November 1995
Beginner
502 pages
11h 11m
English
Content preview from The Future Does Not Compute
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Can Human Ideals Survive the Internet?
This is Chapter 1 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.
Social healing, it seems, approaches us from the Internet. If the hopes clustered about this miraculous, Hydra-headed gift of the information age are fulfilled, it will bring us extended democracy, personal liberation, enhanced powers of organization and coordination, renewal of community, information transmuted into wisdom, education freed from the grip of pedagogical tyranny, a new and wondrous complexity arising from chaos -- and much more. Can any gift prove dangerous while acting as such an extraordinary magnet for every conceivable ideal?
It is at least curious, given the bright light of idealism focused upon the Internet, that its actual development should have proceeded largely according to a dim, scarcely conscious, technical logic. The “intrinsic necessities” of its growth seem to derive as much from the technical machinery's insistence upon its own, natural articulations as from any choosing on our part:
- Often hailed as an unparalleled weapon against the establishment, the Internet actually grew out of a scheme for making military communications ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.