Rated A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence 8/10
A good introduction to AI technologies and their ethical, legal, and social implications, even if verging on techno-optimism at times.
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Finished reading Advanced Introduction to Technology Policy
Wants to read A New Introduction to Comparative Law
Rated How to Do Things with Legal Doctrine 10/10
Wants to read The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science
Wants to read Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Wants to read The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Finished reading Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
Finished reading Contemporary Issues in Human Rights Law: Europe and Asia
Rated Conducting Law and Society Research: Reflections on Methods and Practices 10/10
The authors interview various law and society scholars to show how they arrived at their themes, how they developed methodological knowledge, what adaptations they had to do and so on. The result is a more "realistic" view of practice than the sanitised versions offered by methods sections and textbooks.<br/>
Rated Regulatory Theory: Foundations and applications 8/10
A solid introduction to various approaches and issues in regulatory theory, including core topics such as responsive regulation and network approaches to regulation, foundational topics such as the role of emotions in regulation and treatments of risk in regulatory practice, and specialised topics such as the analyses of various regulated sectors.
Rated Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance 10/10
A fascinating book on politics and technology, examining the contingency of technological development through an analysis of the history of nuclear missile guidance until the end of the 1980s. Increased accuracy is not an inevitable or natural consequence of technical change, but rather the product of a complex process of conflict and cooperation between various social actors, such as technologists, laboratories and corporations, and political and military leaders. The book provides a good antidote to technical and political determinisms, coupled with accessible explanations of relevant technical concepts, which are crucial for understanding how seemingly small "technicalities" become focal points in political disputes over visions of the future of certain technologies.
Rated EU Constitutional Law: An Introduction 6/10
Rated The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri 6/10
Rated How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things 10/10
Affordances are frequently mentioned in the design and STS literatures. There is no consensus about the content of this term, even though there are multiple attempts to theorise it. The author proposes shifting the focus from "what are the affordances?" to how artefacts afford and under what circumstances, and examines approaches for implementing this vision.<br/><br/>The author attempts to make sense of the current mess, providing a coherent account that attends to the political and social contexts in which technologies operate. In addition, the text presents useful techniques for deploying the concept. Curiously, this successful approach shows the limits of "affordance" as a concept: it allows us to understand modes of interaction with technological artefacts, but even a formulation as elegant as the one presented in this book is still centred on individual artefacts (such as apps, devices, or even platforms). As such, recent attempts to take affordances beyond their use case as a design tool seem misguided. This, of course, is not a problem with the book, which does an excellent job of showing how affordances can be a powerful tool for critical design and engagement with designed artefacts.<br/>