Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change
The Myths of Technology Change
$32.99
- Hardcover
272 pages
- Release Date
1 January 2018
Summary
This fascinating look at innovations past and present-and our sometimes mistaken beliefs about them-“puts technological change into historical perspective” (Henry Petroski, author of The Evolution of Useful Things).Everyone knows that today’s rate of technological change is unprecedented. With breakthroughs from the Internet to cell phones to digital music and pictures, everyone knows that the social impact of technology has never been as profound or overwhelming. But how much is truth and how much is hype?Future Hype surveys the past few hundred years to show that many of the technologies we now take for granted transformed society in far more dramatic ways than more recent developments so often touted as unparalleled and historic. In this thoughtful book, Bob Seidensticker exposes the hidden costs of technology-and helps both consumers and businesses take a shrewder position when the next “essential” innovation is trotted out.
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781576753705 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1576753700 |
| Author: | Bob Seidensticker |
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler |
| Imprint: | Berrett-Koehler |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 272 |
| Release Date: | 1 January 2018 |
| Weight: | 560g |
| Dimensions: | 19mm x 154mm x 229mm |
| Series: | Berrett-koehler |
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Critics Review
“A must-read for those who think the Internet changes everything.”
—Bob Frankston, VisiCalc developer and computer industry pioneer
“This clear-eyed, level-headed, historically sophisticated view of the realities of technological change by a knowledgeable insider will be absorbing reading for early adopters, neo-Luddites, and everyone in between.”
—Edward Tenner, author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
“Future Hype is a great antidote to the familiar boosterism about unprecedented technological growth. Seidensticker puts technological change into historical perspective, which enables us to measure progress against what we have known, rather than against what we are promised.”
—Henry Petroski, Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and Professor of History, Duke University, and author of Pushing the Limits
“…. a wonderful compendium of the way the world works, and not just the way it should work. Future Hype reveals when we should be optimistic and when we should be skeptical…. An important contribution.”
—Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine and the “Skeptic” columnist for Scientific American
Bob Seidensticker
I learned how to program in high school in the mid-1970s on a computer designed in 1962. It had four cubes of core memory each the size of a coffee cup (holding roughly 64K bytes) and two 10-megabyte disk drives each bigger than a car tire. Teletype terminals in the school connected to the computer with a 110 bit-per-second telephone modem. From that point to the present, I’ve taken a ringside seat and watched technology change with fascination.
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