Slowing the pace of technological change?

In response to the risks of the future it appears we are faced with a choice: to ‘slow down’ and so resist new technological possibilities for danger, or to ‘speed up’ and welcome or even exacerbate such risks. Yet, it might actually be hard to tell the difference. Resistance and exacerbation may blur or meld and so questions of resistance, disconnection, and dystopia become harder to answer than we imagine. I explore these problems through Heidegger's analysis of technology as site of danger and saving, and Ernst Junger's melding of technology and nature. I argue contemporary accelerationism inherits these forms of melding and while attempting to re-purpose technology can succumb to its reification.

Sociology Lens, 2015

At the end of last week, Ellen MacArthur’s second Disruptive Innovation Festival came to a close, having dedicated the first three weeks of November “to exploring the ideas and innovations which are shaping our changing economy, connecting participants directly with the world’s most forward-looking start-ups, entrepreneurs, designers, thought-leaders and policymakers via a unique collaborative online format.” While the Festival was in full swing (although not apparently in response to it), Lee Vinson, a Science & Technology Studies professor at Stevens Institute of Technology (‘The Innovation University®’) published his wonderful, searing attack on innovation–babble, ‘95 Theses on Innovation.’ Innovation, argues Vinson, is the central ideology of our age. The innovation ideology presents technological change as the “key to both economic growth and quality of life,” and reaches its most pernicious form in Clayton Christensen’s ‘disruptive innovation’ concept, the apparent inspiration for MacArthur’s Festival.

Mother Pelican -- A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability, 2024

Every few years, inexorably, a new buzzword captures the attention and imagination of top managers and eminent scholars alike, when not those of major policymakers, influential media outlets, marketing and PR professionals, and all stripes and varieties of lower cadres within public as much as corporate bureaucracies. Every few years, a fortiori, a growing and rather dismal score of old buzzwords comes to be neglected more-and-more callously by the same fickle audiences, i.e., until the increasingly peripheral lexical specimens are transformed into prosaic descriptors, vague recollections, embarrassing blasts-from-the past, or even cultural fossils from a bygone business era, which can be of interest only to economic historians. Catchy terms, glamorous phrases, and attendant management and organisational styles have been rolling in and out of the scene for decades, if not even centuries. Think, for instance, of mantra-like formulations such as "the knowledge economy," "total quality management," "core competency," "co-opetition," "greed is good," "emotional intelligence," "management by objectives," "Asian/Celtic/Nordic Tiger," "big data," or "disruption." Nowadays, "innovation" seems to be enjoying its rhetorico-managerial and institutional heyday. Enjoy it while it lasts. (https://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv20n12page24.html)

Constellations, 2003

In 1999, James Gleick, exploring everyday life in contemporary American society, noted the "acceleration of just about everything": love, life, speech, politics, work, TV, leisure, etc. 1 With this observation he certainly is not alone. In popular as well as scientific discourse about the current evolution of Western societies, acceleration figures as the single most striking and important feature. 2 But although there is a noticeable increase in the discourse about acceleration and the shortage of time in recent years, the feeling that history, culture, society, or even 'time itself' in some strange way accelerates is not new at all; it rather seems to be a constitutive trait of modernity as such. As historians like Reinhart Koselleck have persuasively argued, the general sense of a "speed-up" has accompanied modern society at least since the middle of the eighteenth century. 3 And indeed, as many have observed and empirical evidence clearly suggests, the history of modernity seems to be characterized by a wide-ranging speed-up of all kinds of technological, economic, social, and cultural processes and by a picking up of the general pace of life. In terms of its structural and cultural impact on modern society, this change in the temporal structures and patterns of modernity appears to be just as pervasive as the impact of comparable processes of individualization or rationalization. Just as with the latter, it seems, social acceleration is not a steady process but evolves in waves (most often brought about by new technologies or forms of socio-economic organization), with each new wave meeting considerable resistance as well as partial reversals. Most often, a wave of acceleration is followed by a rise in the 'discourse of acceleration,' in which cries for deceleration in the name of human needs and values are voiced but eventually die down. 4 However, contrary to the other constitutive features of the modernization process -individualization, rationalization, (functional and structural) differentiation, and the instrumental domestication of nature -which have all been the object of extensive analysis, the concept of acceleration still lacks a clear and workable definition and a systematic sociological analysis. Within systematic theories of modernity or modernization, acceleration is virtually absent, with the notable exception of Paul Virilio's 'dromological' approach to history, which, alas, hardly amounts to a 'theory.' This surprising absence in the face of the

2019

Organizations often adopt, implement and use digital technologies to speed up work and save time. However, the relationship between time and technology is complex and organizations do not always realize the acceleration potential of a technology, nor do they achieve the timesavings that designers intended the technology to bring about. In fact, many organizations and organizational actors feel more pressed for time than ever before despite the use of a multitude of digital technologies. To account for this, we draw on literature about the concept of time and time-driven change combined with theory about acceleration and deceleration mechanisms to develop a nuanced vocabulary and conceptual framework, consisting of eight parameters, for understanding how digital technology influences the pace of work, in general and in a particular organization. Key insights are that digital technologies are more likely to increase the pace of work than to save time and free up human resources. Yet, due to unintended consequences of acceleration as well as natural and intended limits to speed, digital technologies might speed up some aspects of work, while decreasing others and/or have little overall effect.

idea has moved to an ecosystem. We talk now about 'the extended enterprise', with a collaborative power, acting from ideation to partners dynamics. Meaning becomes central to innovation, as well as handling collaborative dynamics, and uniting external with internal. " Therefore, I asked him: What new forms of innovation are you currently observing? Michel Saloff-Coste: We are in a period of deep change, but paradoxically, at the same time, we seem to have forgotten all our capacity for in-depth understanding of the social and business revolution we are undergoing. In the face of rapid modifications, we often have a tendency to focus on the short-term, and thereby get ourselves stuck in the quicksand of fashions. While many roads of thought are opened by people trying to retain a detached attitude regarding the dimension of ever more tumultuous phenomena, two ways of reading the situation intersect. There is the deeper, global one involving the evolution of societies and human activities. Then there is the one entailing evolution of businesses, which gives the appearance of being more concrete in a world that has become essentially commercial. At a time when companies are collapsing while others are witnessing performances never seen throughout the entire industrial era, will we not have to reverse the reflexes that we have built up over hundreds of years?

2017

he post-World War II period of unprecedented growth and prosperity has brought home lessons, many of which are relevant today and likely will be in the future. Several things stand out a ter studying the growth patterns and challenges in a wide range of developed and developing countries for the past 15 years. e global economy has been a key enabler of growth, war recovery and, in particular, progress in developing countries. No one foresaw the scope of the potential for poverty and reduction and prosperity that actually occurred, when the architecture was put in place. But, in the last few decades, that architecture has had di culty keeping up with the realities. Previously small and relatively poor countries are now major players. Digital technology has vastly expanded the ability to manage complexity in global supply chains at low cost. Trade data, built on the assumption that something is produced in country A and consumed in country B, has very little to do with the reality in many sectors. And, perhaps most importantly, trade in services (broadly de ned to include intangibles and intellectual property [IP]), initially a tiny fraction of global trade, may become the dominant part in the future. While there are common ingredients across countries in successful growth recipes, there are also striking di erences. Local conditions, history, governance and path dependence make each case to some extent idiosyncratic. Unfortunately, this valid proposition is sometimes taken as a rationale for not learning from the vast array of experience of other countries. A subset of countries endowed with substantial natural resource wealth have struggled -to varying degrees of success -with the complex challenge of exploiting that wealth for the bene t of their citizens while creating a broad and diverse range of employment opportunities. vii 1 Gordon ( ) situates recent developments in information and communications technology in the larger cycle of economic progress and nds they do not match up to the impacts of ve previous great inventions -electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine and modern communication. Works Cited

New technologies guarantee more speed and less chores in all life activities. Despite this, everyone, everywhere, seemed to be busier. The purpose of this study is to find how much these problems as the cause of perception or the distribution of work. Technology is not the only reason for the "shortage" of time, it is just the factor that triggered the acceleration phenomenon of the modern world. A table of all factors influencing the acceleration will be described in the following

IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, 2020

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 1996

I have, alas, studied philosophy, Jurisprudence, and medicine, too, And, worst of all, theology With keen endeavor, through and through-And here I am, for all my lore, The wretched fool I was before. Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot, For ten years almost I confute And up and down, wherever it goes, I drag my students by the nose-And see that for all our science and art We can know nothing. Johann Wolfgang yon Goethe, Faust, Part I The Mismatch: View 1-The Systems Thinkers vs. the People Jack D. Cowan, the mathematical biologist from the University of Chicago who is a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, has suggested that the major discovery to date from this much-hyped Institute has been that "it's very hard to do science on complex systems" [1A]. The optimistic claims of some of its renowned members suggest that "complexity science" is developing a theory of complex adaptive systems that will be able to deal with systems such as mental illness, corporation management, the U.S. government, entire economies, and even biological evolution. This confidence seems like a case of d~ja vu: previous "theories of almost everything" include cybernetics, information theory, catastrophe theory, artificial life, and chaos theory. They have indeed proven valuable in gaining new insights about the behavior of complex systems. Examples are