Videnskabens og teknologiens påvirkning af samfundet

"A new translation of Karel Capek's 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), with essays from contemporary writers and scientists"--

Discover the secret method used to build the world...For millennia, humans have used one simple method to solve problems. Whether it's planting crops, building skyscrapers, developing photographs, or designing the first microchip, all creators follow the same steps to engineer progress. But this powerful method, the "engineering method", is an all but hidden process that few of us have heard of-let alone understand-but that influences every aspect of our lives.Bill Hammack, a Carl Sagan award-winning professor of engineering and viral "The Engineer Guy" on Youtube, has a lifelong passion for the things we make, and how we make them. Now, for the first time, he reveals the invisible method behind every invention and takes us on a whirlwind tour of how humans built the world we know today. From the grand stone arches of medieval cathedrals to the mundane modern soda can, Hammack explains the golden rule of thumb that underlies every new building technique, every technological advancement, and every creative solution that leads us one step closer to a better, more functional world. Spanning centuries and cultures, Hammack offers a fascinating perspective on how humans engineer solutions in a world full of problems.A book unlike any other, The Things We Make is a captivating examination of the method that keeps pushing humanity forward, a spotlight on the achievements of the past, and a celebration of the potential of our future that will change the way we see the world around us.

A Next Big Idea Club Must-ReadA compelling and accessible new perspective on the modern science of psychology, based on one of Yale's most popular courses of all timeHow does the brain?a three-pound wrinkly mass?give rise to intelligence and conscious experience? Was Freud right that we are all plagued by forbidden sexual desires? What is the function of emotions such as disgust, gratitude, and shame? Renowned psychologist Paul Bloom answers these questions and many more in Psych, his riveting new book about the science of the mind.Psych is an expert and passionate guide to the most intimate aspects of our nature, serving up the equivalent of a serious university course while being funny, engaging, and full of memorable anecdotes. But Psych is much more than a comprehensive overview of the field of psychology. Bloom reveals what psychology can tell us about the most pressing moral and political issues of our time?including belief in conspiracy theories, the role of genes in explaining human differences, and the nature of prejudice and hatred.Bloom also shows how psychology can give us practical insights into important issues?from the treatment of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety to the best way to lead happy and fulfilling lives. Psych is an engrossing guide to the most important topic there is: it is the story of us.

This volume of the series Proceedings in Engineering Mechanics - Research, Technology and Education provides selected papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Science and Technology Education, held in Porto, Portugal, October 6-7, 2022.From the various topics covered at this conference, individual contributions have been selected for this book. These contributions focus on learning mechanisms, learning systems and assessment. The book presents the latest trends, new methods and ideas in science and technology education.An essential resource for lecturers and tutors working in this field.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, the barcode's ordinariness is the ultimate symbol of its success.However, behind the mundanity of the barcode lies an important history. Barcodes bridged the gap between physical objects and digital databases and paved the way for the contemporary Internet of Things, the idea to connect all devices to the web. They were highly controversial at points, protested by consumer groups and labor unions, and used as a symbol of dystopian capitalism and surveillance in science fiction and art installations. This book tells the story of the barcode's complicated history and examines how an object so crucial to so many parts of our lives became more ignored and more ordinary as it spread throughout the world.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

By an award-winning technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal, a behind-the-scenes look at the manipulative tactics Facebook used to grow its business, how it distorted the way we connect online, and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out.

This book is a collection of stories, reflections and advice written by proficient scientists. They address the question of what doing science means to them, and describe attitudes and working practices that have proved effective and rewarding. The book is aimed in particular at young people who are attracted by science or already undertaking undergraduate studies, and who are considering making science their long-term profession. It will also be helpful and revealing to early-career scientists who are searching for their own best route to success. The book serves as a platform for experienced scientists to describe their original inclination, how that subjective disposition found its expression in their way of doing science, whether their expectations were met, and what achievements they can claim. But it is not restricted to success: contributors also share details of the limitations and failures they have encountered. Last but not least they describe how they see science now, howthey think it will be in the near future, and what advice they would give to the their much younger colleagues. Readers will appreciate the diversity of the individual paths shaped by different education, motivation, ambition, inclination, intuition, feeling, belief and eligibility. At the same time the stories confirm that science relies on a translation of this subjective level into an objective level, one that is shared and accepted by the international scientific community, and whose results are produced with a commonly accepted and fully rational scientific method of investigation.

A gripping new investigation into the underbelly of digital technology, which reveals not only how costly the virtual world is, but how damaging it is to the environment.If digital technology were a country, it would be the third-highest consumer of electricity behind China and the United States.Every year, streaming technology generates as much greenhouse gas as Spain - close to 1 per cent of global emissions.One Google search uses as much electricity as a lightbulb left on for up to two minutes.It turns out that the 'dematerialised' digital world, essential for communicating, working, and consuming, is much more tangible than we would like to believe. Today, it absorbs 10 per cent of the world's electricity and represents nearly 4 per cent of the planet's carbon dioxide emissions. We are struggling to understand these impacts, as they are obscured to us in the mirage of 'the cloud'.The result of an investigation carried out over two years on four continents, The Dark Cloud reveals the anatomy of a technology that is virtual only in name. Under the guise of limiting the impact of humans on the planet, it is already asserting itself as one of the major environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

How long do we have left until the human race goes extinct? The Doomsday Argument uses basic probability theory to give a forecast about how many more humans will exist by factoring in the number of humans that have already existed. Proponents of the argument suggest that it would be improbable for us to find ourselves somewhere near the start of the total existence of humankind. To this day, the prevailing consensus amongst those actively writing about the DA is that it still remains unrefuted, despite innumerable attempts in the literature to debunk it. This book provides a critical assessment of the use of thought-experiments in DA rebuttals and argues that testing the DA empirically could yield more fruitful results.

The Bioethics of Space Exploration provides a comprehensive discussion of the possible bioethical issues and challenges that may arise when considering future long-term space missions. Because of numerous threats within the space environment, many consider the concept of radically modifying humans to be a serious and perhaps even necessary option. Konrad Szocik presents what types of ethical and bioethical challenges may await participants on commercial, scientific, and colonizing missions, and provides a new perspective into the potential for radical biomedical technologies.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • By an award-winning technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal, a behind-the-scenes look at the manipulative tactics Facebook used to grow its business, how it distorted the way we connect online, and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out"Broken Code fillets Facebook’s strategic failures to address its part in the spread of disinformation, political fracturing and even genocide. The book is stuffed with eye-popping, sometimes Orwellian statistics and anecdotes that could have come only from the inside." —New York Times Book ReviewOnce the unrivaled titan of social media, Facebook held a singular place in culture and politics. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world. Inside and outside the company, Facebook extolled its products as bringing people closer together and giving them voice.But in the wake of the 2016 election, even some of the company’s own senior executives came to consider those claims pollyannaish and simplistic. As a succession of scandals rocked Facebook, they—and the world—had to ask whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms.Facebook employees set to work in pursuit of answers.  They discovered problems that ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians, allowing VIP users to break the platform’s supposedly inviolable rules. They even raised concerns about whether the product was safe for teens. Facebook was distorting behavior in ways no one inside or outside the company understood. Enduring personal trauma and professional setbacks, employees successfully identified the root causes of Facebook's viral harms and drew up concrete plans to address them. But the costs of fixing the platform—often measured in tenths of a percent of user engagement—were higher than Facebook's leadership was willing to pay. With their work consistently delayed, watered down, or stifled, those who best understood Facebook’s damaging effect on users were left with a choice: to keep silent or go against their employer.Broken Code tells the story of these employees and their explosive discoveries. Expanding on “The Facebook Files,” his blockbuster, award-winning series for The Wall Street Journal, reporter Jeff Horwitz lays out in sobering detail not just the architecture of Facebook’s failures, but what the company knew (and often disregarded) about its societal impact. In 2021, the company would rebrand itself Meta, promoting a techno-utopian wonderland. But as Broken Code shows, the problems spawned around the globe by social media can’t be resolved by strapping on a headset.

"How optimization took over the world and the urgent case for a new approach"--

I shall investigate the natural philosophy of the graduation theses of the Scottish universities in the first half of the seventeenth century. I shall seek to prove that the natural philosophy of the Scottish universities can be defined as 'Eclectic Scotistic Reformed Scholasticism'. The focus will be on two concepts of general physics: prime matter and movement. These concepts are fundamental to the understanding of Scholastic natural philosophy and its relation to early modern philosophy and science. My primary focus will be on the former aspect.

How we can create artificial intelligence with broad, robust common sense rather than narrow, specialized expertise.It’s sometime in the not-so-distant future, and you send your fully autonomous self-driving car to the store to pick up your grocery order. The car is endowed with as much capability as an artificial intelligence agent can have, programmed to drive better than you do. But when the car encounters a traffic light stuck on red, it just sits there—indefinitely. Its obstacle-avoidance, lane-following, and route-calculation capacities are all irrelevant; it fails to act because it lacks the common sense of a human driver, who would quickly figure out what’s happening and find a workaround. In Machines like Us, Ron Brachman and Hector Levesque—both leading experts in AI—consider what it would take to create machines with common sense rather than just the specialized expertise of today’s AI systems.Using the stuck traffic light and other relatable examples, Brachman and Levesque offer an accessible account of how common sense might be built into a machine. They analyze common sense in humans, explain how AI over the years has focused mainly on expertise, and suggest ways to endow an AI system with both common sense and effective reasoning. Finally, they consider the critical issue of how we can trust an autonomous machine to make decisions, identifying two fundamental requirements for trustworthy autonomous AI systems: having reasons for doing what they do, and being able to accept advice. Both in the end are dependent on having common sense.

"Datafication threatens human rights, including privacy and the right to self-determination. This book argues not that we should own but that we are our data; and it proposes an expansion of international human rights to recognize and protect our data selves along with our physical ones"--

Over the years Bill Gates has acquired political influence through his charitable work, and the book shows the controversial ways through which he utilises it. The charity internally sets a policy agenda for how to fix the world - based on one man's worldview - then imposes this vision onto the developing world by funding groups that align with it.

Five mysterious billionaires summoned Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The subject? How to survive the "Event": the societal collapse they know is coming. Rushkoff argues that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley-style certainty that they and their cohort can escape a disaster of their own making-as long as they have enough money and the right technology.Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. Through fascinating characters-master programmers who want to remake the world as if redesigning a video game and bankers who return from Burning Man convinced incentivized capitalism will prevent environmental disasters-Rushkoff explains why those with the most power to change the world have no interest in doing so. He argues that the only way to survive the coming catastrophe is to ensure it doesn't happen by rediscovering community, mutual aid, and human interdependency.Anticipating the mass layoffs and institutional collapse that have recently rocked Silicon Valley, Rushkoff's Survival of the Richest is "a necessary and timely read" (Los Angeles Review of Books) with a prophetic message about the future of tech and our human community.

"A behind-the-scenes look at the manipulative tactics Facebook used to grow its business, how it distorted the way we connect online, and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out"--

A "social" history of AI that finally reveals its roots in the spatial computation of industrial factories and the surveillance of collective behaviour.

The inherent paradox of Egyptology is that the objective of its study -- people living in Egypt in Pharaonic times -- are never the direct object of its studies. Egyptology, as well as archaeology in general, approaches ancient lives through material (and sometimes immaterial) remains. This Element explores how, through the interplay of things and people -- of non-human actants and human actors -- Pharaonic material culture is shaped. In turn, it asks how, through this interplay, Pharaonic culture as an epistemic entity is created: an epistemic entity which conserves and transmits even the lives and deaths of ancient people. Drawing upon aspects of Actor-Network Theory, this Element introduces an approach to see technique as the interaction of people and things, and technology as the reflection of these networks of entanglement--back cover.

This book is a Q-and-A tour for anyone with a curious mind. It focuses on the beauty and excitement of science rather than the details. It is an effort to stimulate everyone's scientific curiosity. It includes some mysteries, strange phenomena, and extremes in nature. It covers some interesting historical episodes. It sheds light on some common myths.In this book, answers to a collection of over five hundred questions are provided in a conversational style. The objective is to simplify the scientific concepts and make them comprehensible, relevant, and enjoyable for all readers.This book covers topics such as the history of science, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, paleontology, technology, and astronomy. It includes modern ideas such as quantum theory, chaos theory, and dark energy. It offers the reader a whistle-stop tour of science.

What if taxi drivers in New York City or rickshaw operators in Bangalore could start a worker-owned and-operated alternative to Uber with stable hourly wages?