: 9781910433225
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
See Yourself X (SYX) is the second volume of Madeline Schwartzman's timely series that look at the human perception and the sensory apparatus.See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception (2011)the first of the series, is a collection of fifty years of futuristic proposals for the body and the senses.See Yourself X focuses in on our fundamental perceptual domainthe human headpresenting an array of conceptual and constructed ideas for extending ourselves physically into space. What will be the physical future of the head and the sensory apparatus in fifty years time, as the mechanisms for how we communicate and sense change and become obsolete, prompted, possibly, by the advancement of brain-to-brain communication? SYX looks at where we are now, in the hope of projecting into that future. SYX explores all forms of physical head augmentation, including new organs, hair extensions and dos, masks, head constructions and gear, headdresses, prosthetics and helmets by artists, designers, inventors, scientists, and world cultures, as well as technological extensions into space. Conceptual topics include the obliteration of the face in fashion, art and folk wedding costume; the politics of hair extension from 18th century hair rolls to contemporary fashion; surrealistic juxtapositions of objects and the head; gender, ritual and identity in contemporary art hair and hair constructions; space-age architectural helmets of the 60s, and conceptual projects that highlight, analyse or deny the internal or perceived functioning of the head and brain. Everyone with a head should be interested in this book. SYX had inauspicious origins. In March 2012 Schwartzman was involved in an airplane crash on the way to a book talk. The wing of her Delta MD-80 knocked over a shuttle bus at over 150 miles per hour while landing in Detroit. Luckily no one was hurt. But it did spark an investigation: do pilots feel the width of their wings? If so, this would mean that the head was effectively approximately 150 feet wide? This was the catalyst for SYX: to look across art practices and contemporary culture at all ways of extending the head into space, and to move headlong into the future. See Yourself Sensing has been used widely at design institutions across the world.See Yourself X, like its predecessor, will be both an exhibition in book form, and an academic book, with examples of Schwartzman's innovative head-centred design projects from Columbia University and Parsons.