Human Enhancement Technologies and Our Merger with Machines

A cross-disciplinary approach is offered to consider the challenge of emerging technologies designed to enhance human bodies and minds. Perspectives from philosophy, ethics, law, and policy are applied to a wide variety of enhancements, including integration of technology within human bodies, as well as genetic, biological, and pharmacological modifications. Humans may be permanently or temporarily enhanced with artificial parts by manipulating (or reprogramming) human DNA and through other enhancement techniques (and combinations thereof). We are on the cusp of significantly modifying (and perhaps improving) the human ecosystem. This evolution necessitates a continuing effort to re-evaluate current laws and, if appropriate, to modify such laws or develop new laws that address enhancement technology. A legal, ethical, and policy response to current and future human enhancements should strive to protect the rights of all involved and to recognize the responsibilities of humans to other conscious and living beings, regardless of what they look like or what abilities they have (or lack). A potential ethical approach is outlined in which rights and responsibilities should be respected even if enhanced humans are perceived by non-enhanced (or less-enhanced) humans as “no longer human” at all

Equality in the City

This collection critiques the rhetoric of ‘smart cities’. It seeks to engender a timely debate about what future cities might look like and what their concerns should be. Using a multi-disciplinary perspective, it features acclaimed scholars whose work investigates the proposed networked digital technologies that ostensibly affect planning policies, control infrastructures and deliver and manage city services and systems. The contributors offer insights into how future cities might be envisaged, planned and executed in order to be more ‘equal’.   

Equality in the City

This collection critiques the rhetoric of ‘smart cities’. It seeks to engender a timely debate about what future cities might look like and what their concerns should be. Using a multi-disciplinary perspective, it features acclaimed scholars whose work investigates the proposed networked digital technologies that ostensibly affect planning policies, control infrastructures and deliver and manage city services and systems. The contributors offer insights into how future cities might be envisaged, planned and executed in order to be more ‘equal’

Geopolitics of Digital Literacies: Accounting for Myths and Realities

This dissertation interrogates the global material consequences of the rhetorics of digital literacies in the One-Third World. Building on the work of literacy studies and computers and writing scholarship, I define and critique the digital literacy myth -a public discourse wherein digital literacies and their technologies are portrayed as inherently democratic for individuals and nations, and are promised to deliver economic competitiveness to those who can attain and best leverage them. I follow the consequences of the digital literacy myth, showing how the myth shapes One-Third World responses to transnational moments of struggle in the case of the 2009 Iranian election protests and the recent decades of rape related to conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using a transnational feminist analytic to trace transnational networks of literacy and materiality, I argue that the digital literacy myth frames how One-Third World citizens are likely to read and participate in global events. And, I note the ways in which US neoliberal interests have historically invested in the digital literacy myth in order to serve their economic agenda. Lastly, I address how, as ethical writing teachers, we might balance teaching our students the digital literacies of today\u27s economy while remaining aware of the costs of those literacies in the global era

The Dark Posthuman

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social, and scientific classification. The posthuman is very much the product of world-building narratives that have their beginnings in the commercial franchise and are fundamentally rooted in science, governance, and economics around the hegemonic appropriation of environments and commodification of bodies that initially fuelled white settler life worlds and continue to be operational in the way we conceive of these worlds as continuous ontological formations. The want has always been for ownership of any of these dimensions of being without regard to condition, to not remain stranded as the subsidiary of another’s being, to another’s claim to humanity, and finally, to escape the suffocating confines of an instrumental ontology that suggests a subcategory of humanity without rights onto itself. The Dark Posthuman distinguishes the posthuman’s place within both the liberal and neoliberal imaginary and reveals how its appearance first entrenched itself through the avarice of English settler colonialism, and subsequently, through the paranoia of American slavery. This same figure of the posthuman played a crucial role in the functional adaptation of Cold War behavioural cybernetics, and thereafter, in the fetishization of technology within the era of global financialization. The shadowing of this arrangement during and beyond the long duration of humanity’s domination of this world becomes the structural web work of this book

Equality in the City

This collection critiques the rhetoric of ‘smart cities’. It seeks to engender a timely debate about what future cities might look like and what their concerns should be. Using a multi-disciplinary perspective, it features acclaimed scholars whose work investigates the proposed networked digital technologies that ostensibly affect planning policies, control infrastructures and deliver and manage city services and systems. The contributors offer insights into how future cities might be envisaged, planned and executed in order to be more ‘equal’

Everyday Automation

This Open Access book brings the experiences of automation as part of quotidian life into focus. It asks how, where and when automated technologies and systems are emerging in everyday life across different global regions? What are their likely impacts in the present and future? How do engineers, policy makers, industry stakeholders and designers envisage artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) as solutions to individual and societal problems? How do these future visions compare with the everyday realities, power relations and social inequalities in which AI and ADM are experienced? What do people know about automation and what are their experiences of engaging with ‘actually existing’ AI and ADM technologies? An international team of leading scholars bring together research developed across anthropology, sociology, media and communication studies and ethnology, which shows how by rehumanising automation, we can gain deeper understandings of its societal impacts

Trinity College Bulletin, 2020-2021

https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/bulletin/1670/thumbnail.jp

Trinity College Bulletin, 2019-2020

https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/bulletin/1669/thumbnail.jp