Radical Technologies

The Design of Everyday Life

De: Adam Greenfield

Narrado por: Michael Butler Murray

Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services, and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.

We're told that innovations - from augmented - reality interfaces and virtual assistants to autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars - will make life easier, more convenient, and more productive. 3D printing promises unprecedented control over the form and distribution of matter, while the blockchain stands to revolutionize everything from the recording and exchange of value to the way we organize the mundane realities of the day to day. And, all the while, fiendishly complex algorithms are operating quietly in the background, reshaping the economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics, and even redefining what it means to be human.

Having successfully colonized everyday life, these radical technologies are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. Greenfield's timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront-and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.

©2017 Adam Greenfield (P)2020 Tantor

Extremely important book

As we navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this book offers essential, critical counter-narratives to the prevailing ones (e.g., by the World Economic Forum, Silicon Valley and others).
This book helps and us to reflect on the intended (but rarely fully revealed) and unintended (yet rarely fully understood) consequences of the technological progress we are either facilitating and/or experiencing.

To be sure: I am - overall - positive and optimistic about technology’s role in economic and social progress. Equally, I’m alive to the reality that technology has been and is also being used to control and subjugate. It is exactly therefore this book is relevant in the context of the current mass-digitalisation of society and lives we are witnessing.

I don’t think the book can (or aims to)) to stop this development. It is, however, seeking to make us cognisant and more determined in harnessing technology for the greater good of all, rather than it being used by the few to control and subjugate the many.

ahead with the times

this book prepares all tech minded people for the future of automation, digital currency and more.

This author is super centrist

I was appalled by the things this author disparaged. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this guy worked for state bankers