From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide: www.dropbox.com

A poetic exploration of the new world created by the collision of the biological body with technology and culture. For more than 3,000 years, humans have explored uncharted geographic and spiritual realms. Present-day explorers face new territories born from the coupling of living tissue and metal, strange lifeforms that are intelligent but unconscious, neither completely alive nor dead. Our bodies are now made of machines, images, and information. We are becoming cultural bodies in a world inhabited by cyborgs, clones, genetically modified animals, and innumerable species of human/information symbionts. Ollivier Dyens's Metal and Flesh is about two closely related phenomena: the technologically induced transformation of our perceptions of the world and the emergence of a cultural biology. Culture, according to Dyens, is taking control of the biosphere. Focusing on the twentieth century—which will be remembered as the century in which the living body was blurred, molded, and transformed by technology and culture—Dyens ruminates on the undeniable and irreversible human/machine entanglement that is changing the very nature of our lives.

A pivotal volume in the collected works of Hans Jonas (1903-1993), one of most important German-American philosophers of the last half of the 20th century, this edition is the only one to include contributions from his three primary areas of achievement: philosophical reflection on gnosticism, on biology, and on technology.

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping account of the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society's members. As the author shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were devastating for large swaths of the population.These trends broadly mirror those in our current age of automation. But, just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the potential to do the same. Benedikt Frey demonstrates that in the midst of another technological revolution, the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present. --From publisher description.

It is widely accepted that the key to rising incomes for workers, for investors, and (indirectly) for welfare recipients is innovation. New ideas provide opportunities for investment in new products, new processes, and new markets. Exploitation of these opportunities by intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs gives rise to increases in labor productivity, which in turn lead to higher primary incomes for workers and investors and, via government redistributive mechanisms, larger transfers to welfare recipients. Since technology is the driver of innovation and the key to the subsequent economic and distributional benefits of this innovation, there is a need for researchers and businesspersons to have access to up-to-date information on emerging technologies and the business opportunities they provide. Technological Breakthroughs and Future Business Opportunities in Education, Health, and Outer Space discusses the economic, social, and cultural benefits that new technologies can provide in multidisciplinary industries with a unique emphasis on looking towards the impacts of these technologies across the next two decades. Within this theme, the book discusses the recent trends, future developments, and business opportunities surrounding new technologies including information technology and biotechnology. Additionally, the book investigates recent demands and disruptions in the health and education sectors as well as recent developments and forthcoming opportunities in the outer space sector and how newer technologies can enable and meet the growing demands of these industries. While covering all these technologies and their applications, this book is an ideal reference work for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, teachers, technologists, analysts, IT specialists, engineers, policymakers, medical professionals, government officials, space agencies, financial planners, public officials, and researchers and students working in areas that include but are not limited to technology, education, public health, medicine, business and management, aeronautics, and public policy.