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.
At the Fringe of Freedom
This is Chapter 7 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/.
It is strange that in a society founded so centrally on the creative initiative and freedom of the individual, we should today find this same individual so utterly helpless before the most urgent social problems.
Or so it seems. If you are troubled, for example, by the drug problem in our cities, what can you actually do about it? The educational system, family structure, mass media, organized crime, international commerce, welfare system -- all affect, and in turn are affected by, the culture of drugs and violence. It is not easy to see where you and I might step into the picture and make a discernible difference. It is all too easy to see how we might throw our lives away.
Similar perplexities arise if you think about the famines regularly scything millions of people, or the massive human assaults upon mother earth, or the stranglehold with which the indifferent imperatives of technological development now direct the evolution of social forms. The problems have gone so systemic, the causes become so tortured and inaccessible, the interrelationships grown so intricate, ...
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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.