The ethical assessment of new technologies raises two principal concerns: the need to develop effective policies and legislation, and the reconsideration of the ethical frameworks in which these policies and laws are developed. The importance of rapid, accurate examinations of tensions between Philosophy and Law and the relationship between philosophical principles and empirical data has never been greater.

The Concise Encyclopedia of Ethics of New Technologies includes 23 articles previously published in the highly-acclaimed Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, nine...

..". an original, quirky, and illuminating collection of material concerning the relatively new and exciting field of technoscience studies.... T]he editors' choice of multiple approaches to the work of four major figures is wholly suited to clarifying their unorthodox and consequently somewhat elusive philosophical positions." --Robert Scharff

Although often absent from the considerations of philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists, the material dimension plays an important and even essential role in the practices of the sciences. Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for...

"David Shenk looks at the new face of our world with a curiosity and connection-making responsiveness that make him exhilarating to read. These are bits, takes, provisional sweeps at issues still coming into focus, but taken together they give us a startling glimpse of where we are. Shenk is so close to the present that most readers will mistake it for the future." -SVEN BIRKERTS, author, THE GUTENBERG ELEGIES

"If the world of constant, instantaenous communication makes you a little nervous from time to time, David Shenk can explain why. This book is a very useful antidote to the...

The Robot in the Garden initiates a critical theory of telerobotics and introduces telepistemology, the study of knowledge acquired at a distance. Many of our most influential technologies, the telescope, telephone, and television, were developed to provide knowledge at a distance. Telerobots, remotely controlled robots, facilitate action at a distance. Specialists use telerobots to explore actively environments such as Mars, the Titanic, and Chernobyl. Military personnel increasingly employ reconnaissance drones and telerobotic missiles. At home, we have remote controls for...

Digital images are an integral part of all media, including television, film, photography, animation, video games, data visualization, and the Internet. In the digital world, spectators become navigators wending their way through a variety of interactive experiences, and images become spaces of visualization with more and more intelligence programmed into the very fabric of communication processes. In How Images Think, Ron Burnett explores this new ecology, which has transformed the relationships humans have with the image-based technologies they have created. So much intelligence...

Information design is the newest of the design disciplines. As a sign of our times, when the crafting of messages and meaning is so central to our lives, information design is not only important -- it is essential. Contemporary information designers seek to edify more than to persuade, to exchange more than to foist upon. With ever more powerful technologies of communication, we have learned that the issuer of designed information is as likely as the intended recipient to be changed by it, for better or worse.

The contributors to this book are both cautionary and hopeful as they...