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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... Responsibility lies instead with the readiness of human institutions to submit to forces of short-term expediency that heavily diminish any accounting for outcomes. Moreover, when the bleak future arrives, what other means are there ...
... responsibility is mine alone for errors and inconsistencies that remain. A finalword may be in order on my personal standpoint regarding technology. My early experience in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a mill hand in the “Big Mill ...
... responsibility for growth should be assigned to entrepreneurs than to inventors.19 On the other hand, no less forcefully, Simon Kuznets maintains the contrary emphasis. While recognizing that there is and must be an interplay of the ...
... responsible for continuing gains in productivity that threaten to make increasing numbers of unskilled and semiskilled workers permanently redundant. Those directing and working within the science-and-technology enterprise, on the other ...
... responsible for introducing them are not independent scientists or engineers but entrepreneurs and teams working under their immediate directions. Unlike inventions, which tend to focus on a central discovery, Schumpeter recognized that ...
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 |