ENGR 101/HUM 200Technology and Society

October 5, 2005

Agenda

• Questions from yesterday

• “Make It Better” assignment

• Your topic preferences/constraints (turn in index card at end of class)

• Speculative Fiction (aka sci-fi!), Possible Futures, and the People Who Build Stuff

“Make It Better”

• If you want to arrange yourselves into a group, please do so. Write group member names down on card and turn in today.

• Otherwise, write down up to three general subjects/technologies in which you are interested AND any schedule constraints you may have (i.e. can’t meet after 5 pm any day) and turn in today.

Why Sci-Fi?

• Themes from The Diamond Age– Transportation (pedomotive, blades)– Energy (The Feed)– Information dissemination (electronic media;

ractives, books!)– Social structures (claves)

Why Sci-Fi?

• Themes from The Diamond Age– Transportation (pedomotive, blades)– Energy (The Feed)– Information dissemination (electronic media;

ractives, books!)– Social structures (claves)

Why Not Sci-Fi?

• Themes from “The Machine Stops”– Transportation– Energy (power plant in France; centralized

and distant)– Information Dissemination (lectures, music,

The Book)– Social structures (mediated interaction,

erasure of family structures, economics, individual choice)

“The Machine Stops”

• http://www.tcnj.edu/~casa3/machine_index.html

Possible Futures

• Some predictions have been a little better than others

Visionary Transportation

• Why don’t we have flying cars? We were promised flying cars!

Transportation in The Diamond Age

• Blades

• Pedomotive

• Airships

Robotics

• And robots! We were promised robots!

And Interplanetary Politics…

And What About Intergalactic Travel?

Sci-Fi As Snapshot of Culture

Next class

• Read “The Engineering Disciplines” (short)

• Read Donald Norman, from The Design of Everyday Things (not short, but interesting!)

• Assignment into “Make It Better” groups