Radical Technologies

Everywhere we turn, our everyday experience is being overlaid and interrupted by startling new technologies. Today, we depend on the smartphone as an interface to an urban environment we share with autonomous drones and self-driving cars, even as we use augmented-reality applications to interact with things that aren't quite there. Now 3D printing offers us unprecedented fine-grained control over the form and distribution of matter, while the blockchain promises to remake the way we record and exchange value. And all the while, fiendishly complex algorithmic systems are operating quietly, reshaping the economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics, and even beginning to etch away at what it means to be human. Just how did these things come to be? How do they work? What (and whose) values do they reproduce? And what kind of choices do they present us with? Radical Technologies raises all of these questions to the surface and provokes us to ask what we might want to do with them now, when we might still be able to shape their impact on our shared future.