Product Description

Technology has been the blessing and the bane of the 20th century. As the cultural ambivalence towards technology moves into the 21st century, this book debates machines, systems and the human world, and attempts to answer questions arising from the prominence which technology plays in our lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #606859 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"Technological wariness is an enduring disturbance, with roots in religion," writes popular-science interpreter Rhodes in his introduction to this welcome anthology of 20th-century scientific invention. "Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans carries the sense of it; so does the serpent persuading Eve to taste the knowledgeable apple and the Jewish myth of the Golem, a Frankenstein's monster animated by incorporations of holy words." Gods and monsters abound in these pages, made up of excerpts from essays, reports, articles, and speeches by both inventors and their critics. Rhodes includes, for instance, a worried editorial from 1931 by the journalist Floyd Allport, who presciently noted the community-destroying effects of technological advances such as the private car and the telephone; he also reproduces any number of warnings from the likes of Aldous Huxley, Vannevar Bush and Edward Abbey that humankind's scientific imagination far outstrips our moral capacity. Joining these jeremiads in Rhodes' pages are more optimistic assessments, including Intel Corporation founder Gordon Moore's famous formulation, from 1965, that "the complexity of integrated circuits has approximately doubled every year since their introduction," whereas "cost per function has decreased several thousand-fold"--which explains why personal computers, among other items, have become increasingly more powerful and yet less expensive. Anyone interested in the development of 20th-century science, applied or theoretical, will delight in Rhodes' collection. --Gregory McNamee, Amazon.com

Review
Scott LaFee

"The San Diego Union-Tribune"

With a keen eye for both breadth and detail, for irony and insight, Rhodes has found some of the best thinking by figures ranging from Henry Ford and Albert Einstein to Rachel Carson and Joan Didion.

Customer Reviews

Look at where we were and where we might be going
This is not a run of the mill anthology of 20th Century scientific thinking and predictions. This a many and varied collection of articles, some so short as to only occupy a few lines, whilst some run to 2 or 3 pages.
Some of them are ironic, such as predictions that never came to pass (eg Spiro Agnew on Supersonic flight), whilst others transpire to be very omniscient in their warnings for the future (concerns about the 'O' rings on the Space Shuttle 6 months before Challenger exploded).

Well worth a read to look back at where we were, consider where we've come to, and where we might be going.