Autonomous Technology

The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified "facts." What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier...

The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified "facts." What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the "data" in the world will make no difference.;From the Introduction

兰登·温纳 Langdon Winner，1944年生于美国加利福尼亚的San LuisObispo.1973年毕业于加州大学伯克利分校，获得博士学位。他曾经在欧美多所大学任教，从1985年至今一直担任Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute的 讲座教授（Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences）。他的主要著作还有The Whale and the Reactor， Technology and Democracy。