Time Progress Growth And Technology

Author : Filipe Duarte Santos
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030553345
Total Pages : 720 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Time, Progress, Growth and Technology written by Filipe Duarte Santos and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-18 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the current challenges of sustainable development, including its social, economic and environmental components. The author argues that we need to develop a new concept of time based on inter-generational solidarity, which focuses both on the long- and the short term. The evolution of man's notions of time are analyzed from prehistory to modern times, showing how these concepts shape our worldviews, our ecological paradigms and our equilibrium with our planet. Practical approaches to dealing with the major medium- and long term sustainability challenges of the 21st century are presented and discussed. This is a thought provoking and timely book that addresses the main global socioeconomic and environmental challenges facing the current and future generations, using science-based analysis and perspectives. It presents an historical narrative of the advent of progress, economic growth and technology, and discusses the structural changes needed to co-create sustainable pathways. It provides hope for our future on Earth, mankind’s common home. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations This is an amazing, almost mind-boggling book. The author takes a look at the true whole, i.e., the development of the human enterprise since its very beginning. This enterprise is evidently a possibility under the boundary conditions of cosmological dynamics and natural evolution, but evidently also a highly improbable one. It is all but a miracle that the Earth system in its present form exists and happens to support a technical civilization. Will this civilization last long, will it transform itself into something even more exceptional, or will it perish in disgrace? Santos dares to address these grandest of all questions, equipped with a unique transdisciplinary wisdom drawing on physics, cybernetics, geology, biology, economics, anthropology, history, and philosophy. And he dares to dive into the deepest abysses of thinking, where categorial monsters like time and progress lurk. Thereby, he takes us on fascinating journey, during which we perceive and grasp things we have never seen and understood before. One of the best essays I have ever read. John Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and former chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change

Author : Erik Brynjolfsson
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393239357
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies written by Erik Brynjolfsson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-01-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The big stories -- The skills of the new machines : technology races ahead -- Moore's law and the second half of the chessboard -- The digitization of just about everything -- Innovation : declining or recombining? -- Artificial and human intelligence in the second machine age -- Computing bounty -- Beyond GDP -- The spread -- The biggest winners : stars and superstars -- Implications of the bounty and the spread -- Learning to race with machines : recommendations for individuals -- Policy recommendations -- Long-term recommendations -- Technology and the future (which is very different from "technology is the future").

Author : Johan Norberg
Publisher : Atlantic Books
ISBN 13 : 1786497174
Total Pages : 431 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Open written by Johan Norberg and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR Humanity's embrace of openness is the key to our success. The freedom to explore and exchange - whether it's goods, ideas or people - has led to stunning achievements in science, technology and culture. As a result, we live at a time of unprecedented wealth and opportunity. So why are we so intent on ruining it? From Stone Age hunter-gatherers to contemporary Chinese-American relations, Open explores how across time and cultures, we have struggled with a constant tension between our yearning for co-operation and our profound need for belonging. Providing a bold new framework for understanding human history, bestselling author and thinker Johan Norberg examines why we're often uncomfortable with openness - but also why it is essential for progress. Part sweeping history and part polemic, this urgent book makes a compelling case for why an open world with an open economy is worth fighting for more than ever.

Author : Byron Reese
Publisher : Greenleaf Book Group
ISBN 13 : 1608324044
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Infinite Progress written by Byron Reese and published by Greenleaf Book Group. This book was released on 2013 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Forecasting, Futurology.

Author : Vaclav Smil
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262042835
Total Pages : 665 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Growth written by Vaclav Smil and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Smil takes readers from bacterial invasions through animal metabolisms to megacities and the global economy. He begins with organisms whose mature sizes range from microscopic to enormous, looking at disease-causing microbes, the cultivation of staple crops, and human growth from infancy to adulthood. He examines the growth of energy conversions and man-made objects that enable economic activities—developments that have been essential to civilization. Finally, he looks at growth in complex systems, beginning with the growth of human populations and proceeding to the growth of cities. He considers the challenges of tracing the growth of empires and civilizations, explaining that we can chart the growth of organisms across individual and evolutionary time, but that the progress of societies and economies, not so linear, encompasses both decline and renewal. The trajectory of modern civilization, driven by competing imperatives of material growth and biospheric limits, Smil tells us, remains uncertain.

Author : Tyler Cowen
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101502258
Total Pages : 71 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Stagnation written by Tyler Cowen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Author : Erik Brynjolfsson
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393241254
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies written by Erik Brynjolfsson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-01-20 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller. A “fascinating” (Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times) look at how digital technology is transforming our work and our lives. In recent years, Google’s autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM’s Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies—with hardware, software, and networks at their core—will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human. In The Second Machine Age MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—two thinkers at the forefront of their field—reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives. Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds—from lawyers to truck drivers—will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar. Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape. A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age alters how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.

Author : G. N. Von Tunzelmann
Publisher : Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9781781956595
Total Pages : 562 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Technology and Industrial Progress written by G. N. Von Tunzelmann and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What has dictated the rate and direction of technological change? How central has it been to industrial progress? How has it related to other determinants of economic growth and development? In Technology and Industrial Progress, Dr von Tunzelmann examines theoretical views on the nature and contribution of technology, and the empirical evidence from the major industrializing countries from the 18th century to the present day. The experiences of countries regarded in their time as the leaders of industrialization - Britain in the 18th century, the United States in the 19th century and Japan in the 20th century - are critically compared by the author. The following chapters study the transfer of each of these patterns of technology and growth to later industrializers, such as continental Europe, the Soviet Union, and today's newly industrializing countries. Adopting approaches drawn from evolutionary economics, Dr von Tunzelmann links micro-level phenomena relating to individual firms and technologies to macro-level outcomes as reflected in economic growth and development. This long-awaited book is exceptional both in the range of countries surveyed and the breadth of topics analysed, encompassing changes in production processes, products and marketing, management and finance.

Author : Jakub Growiec
Publisher : Presses univ. de Louvain
ISBN 13 : 9782874630859
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Essays on Technological Progress and Economic Growth written by Jakub Growiec and published by Presses univ. de Louvain. This book was released on 2007 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis covers a broad range of topics in the general area of economic growth theory and economics of technological change. It is primarily about the ultimate sources of growth and its ultimate limitations. We scrutinize the implications of several specifications of long-run growth “engines” found in the theoretical literature and put forward their generalizations and extensions. At the highest level of generality, we provide a formal proof that balanced (i.e. exponential) growth requires knife-edge assumptions which cannot be satisfied by typical values of model parameters. This result implies that at least one such knife-edge assumption must be made if a given model is supposed to deliver balanced growth over the long run. Next, we deal with the issue of resource-based limits to long-run growth. We propose to promote technological progress which would improve the substitutability between non-renewable and renewable resources: if the elasticity of substitution between the two kinds of resources exceeds unity, production will not fall down to zero even after the non-renewable resources will have been completely depleted. Another question asked is whether it is plausible that R&D-based growth, fueled by steady increases in the world’s population, can be extended into indefinite time. We answer this question by introducing endogenous fertility choice, with population entering the utility functional multiplicatively, into an R&D-based semi-endogenous growth model. The next issue addressed here are the idea-based microfoundations of aggregate production functions. We discuss the correspondence between the shape of production functions, the direction of technical change, and the possibility of sustained endogenous growth. A broad class of production functions, nesting both the Cobb-Douglas and the CES function, is derived. Finally, we discuss the impact of the heterogeneity of innovations on long-run economic dynamics: we augment the semi-endogenous growth model with a distinction between radical and incremental innovations. Total R&D output is assumed to depend on technological opportunity which is depleted by incremental innovations but renewed by radical innovations. The dynamic interplay of the arrivals of the two types of innovations is shown to give rise to transitional oscillations.

Author : Robert Feigelson
Publisher : Elsevier
ISBN 13 : 0080489931
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book 50 Years Progress in Crystal Growth written by Robert Feigelson and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2004-07-09 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no question that the field of solid state electronics, which essentially began with work at Bell laboratories just after World War II, has had a profound impact on today's Society. What is not nearly so widely known is that advances in the art and science of crystal growth underpin this technology. Single crystals, once valued only for their beauty, are now found, in one form or another in most electronic, optoelectronic and numerous optical devices. These devices, in turn, have permeated almost every home and village throughout the world. In fact it is hard to imagine what our electronics industry, much less our entire civilization, would have been like if crystal growth scientists and engineers were unable to produce the large, defect free crystals required by device designers. This book brings together two sets of related articles describing advances made in crystal growth science and technology since World War II. One set is from the proceedings of a Symposium held in August 2002 to celebrate 50 years of progress in the field of crystal growth. The second contains articles previously published in the newsletter of the American Association for Crystal Growth in a series called "Milestones in Crystal Growth". The first section of this book contains several articles which describe some of the early history of crystal growth prior to the electronics revolution, and upon which modern crystal growth science and technology is based. This is followed by a special article by Prof. Sunagawa which provides some insight into how the successful Japanese crystal growth industry developed. The next section deals with crystal growth fundamentals including concepts of solute distribution, interface kinetics, constitutional supercooling, morphological stability and the growth of dendrites. The following section describes the growth of crystals from melts and solutions, while the final part involves thin film growth by MBE and OMVPE. These articles were written by some of the most famous theorists and crystal growers working in the field. They will provide future research workers with valuable insight into how these pioneering discoveries were made, and show how their own research and future devices will be based upon these developments. · Articles written by some of the most famous theorists and crystal growers working in the field · Valuable insight into how pioneering discoveries were made. · Show how their own research and future devices will be based upon these developments