Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western TechnologyPrinceton University Press, 2012 M09 17 - 360 páginas Technology, perhaps the most salient feature of our time, affects everything from jobs to international law yet ranks among the most unpredictable facets of human life. Here Robert McC. Adams, renowned anthropologist and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, builds a new approach to understanding the circumstances that drive technological change, stressing its episodic, irregular nature. The result is nothing less than a sweeping history of technological transformation from ancient times until now. Rare in antiquity, the bursts of innovations that mark the advance of technology have gradually accelerated and now have become an almost continuous feature of our culture. Repeatedly shifting in direction, this path has been shaped by a host of interacting social, cultural, and scientific forces rather than any deterministic logic. Thus future technological developments, Adams maintains, are predictable only over the very short term. |
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... application are later found that heighten these prospects further and take them in entirely new directions. But at what risk, and to whom? Advancing technology has also meant that risks may be devastating but long-delayed, beyond our ...
... applications of new technologies resulting from many new paths of convergence with basic scientificresearch. What has been put in place is nothing less than a systematic process to generate an accelerating flow of new inventions ...
... applications quickly follow the more fruitful and fundamental breakthroughs as their potential is recognized and widely exploited. At the same time, the heterogeneity of innovations must be a source of irregularity in the rates at which ...
... application of themes drawn from an existing pool of knowledge, but the agents primarily responsible for introducing ... applications. Separating the two, however, has inevitably involved drawing a line of division across a continuum ...
... application of market principles—in the outcome. Highly uniform regularities, for example, have been persuasively illustrated in the successive rates of growth and replacement of canal systems, railroads, highways, and finally the ...
Contenido
3 | |
36 | |
3 Technology and the New European Society | 69 |
4 England as the Workshop of the World | 104 |
The American System Emerges | 138 |
6 The United States Succeeds to Industrial Leadership | 173 |
7 The Competitive Global System | 212 |
Technological Change in a Borderless World | 253 |
Notes | 279 |
References Cited | 301 |
Index | 327 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology Robert M. Adams Vista previa limitada - 2012 |
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry Into Western Technology Robert McCormick Adams Sin vista previa disponible - 1996 |