“Shaping Technologies that Affect Our Lives – An Emerging Human Right?”
Langdon Winner is the Thomas Phelan professor of political science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where he serves as co-director of the newly founded Center for Cultural Design. Mr. Winner is past president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. Praised by The Wall Street Journal as “the leading academic on the politics of technology,” in the early 1980s he was consultant on Godfrey Reggio’s film “Koyaanisqatsi.”
The following excerpt is a summary of some of the topics his talk at Bard touched on:
“Today we recognize that technologies of many kinds have the power to affect our well being in fundamental ways. But seldom has the right to participate in the shaping of crucial technologies been upheld as one of the basic human rights. How can we explain the silence that surrounds this issue? What is involved in moving this question onto the agenda of humanity’s central concerns?”
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