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Full Description
The Dark Side of Technology is intended as a powerful wake-up call to the potential dangers that could, in the near future, destroy our current advanced civilizations. The author examines how fragile our dependence on electronic communications, information storage, and satellites is, as vulnerability increases in an age of raising security concerns. This weakness is evident from the exponential rise in cyber-crime and terrorism. Satellites are crucial to modern-day living, but they can be destroyed by energetic space debris or damaged by solar emissions. Destruction of data, communications, and electrical power grids would bring disaster to advanced nations. Such events could dramatically change our social and economic landscapes within the next 10-20 years.
New technology equally impacts employment, agriculture, biology, medicine, transport, languages, and our social well-being. This book explores both the good and the bad aspects of technological advances, in order to raise awareness and promote caution. Technology may be impressive, but we need to be mindful of potential negative future effects. We ought to seriously consider the long term consequences of an increasing failure to pursue healthy life styles, use of ineffective antibiotics, genetic mutations, and the destruction of food supplies and natural resources. The diverse topics covered aims to show why we must act now to plan for both the predictable downsides of technology, and also develop contingency plans for potential major catastrophes, including natural events where we cannot define accurate time scales.
Contents
1: Have we the knowledge, willpower and determination to survive?
2: Technology and survival - are they compatible?
3: Natural Disasters and Civilization
4: Good technologies with bad side effects
5: From trains to transistors
6: Food, survival and resources
7: The "Silent Spring" revisited
8: Medicine - Expectations and Reality
9: Knowledge loss from changing language
10: Decay of materials and information loss from technology
11: Technology, the new frontier for crime and terror
12: Technology driven social isolation
13: Consumerism and Obsolescence
14: Rejection of knowledge and information
15: Hindsight, foresight, radical suggestions, and a grain of Hope
