I’ve just come across the news that soon Government will rely on decision making apps. According to the BBC: The app, which had the working title of Number 10 Dashboard, was developed by the Cabinet Office’s digital team – and pulls data from hundreds of data sources including Google, Twitter and Facebook. The Cabinet Office confirmed ...
[Presentation at the Research Workshop “Emerging Issues in Uncertainty and Ethical Consumption”, 13th June 2011, University of Glasgow] pdf Why Fairtradeand Fear? When first encountering the concept of consumer anxiety in connection with fair trade I was sceptical: It seemed all too vague and not quite clear what consumers are afraid of. The uncertainties said ...
As this will sound like an all round defence of consumerism, I should start by saying that this is not my aim. So straightaway: consumer capitalism is a problem in terms of its ecological consequences and if those consequences can be mitigated by more social control over the production of consumer goods (aka socialism), I’m ...
… it’s often been said that science fiction isn’t really about science and technology – all that is only a means for the author to create social worlds without the constraint of setting them into already existing contexts (while the science in the fiction provides the indispensable plausibility of a realistic daydream). I’ve been reading Jack Vance’s ...
If you have a back up file of of your mind on disk and a genetic recording of your physical make up, if you then get killed in an accident and then somebody restores you by replicating an exact copy of you using the stored information: would that be you resurrected (minus the experience you ...