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.
What This Book Was About
This is Chapter 25 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/.
Technology offers us many obscure reasons for worry, not least among them the threat of nuclear terrorism. Yet what I fear most in the technological cornucopia is the computer's gentle reason.
A bomb's fury exhausts itself in a moment, and the poisonous aftermath can at least be identified and tracked. The computer, burrowing painlessly into every social institution, infecting every human gesture, leaves us dangerously unalarmed. The first post-Hiroshima nuclear detonation in a major city -- however deep the gash it rips through human lives and world structures -- may clarify the minds of world leaders marvelously, jolting them, we can hope, to wise and sensible action. The computer, meanwhile, will continue quietly altering what it means to be wise or sensible.
New technologies often exert their early influences reassuringly, by merely imitating older, more comfortable tools. We still use the computer primarily for electronic mail, routine word processing, and text storage. Its distinctive powers remain nascent, rumored endlessly back and forth among silently blinking ...
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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.