technological determinism

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

by Sebastian Mallaby;  · 30 Mar 2026  · 607pp  · 161,998 words

control the race that it had started. But the release of ChatGPT, at the end of November 2022, played out as a textbook case of technological determinism. Inventors dream of shaping the technology that they create. Often, the technology shapes them—the technology plus the business, political, and geopolitical currents that it

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than the other contenders in this race. In fact, both the slowness of their start and their new resolve to sprint illustrated the forces of technological determinism. For the past couple of years, Google in particular had been gripped by the opposite of race incentives. Its choices had been shaped by the

The Transhumanist Reader

by Max More and Natasha Vita-More  · 4 Mar 2013  · 798pp  · 240,182 words

implausible endogenous growth models can produce radical growth appears to support some forms of the singularity concept. A common criticism is that technological singularity assumes technological determinism. This appears untrue: several if not all of the singularity concepts in the introduction could apply even if technology just exhibited trends driven by non

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker  · 24 Sep 2012  · 1,351pp  · 385,579 words

weapons would inevitably be used by the great powers to justify the cost of developing them turned out to be flat wrong. The failure of technological determinism as a theory of the history of violence should not be that surprising. Human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven, and what matters most

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

by James Bridle  · 6 Apr 2022  · 502pp  · 132,062 words

strongest warnings about AI have in fact come from its greatest proponents: the billionaires of Silicon Valley who have most bullishly pushed a narrative of technological determinism. Technological determinism is the line of thinking which decrees that technological progress is unstoppable. Given that the rise of AI is as inevitable as that of computers

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paranoia – distributed networks designed to withstand atomic attack and the Californian Ideology, which in the 1990s traded the hippy ideals of liberation and togetherness for technological determinism and neoliberal capitalism.21 It’s this combination of military power and corporate profit-seeking which has shaped the modern internet, writing structural violence and

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us towards something important. Like the problem of artificially intelligent systems in general, the problem of Sophia’s legal status is not merely one of technological determinism or political necessity. Rather, her role might be to draw our attention to a far greater problem: who matters, who counts and who has agency

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’s proposition, but none of them are as big as the claimed solution. The rationalist community represented by LessWrong leans right, and believes fervently in technological determinism. Computers, as wholly rational machines, represent for them the highest kind of thinking, and the rationalists have a deep belief in the emergence of a

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to think carefully about the ways in which it is deployed, used and administered. In particular, we must not repeat the mistake of twentieth-century technological determinism, which saw the role of high technology as producing the one, unarguable answer to every problem. If the use of trackers and other gadgets to

What Technology Wants

by Kevin Kelly  · 14 Jul 2010  · 476pp  · 132,042 words

these central concerns later, but I want to note one curious fact about this last belief. While many people claim to believe the notion of technological determinism is wrong (in either sense of that word), they don’t act that way. No matter what they rationally think about inevitability, in my experience

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most quotable passages and perspectives on technology. I found all kinds of insights I had not seen elsewhere. Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. A fairly scholarly anthology of historians trying to answer this vexing question. The Singularity

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)

by Unknown  · 7 Jun 2012

the seeds of its own destruc­ tion. It must not be imagined that the autonomous technique en- xviii) visioned by Ellul is a kind of "technological determinism,” to use a phrase of Veblen. It may sometimes seem so, but only because all human institutions, like the motions of all physical bodies, have

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff  · 15 Jan 2019  · 918pp  · 257,605 words

“accumulated unanticipated consequences.” We accept the idea that technology must not be impeded if society is to prosper, and in this way we surrender to technological determinism. Rational consideration of social values is considered “retrograde,” Winner writes, “not the ticket that scientific technology gives to civilization.… To this day, any suggestions that

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design

by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc  · 15 Feb 2010  · 1,233pp  · 239,800 words

an overriding spatial or physical aesthetic of urban form.’ (Webber 1963: 52) Recognising the instrumental impact of transport and communication technology does not equate to technological determinism – the application of technology is mediated by social trends. Decentralisation, the so-called ‘death of distance’ and the end of the city, are not foregone

Marxian Economic Theory

by Meghnad Desai  · 20 May 2013

help in studying social relations. Modern interpretations of Marx whether by economists hostile to his ideas or by his champions, seem to rely on a technological determinism based on a physical input-output system. This is reinforced by mechanistic assumptions about the determinants of the wage rate - in most cases a constant

You Are Not a Gadget

by Jaron Lanier  · 12 Jan 2010  · 224pp  · 64,156 words

, and strengthened my sense that people are still able to steer the evolution of the net. It was one good piece of evidence against metahuman technological determinism. The net doesn’t design itself. We design it. But even after the Beacon debacle, the rush to pour money into social networking sites continued

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

by Yochai Benkler  · 14 May 2006  · 678pp  · 216,204 words

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard

by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel  · 3 Oct 2016  · 504pp  · 126,835 words

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World

by David Kerrigan  · 18 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 80,835 words

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

by David Wootton  · 7 Dec 2015  · 1,197pp  · 304,245 words

The Rise of the Network Society

by Manuel Castells  · 31 Aug 1996  · 843pp  · 223,858 words

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

by Robert W. McChesney  · 5 Mar 2013  · 476pp  · 125,219 words

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

by Robert Wright  · 28 Dec 2010

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari  · 9 Sep 2024  · 566pp  · 169,013 words

The Nature of Technology

by W. Brian Arthur  · 6 Aug 2009  · 297pp  · 77,362 words

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

by Timothy Garton Ash  · 23 May 2016  · 743pp  · 201,651 words

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America)

by Louis Hyman  · 3 Jan 2011

Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier  · 6 May 2013  · 510pp  · 120,048 words

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans

by Eben Kirksey  · 10 Nov 2020  · 599pp  · 98,564 words

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly  · 7 Jan 2025  · 293pp  · 104,461 words

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict

by Kenneth Payne  · 16 Jun 2021  · 339pp  · 92,785 words

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 21 Mar 2013  · 323pp  · 95,939 words

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage

by Douglas B. Laney  · 4 Sep 2017  · 374pp  · 94,508 words

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

by Henry Jenkins  · 31 Jul 2006

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life

by Robert Wright  · 1 Jan 1994  · 604pp  · 161,455 words

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton  · 19 Feb 2016  · 903pp  · 235,753 words

Data and the City

by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle  · 2 Aug 2017

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age

by Andrew Keen  · 1 Mar 2018  · 308pp  · 85,880 words

How Will Capitalism End?

by Wolfgang Streeck  · 8 Nov 2016  · 424pp  · 115,035 words

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back

by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy  · 15 Mar 2020  · 296pp  · 83,254 words

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety

by Eric Schlosser  · 16 Sep 2013  · 956pp  · 267,746 words

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology

by Kentaro Toyama  · 25 May 2015  · 494pp  · 116,739 words

Empire of Guns

by Priya Satia  · 10 Apr 2018  · 927pp  · 216,549 words

The Origins of the Urban Crisis

by Sugrue, Thomas J.

The Hacker Crackdown

by Bruce Sterling  · 15 Mar 1992  · 345pp  · 105,722 words

The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour  · 20 Aug 2019  · 297pp  · 83,651 words

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

by Jamie Susskind  · 3 Sep 2018  · 533pp

1491

by Charles C. Mann  · 8 Aug 2005  · 666pp  · 189,883 words

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child

by Morgan G. Ames  · 19 Nov 2019  · 426pp  · 117,775 words

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

by Victor Davis Hanson  · 16 Oct 2017  · 908pp  · 262,808 words

The Future of Technology

by Tom Standage  · 31 Aug 2005

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

by E. Gabriella Coleman  · 25 Nov 2012  · 398pp  · 107,788 words

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise

by Nathan L. Ensmenger  · 31 Jul 2010  · 429pp  · 114,726 words

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities

by Howard P. Segal  · 20 May 2012  · 299pp  · 19,560 words

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More

by Luke Dormehl  · 4 Nov 2014  · 268pp  · 75,850 words

Bomb Scare

by Joseph Cirincione  · 24 Dec 2011  · 293pp  · 74,709 words

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

by Evgeny Morozov  · 16 Nov 2010  · 538pp  · 141,822 words

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed

by Andrew Jackson (economist) and Ben Dyson (economist)  · 15 Nov 2012  · 363pp  · 107,817 words

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

by Nicholas Carr  · 28 Sep 2014  · 308pp  · 84,713 words

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon

by Rosa Brooks  · 8 Aug 2016  · 548pp  · 147,919 words

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

by Jacob Silverman  · 17 Mar 2015  · 527pp  · 147,690 words

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

by Bruce Schneier  · 2 Mar 2015  · 598pp  · 134,339 words

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)

by Andrew L. Russell  · 27 Apr 2014  · 675pp  · 141,667 words

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

by Paul Mason  · 29 Jul 2015  · 378pp  · 110,518 words

The Cultural Logic of Computation

by David Golumbia  · 31 Mar 2009  · 268pp  · 109,447 words

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

by Robert Skidelsky  · 13 Nov 2018

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems

by Linda Yueh  · 4 Jun 2018  · 453pp  · 117,893 words

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today

by Linda Yueh  · 15 Mar 2018  · 374pp  · 113,126 words

Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare

by Paul Lockhart  · 15 Mar 2021

Automation and the Future of Work

by Aaron Benanav  · 3 Nov 2020  · 175pp  · 45,815 words

Hacking Capitalism

by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber  · 29 Oct 2024  · 292pp  · 106,826 words

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

by Brian Merchant  · 25 Sep 2023  · 524pp  · 154,652 words

Hard Landing

by Thomas Petzinger and Thomas Petzinger Jr.  · 1 Jan 1995  · 726pp  · 210,048 words

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

by Cal Newport  · 2 Mar 2021  · 350pp  · 90,898 words

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams  · 1 Oct 2015  · 357pp  · 95,986 words

Alone Together

by Sherry Turkle  · 11 Jan 2011  · 542pp  · 161,731 words

The Googlization of Everything:

by Siva Vaidhyanathan  · 1 Jan 2010  · 281pp  · 95,852 words

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism

by David Harvey  · 1 Jan 2010  · 369pp  · 94,588 words

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom

by Rebecca MacKinnon  · 31 Jan 2012  · 390pp  · 96,624 words

The Best Business Writing 2013

by Dean Starkman  · 1 Jan 2013  · 514pp  · 152,903 words

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work

by Alex Rosenblat  · 22 Oct 2018  · 343pp  · 91,080 words

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

by Jerry Mander  · 1 Jan 1977

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages

by Carlota Pérez  · 1 Jan 2002

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

by John Brockman  · 19 Feb 2019  · 339pp  · 94,769 words

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History

by David Edgerton  · 27 Jun 2018

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities

by Benjamin R. Barber  · 5 Nov 2013  · 501pp  · 145,943 words

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)

by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig  · 15 Mar 2020

The Smartphone Society

by Nicole Aschoff

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker  · 13 Feb 2018  · 1,034pp  · 241,773 words

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification

by Paul Roberts  · 1 Sep 2014  · 324pp  · 92,805 words

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents

by Lisa Gitelman  · 26 Mar 2014

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up

by Philip N. Howard  · 27 Apr 2015  · 322pp  · 84,752 words

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class

by Guy Standing  · 27 Feb 2011  · 209pp  · 89,619 words

The Art of SQL

by Stephane Faroult and Peter Robson  · 2 Mar 2006  · 480pp  · 122,663 words

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

by Joel Kotkin  · 11 May 2020  · 393pp  · 91,257 words

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back

by Bruce Schneier  · 7 Feb 2023  · 306pp  · 82,909 words

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning

by Justin E. H. Smith  · 22 Mar 2022  · 198pp  · 59,351 words

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson  · 30 May 2016  · 324pp  · 89,875 words

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine

by Peter Lunenfeld  · 31 Mar 2011  · 239pp  · 56,531 words

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

by Michael Specter  · 14 Apr 2009  · 281pp  · 79,958 words

Brave New World of Work

by Ulrich Beck  · 15 Jan 2000  · 236pp  · 67,953 words

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

by John Markoff  · 1 Jan 2005  · 394pp  · 108,215 words

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900

by David Edgerton  · 7 Dec 2006  · 353pp  · 91,211 words

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

by Aaron Bastani  · 10 Jun 2019  · 280pp  · 74,559 words

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation

by Paris Marx  · 4 Jul 2022  · 295pp  · 81,861 words

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent

by Douglas Coupland  · 29 Sep 2014  · 124pp  · 36,360 words

Bureaucracy

by David Graeber  · 3 Feb 2015  · 252pp  · 80,636 words

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age

by Cory Doctorow, Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman  · 18 Nov 2014  · 170pp  · 51,205 words

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres

by Jamie Woodcock  · 20 Nov 2016

The Cigarette: A Political History

by Sarah Milov  · 1 Oct 2019

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere

by Christian Wolmar  · 18 Jan 2018

Collaborative Society

by Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska  · 18 Feb 2020  · 187pp  · 50,083 words

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval

by Jason Cowley  · 15 Nov 2018  · 283pp  · 87,166 words

Distrust That Particular Flavor

by William Gibson  · 3 Jan 2012  · 153pp  · 45,871 words

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality

by Laurence Scott  · 11 Jul 2018  · 244pp  · 81,334 words

Basic Income And The Left

by henningmeyer  · 16 May 2018

Marx: A Very Short Introduction

by Peter Singer  · 15 Mar 2000  · 109pp  · 29,486 words

A Short History of Progress

by Ronald Wright  · 2 Jan 2004  · 225pp  · 54,010 words