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Title:
The techno-human condition
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Publication Information:
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2011
Physical Description:
xi, 222 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm.
ISBN:
9780262525251

9780262015691
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30000010345022 T14.5 A45 2011 Open Access Book Book
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Summary

Summary

A provocative analysis of what it means to be human in an era of incomprehensible technological complexity and change.

In The Techno-Human Condition , Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz explore what it means to be human in an era of incomprehensible technological complexity and change. They argue that if we are to have any prospect of managing that complexity, we will need to escape the shackles of current assumptions about rationality, progress, and certainty, even as we maintain a commitment to fundamental human values.
Humans have been co-evolving with their technologies since the dawn of prehistory. What is different now is that we have moved beyond external technological interventions to transform ourselves from the inside out--even as we also remake the Earth system itself. Coping with this new reality, say Allenby and Sarewitz, means liberating ourselves from such categories as "human," "technological," and "natural" to embrace a new techno-human relationship.


Author Notes

Braden R. Allenby is Founding Director of the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management, Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics, and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Arizona State University. He is the author of Reconstructing Earth: Technology and Environment in the Age of Humans .


Reviews 2

Publisher's Weekly Review

Allenby (Reconstructing Earth) and Sarewitz (Frontiers of Illusion) explore the radical technological enhancement of people, or "transhumanism." Humanity today can be defined through our relationship with technology, but human evolution is nothing more than a series of enhancements; the "new-and-improved-model human brain and body," with its "fully re-engineered immune system...renders all previous models obsolete." After a quick history lesson, the authors delve into cognitive and genetic technological progress, the subjectivity problem with "progress" (the defeat of Nazism and life with The Bomb both show "progress"), and three levels of tech: a means through which a society meets its goals; a "networked" social and cultural phenomenon; and a wildly complex, constantly adapting "Earth system." The authors dismiss the binary debate of transhumanism as between the individual and the institution, and discuss the "existential challenge to society" brought be tech-aided warfare; in this context the authors see the 2003 invasion of Iraq as conflating "technological dominance and military power at Level I...with national security at Level III" and cite similar "category confusion" in America's response to terrorism. With the imperative for adaptability wired into every chapter, Allenby and Sarewitz entertaining articulate the importance of understanding the condition that has captured their imaginations and embroiled them in a "several-year running argument." (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.


Choice Review

The Techno-Human Condition is an eight-chapter essay that illustrates how technology is a part of all individuals, including their cultures and institutions. Allenby and Sarewitz (both, Arizona State) encourage the reader to understand, embrace, and celebrate people's ignorance of the complexity of techno-human systems in order to begin to manage technological and scientific prowess with rationality, ethics, humility, and responsibility. The book begins with a discussion of transhuman and cause and effect, and moves toward the idea of the individual and the quest for comprehensibility. Allenby and Sarewitz offer a model of technological analysis composed of three levels of technological reality that focus on the same artifact, and apply different boundaries of analysis. Level 1 is the immediate effectiveness of a technology to accomplish a task; level 2 is a highly complex sociotechnical system that contains a technology within the system; and level 3 involves the long-term implications of a sociotechnological system taken as a whole. The authors illustrate this model by analyzing two such systems: railroads and modern military technology. The final chapter offers nine suggestions for thinking about and acting within "the techno-human condition.. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; general readers. W. K. Bauchspies Georgia Institute of Technology