BOOK REVIEW: Morality by Design: Technology’s Challenge to Human Values
MORALITY BY DESIGN: TECHNOLOGY’S CHALLENGE TO HUMAN VALUES, by WADE ROWLAND (2019) Bristol: Intellect, 120 pp., ISBN 978-1-78938-1-238, p/bk, $24 Reviewed by Lynne Heller, Adjunct Professor, OCAD University Author Wade Rowland, a professor emeritus from York University, Toronto, Canada titled this book of eleven short essays Morality by Design. However, it was the subtitle – Technology’s Challenge to Human Values – that intrigued me and prompted this review. It is impossible not to wonder about morality and who we are as human beings in the face of overwhelming hype/fear/enchantment...
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The introduction: How do you build a utopia? What does it take to construct the best of all possible worlds? Thomas More chose the name Utopia (in Greek, it means no-place) for the ideal society he described in his Renaissance masterpiece of 1516, written as a young man long before he served as Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII (and was beheaded for his trouble). The book was a visionary critique of fractious English society which More described as a “conspiracy of the rich,” in which the “greedy, unscrupulous and useless” lived off the labour of others. In Utopia, he sketched a form...
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