Autonomous Technology

Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought

Langdon Winner

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English

MIT Press
15 August 1978

Computer aided manufacture (CAM)

Series: Autonomous Technology

The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified ""facts."" What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the ""data"" in the world will make no difference. From the Introduction

By: Langdon Winner
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 201mm, Width: 132mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 431g
ISBN: 9780262730495
ISBN 10: 0262730499
Series: Autonomous Technology
Pages: 396
Publication Date: 15 August 1978
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Langdon Winner is the Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Reviews for Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought

Readers interested in technology, politics, and social change will find Autonomous Technology a useful guide and a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between technology and society. In it, Winner outlines the paradoxes of technological development, the images of alienation and liberation evoked by machines, and he assesses the historical conditions underlying the exponential growth of technology. Winner brings together the ideas of several gifted observers of industrial society, among them Karl Marx, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Hannah Arendt, pointing up the importance (and shortcomings) of their thinking on technological and technocratic development. In asking the question, What have we created?, Winner evokes the myths of Frankenstein and Prometheus to illustrate the possibility that we may all face a permanent bondage to our own inventions. To answer the question, What is to be done about what we have created?, Winner explores