Download Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner PDF

By Edward Tenner

This pleasant and instructive background of invention exhibits why nationwide Public Radio dubbed Tenner “the thinker of daily technology.” how our innovations have impacted our global in methods we by no means meant or imagined, he exhibits that the issues we create tend to bop again and alter us.

The reclining chair, initially designed for short, healthy rest, has turn into the very image of weight problems. The helmet, invented for army reasons, has made attainable new activities like mountain cycling and rollerblading. The typewriter, created to make enterprise run extra easily, has ended in widespread imaginative and prescient difficulties, which in flip have made humans extra reliant on one other invention—eyeglasses. As he sheds gentle at the many ways innovations shock and renew us, Tenner considers the place expertise will take us sooner or later, and what we will be able to count on from the units that we now not appear capable of reside with no.

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Among the better known examples of the use of export controls as an instrument of US foreign policy is the embargo placed on US goods intended for the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Then there was the grain embargo of 1980-1, whose casual administration by the Department of Commerce was soon to be exposed. 38 Oil and gas technology had been targeted for export control in 1978 to display indignation at various Soviet misdemeanours, particularly human rights infringements and the treatment of Anatoly Shcharansky.

18 The technical press screamed in dismay - to no avail whatsoever: Earlier this year Steve Byren, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, seriously tried to tell the US Computer and Business Manufacturers Association that Nato used off-the-shelf personal computers for its Distributed Command and Control System. 'We know this type of equipment is effective', he told the CBEMA. 'In a recent Nato exercise, the side using an Apple computer won' ... He probably went to school with the US Department of Defense spokesman who, when Sweden intercepted a Vax 11-780 being illegally exported to the USSR, claimed that Vax machines were 'used inside Russian cruise missiles as part of the guidance system'.

48 Japanese competitiveness in high technology had shown absolutely no sign of diminishing, and nor had American disquiet. It was easy to judge that a striking example of Japanese venality in high technology would be publicly acceptable and would illustrate convincingly the military cost of commercial profit. DoD calculations of the cost of coping with less noisy Russian submarines were reported variously as $8 billion and $30 billion and even $60 billion 49 - quite sufficient, whatever the figure, to put the commercial cost calculations of the NAS completely in the shade.

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