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...
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.