Langdon Winner is the Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
"Readers interested in technology, politics, and social change will
find Autonomous Technology a useful guide and a thoughtful inquiry
into the relationship between technology and society. In it, Winner
outlines the paradoxes of technological development, the images of
alienation and liberation evoked by machines, and he assesses the
historical conditions underlying the exponential growth of
technology. Winner brings together the ideas of several gifted
observers of industrial society, among them Karl Marx, Lewis
Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, John Kenneth Galbraith,
and Hannah Arendt, pointing up the importance (and shortcomings) of
their thinking on technological and technocratic development. In
asking the question, What have we created?, Winner evokes the myths
of Frankenstein and Prometheus to illustrate the possibility that
we may all face a permanent bondage to our own inventions. To
answer the question, What is to be done about what we have
created?, Winner explores the possibilities offered by
epistemological luddism. "The author, an assistant professor of
political science, has read the many artists and social scientists
concerned with the consequences of uncontrolled technological
development. But his inspiration is also fed by the
anti-technological reactions he witnessed in the early sixties.....
The book is extremely well documented and written." Sociology
"This study of the idea of technology out of control makes an
important contribution to our understanding of the problems of
civilization. The basic argument is not that some persons or groups
promote technology against the public interest (true though that
is), or even that our technology develops in its own way in spite
of all our efforts to control it (also true in some respects).
Rather, Winner is concerned with a more subtle effect: the
artifacts that we have invented to satisfy our material wants have
now developed, in size and complexity, to the point of delimiting
or even determining our conception of the wants themselves. In that
way, we as a civilization are losing mastery over our own tools....
"As a source for readings and reflections on this problem, the book
is rich and rewarding.... If it has a practical lesson, it is that
of awareness: only by recognizing the boundaries of our socially
constructed scientific-technological reality can we transcend them
in imagination and then achieve effective human action." Jerome R.
Ravetz Science
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