The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures


Book Description

How does automation affect us, our environment, and our imaginations? What actions should we take in response to automation? Beyond grand narratives and technology-driven visions of the future, what more can automation offer? With these questions in mind, The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures provides a framework for thinking about and implementing automation differently. It consolidates automated futures as an inter- and transdisciplinary research field, embedding the imaginaries, interactions, and impacts of automation technology within their social, historical, societal, cultural, and political contexts. Promoting a critical yet constructive and engaging agenda, the handbook invites readers to collaborate with rather than resist automation agendas. It does so by pushing the agenda for social science, humanities and design beyond merely assessing and evaluating existing technologies. Instead, the handbook demonstrates how the humanities and social sciences are essential to the design and governance of sustainable sociotechnical systems. Methodologically, the handbook is underpinned by a pedagogical approach to staging co-learning and co-creation of automated futures with, rather than simply for, people. In this way, the handbook encourages readers to explore new and alternative modes of research, fostering a deeper engagement with the evolving landscape of automation.




The De Gruyter Handbook of Robots in Society and Culture


Book Description

The De Gruyter Handbook of Robots in Society and Culture provides a comprehensive discussion of how social robots take form, function, and meaning for individuals, relationships, cultures, and societies. Through a path-breaking integration of perspectives coming from sociology, communication and media, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, political science, and science and technology studies, it focuses on the critical and social meaning of present developments in social robotic technologies. This book looks at artificial agents – from voice-based assistants to humanoid robots— as their use transforms private and public contexts and gives rise to both new possibilities and new perils for human being and becoming, organizations as well as social structures and institutions. The handbook traces the consequences and key problems of social robotics across broad social contexts in both public and political as well as domestic and intimate spaces. Further, it attends carefully to the implications of social robotics for various human identity groups, including those based on gender, ethnicity, culture, class, ability, and age. Deep attention to interdisciplinarity, inclusivity, ethics, and socio-cultural futures serves as the guiding inspiration behind each contribution within this handbook.




The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies


Book Description

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies examines the relationship of the social sciences to artificial intelligence, surveying the various convergences and divergences between science and technology studies on the one hand and identity transformations on the other. It provides representative coverage of all aspects of the AI revolution, from employment to education to military warfare, impacts on public policy and governance and the future of ethics. How is AI currently transforming social, economic, cultural and psychological processes? This handbook answers these questions by looking at recent developments in supercomputing, deep learning and neural networks, including such topics as AI mobile technology, social robotics, big data and digital research. It focuses especially on mechanisms of identity by defining AI as a new context for self-exploration and social relations and analyzing phenomena such as race, ethnicity and gender politics in human-machine interfaces.




Frictionlessness


Book Description

Frictionlessness provides an examination of the environmentally destructive digital design philosophy of "frictionlessness" and the critical significance of a technological aesthetic of imperfection. If there is one thing that defines digital consumer technologies today, it is that they are designed to feel frictionless. From smart technologies to cloud computing, from from one-click shopping to the promise of seamless streaming-digital technology is framed to host ever-faster operations while receding increasingly into the background of perception. The environmental costs of this fetishization of frictionlessness are enormous and unevenly distributed; the frictionless experience of the end user tends to be supported by opaque networks of exploited labor and extracted resources that disproportionately impact the Global South. This situation marks an urgent need for alternate, less destructive aesthetic relations to technology. As such, this book examines imperfection, as an aesthetic concept that highlights existential conditions of finitude and fragility, as a particularly powerful counterweight to the dominant digital design philosophy of frictionlessness. While frictionlessness aims to draw the user's perception away from the exploitative and destructive conditions of digital production, imperfection forms an aesthetic source of friction that alerts users to the fragile nature of technology and the finite resources on which it relies. These arguments are elaborated through a close reading of three technological objects-a video game that was programmed to expire, an audiovisual performance that laments the fate of disused technology and a collection of music albums that dramatize a techno-cultural logic of relentless consumerism. Together, these case studies underline the value of technological aesthetics of imperfection and point to the need for a renewed ethics of care in relation to technology.




De Gruyter Handbook of Drone Warfare


Book Description

In 2010, 60 states had a military drone program. Today at least 113 countries and 65 non-state actors now have access to weaponized drone technologies. Alongside this, established ‘drone powers’ – the U.S., China, Turkey, and Iran – have expanded their own use of military drones, increasing the sale and deployment of drones around the world. In the De Gruyter Handbook of Drone Warfare, drone expert, policy adviser, and historian, Dr James Patton Rogers, brings together 37 of the world’s leading voices on the growing issues of commercial and military drone technologies. From the origins of military drones in the early 1900s and the resurgence of drone use during the War on Terror, through to the global proliferation of drones across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, this handbook explores the moral, ethical, technological, legal, military, geopolitical, social, and strategic issues at the heart of drone warfare. The first handbook of its kind, the volume also addresses Russia’s offensive war against Ukraine, the rise of Iranian and Houthi drones, and provides a focused analysis of the future of drone warfare and the opportunities and perils of AI, autonomy, and swarming technologies in the coming Third Drone Age.




De Gruyter Handbook of Media Economics


Book Description

The handbook presents key contributions from scholars worldwide, providing a comprehensive exploration of current trends in media industries from diverse perspectives. Within the framework of understanding contemporary and future trajectories in media markets and industries, the volume delves into their influence on media organization and delivery, along with broader societal and market implications. Encompassing research at the crossroads of economics, management, political economy, and production studies, the handbook emphasizes the necessity for a robust interdisciplinary dialogue. Beyond scrutinizing present and forthcoming industry developments, the handbook addresses pivotal issues pertaining to media economics research methods and pedagogy. It serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, and media professionals, providing insights into media economics as an academic field and delving into the multifaceted dynamics that shape the media landscape. Doing this, it contributes to the ongoing discourse on the evolving nature of media markets and their profound impact on society.




De Gruyter Handbook of Responsible Project Management


Book Description

The narrative about the project management profession is dominated by discussions of “success” and “failure” along with the need to improve the competence of project managers. As a result, the community is engaged in a fruitless search for a combination of tools, techniques and practices that will result in desired outcomes for funders. While the profession has made recent attempts to incorporate environmental and social responsibility, these areas are still framed within the existing discourses of project delivery. The De Gruyter Handbook of Responsible Project Management seeks to rethink project management by integrating contributions from the emerging responsible Management domain. This handbook will explore the nature and extent of project professionals’ responsibility at different levels – individual, team, organizational and societal – along with the implications for education, research and practice. The De Gruyter Handbook of Responsible Project Management offers cutting-edge insights into the field of project management. It is an essential reference for scholars and practitioners.




Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future


Book Description

Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future invites us to think forward from our present moment of planetary, public and everyday crisis, through the prism of emerging technologies. It calls for a new ethical, responsible and equitable path towards possible futures, curated through in-depth engagement with and across experiential, environmental and technological possibilities. It tackles three of the most significant challenges for contemporary society by asking: how emerging technologies are implicated in the sites of everyday lives; what place emerging technologies have in an evolving world in crisis; and how we might better imagine and shape ethical, equitable and responsible futures. The book interweaves three narratives, each of which advances three sets of concerns for our societal futures: ‘Emergence’, which addresses futures, trust and hope; ‘Worlds’, which addresses data, air and energy; and ‘Technologies’, which addresses the future of mobilities, homes and work. Not simply a critical study of emerging technologies, this book is also an approach to thinking and practice in times of global crisis that plays out a mode of future-focused scholarship and action for the first half of the twenty-first century.




An Anthropology of Futures and Technologies


Book Description

This book examines emerging automated technologies and systems and the increasingly prominent roles that each plays in our lives and our imagined futures. It asks how technological futures are being constituted and the roles anthropologists can play in their making; how anthropologists engage with emerging technologies within their fieldwork contexts in research which seeks to influence future design; how to create critical and interventional approaches to technology design and innovation; and how a critical anthropology of the way that emerging technologies are experienced in everyday life circumstances offers new insights for future-making practices. In pursuing these questions, this book responds to a call for new anthropologies that respond to the current and emerging technological environments in which we live, environments for which thinking critically about the possible, plausible, and impossible futures are no longer sufficient. Taking the next step, this book asserts that anthropology must now propose alternative ways, rooted in ethnography, to approach and engage with what is coming and to contest dominant narratives of industry, policy, and government, and to respond to our contemporary context through a public, vocal, and interventional approach.




The Routledge Handbook of Public Transport


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Public Transport is a reference work of chapters providing in-depth examination of the current issues and future developments facing public transport. Chapters in this book are dedicated to specific key topics, identifying the challenges therein and pointing to emerging areas of research and concern. The content is written by an international group of expert contributors and is enhanced through contributions from practitioners to deliver a broader perspective. The Handbook deals with public transport policy context, modal settings, public transport environment, public transport delivery issues, smart card data for planning and the future of public transport. This comprehensive reference work will be a vital source for academics, researchers and transport practitioners in public transport management, transport policy and transport planning.