Surviving the Techstorm

摘要

In A Dangerous Master, Wendell Wallach, a scholar at Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, tells the story of modern society's struggle to cope with technology's complexity and uncertainty. In the course of telling this story, Wallach questions the terms of the social contract under which we as a society predict, weigh, and manage the potential harms and benefits that result from the adoption of emerging technologies. In urgent prose, he argues that we need different epistemic, cultural, and political approaches to adequately assess emerging technologies' risks and their broader social impacts. Wallach promotes public deliberation as one of these approaches, which provides citizens and experts the opportunity to distinguish the technological hype from the hope, the speculation from reality, and in so doing shape their technological futures.