A preface to Morality by Design
I have spent much of my working life toiling in various fields journalism, a craft that allowed me to indulge an obsessive interest in trying understand to the big, existential questions of our time, and then pass along whatever insight I’d gleaned. Decades of research into politics, media, corporate crime, energy policy, environmental pollution, climate change, and, most recently, the impact of technological innovation led me more and more frequently to wonder: “Why is this happening?” and “Why do we let it happen?” Those sorts of questions, it would eventually occur...
Read MoreMorality by Design: technology’s challenge to human values
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...
Read MoreAbout Wade Rowland
Ranked among Canada’s leading literary journalists, Wade Davies Rowland has written more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from television journalism, organized crime, and international environmental law to his current concerns, which include communications technology, the philosophy of science, and technology and human values. Full author bio.