Book by Francesca Mazzi and Luciano Floridi: “Artificial intelligence (AI) as a general-purpose technology has great potential for advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the AI×SDGs phenomenon is still in its infancy in terms of diffusion, analysis, and empirical evidence. Moreover, a scalable adoption of AI solutions to advance the achievement of the SDGs requires private and public actors to engage in coordinated actions that have been analysed only partially so far. This volume provides the first overview of the AI×SDGs phenomenon and its related challenges and opportunities. The first part of the book adopts a programmatic approach, discussing AI×SDGs at a theoretical level and from the perspectives of different stakeholders. The second part illustrates existing projects and potential new applications…(More)”.
Challenge-Based Learning, Research, and Innovation
Book by Arturo Molina and Rajagopal: “Challenge-based research focuses on addressing societal and environmental problems. One way of doing so is by transforming existing businesses to profitable ventures through co-creation and co-evolution. Drawing on the resource-based view, this book discusses how social challenges can be linked with the industrial value-chain through collaborative research, knowledge sharing, and transfer of technology to deliver value.
The work is divided into three sections: Part 1 discusses social challenges, triple bottom line, and entrepreneurship as drivers for research, learning, and innovation while Part 2 links challenge-based research to social and industrial development in emerging markets. The final section considers research-based innovation and the role of technology, with the final chapter bridging concepts and practices to shape the future of society and industry. The authors present the RISE paradigm, which integrates people (society), planet (sustainability), and profit (industry and business) as critical constructs for socio-economic and regional development.
Arguing that the converging of society and industry is essential for the business ecosystem to stay competitive in the marketplace, this book analyzes possible approaches to linking challenge-based research with social and industrial innovations in the context of sectoral challenges like food production, housing, energy, biotechnology, and sustainability. It will serve as a valuable resource to researchers interested in topics such as social challenges, innovation, technology, sustainability, and society-industry linkage…(More)”.
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Book review by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn: “Whether in cataclysmic losses, trials and tribulations, or just everyday disappointments, life offers opportunities for it to fall short and for us to fall short. Isn’t it bad enough that we fail so often, and fall so hard, with such devastating consequences? When it comes to failure of whatever stripe, can’t we just follow in the footsteps of the stoic Captain Call and “ride off from it”?
The philosopher Costică Brădățan, who is also Los Angeles Review of Books religion and comparative studies editor, answers with an unequivocal no. Instead, he asks us to hold our horses and embrace failures of all kinds, from mere shortcomings to death. And in In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, he devotes his considerable powers of observation to the distinct potential of the acceptance of failure to liberate.
The book begins with a moment of panic in an imagined scenario in which a plane engine has caught fire and passengers face the possibility of their imminent demise. In this case, all are fine after a safe landing, but such scares, according to Brădățan, make us realize that our life is just a brief moment between “two instantiations of nothingness”: “Nothing first—dense, impenetrable nothingness. Then a flickering. Then nothing again, endlessly.” His premise is that the reality of death and the individual human’s smallness in relation to space and time—“We are next to nothing, in fact”—lies behind most of our endeavors, from religion to art, which “seek to make this unbearable fact a little more bearable.” Yet many such endeavors only obscure the fundamental reality of things. Instead, Brădățan calls for an “eyes-wide-open approach” that can remove us from our immediate surroundings and allow for the contemplation needed to transform this reality. Far from being an occasional exception, failure is an inherent part of human life. He suggests that direct confrontation with failures large and small can provide a “failure-based therapy” to help us handle this fact…(More)”.
The Myth of Objective Data
Article by Melanie Feinberg: “The notion that human judgment pollutes scientific attempts to understand natural phenomena as they really are may seem like a stable and uncontroversial value. However, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have established, objectivity is a fairly recent historical development.
In Daston and Galison’s account, which focuses on scientific visualization, objectivity arose in the 19th century, congruent with the development of photography. Before photography, scientific illustration attempted to portray an ideal exemplar rather than an actually existing specimen. In other words, instead of drawing a realistic portrait of an individual fruit fly — which has unique, idiosyncratic characteristics — an 18th-century scientific illustrator drew an ideal fruit fly. This ideal representation would better portray average fruit fly characteristics, even as no actual fruit fly is ever perfectly average.
With the advent of photography, drawings of ideal types began to lose favor. The machinic eye of the lens was seen as enabling nature to speak for itself, providing access to a truer, more objective reality than the human eye of the illustrator. Daston and Galison emphasize, however, that this initial confidence in the pure eye of the machine was swiftly undermined. Scientists soon realized that photographic devices introduce their own distortions into the images that they produce, and that no eye provides an unmediated view onto nature. From the perspective of scientific visualization, the idea that machines allow us to see true has long been outmoded. In everyday discourse, however, there is a continuing tendency to characterize the objective as that which speaks for itself without the interference of human perception, interpretation, judgment, and so on.
This everyday definition of objectivity particularly affects our understanding of data collection. If in our daily lives we tend to overlook the diverse, situationally textured sense-making actions that information seekers, conversation listeners, and other recipients of communicative acts perform to make automated information systems function, we are even less likely to acknowledge and value the interpretive work of data collectors, even as these actions create the conditions of possibility upon which data analysis can operate…(More)”.
Networks: An Economics Approach
Book by Sanjeev Goyal: “Networks are everywhere: the infrastructure that brings water into our homes, the social networks made up of our friends and families, the supply chains connecting cities, people, and goods. These interconnections contain economic trade-offs: for example, should an airline operate direct flights between cities or route all its flights through a hub? Viewing networks through an economics lens, this textbook considers the costs and benefits that govern their formation and functioning.
Networks are central to an understanding of the production, consumption, and information that lie at the heart of economic activity. Sanjeev Goyal provides advanced undergraduate and graduate students with an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the economics research on networks of the past twenty-five years. Each chapter introduces a theoretical model illustrated with the help of case studies and formal proofs. After introducing the theoretical concepts, Goyal examines economic networks, including infrastructure, security, market power, and financial networks. He then covers social networks, with chapters on coordinating activity, communication and learning, information networks, epidemics, and impersonal markets. Finally, Goyal locates social and economic networks in a broader context covering networked markets, economic development, trust, and group networks in their relation to markets and the state…(More)”.
Innovating Democracy? The Means and Ends of Citizen Participation in Latin America
Book by Thamy Pogrebinschi: “Since democratization, Latin America has experienced a surge in new forms of citizen participation. Yet there is still little comparative knowledge on these so-called democratic innovations. This Element seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on a new dataset with 3,744 cases from 18 countries between 1990 and 2020, it presents the first large-N cross-country study of democratic innovations to date. It also introduces a typology of twenty kinds of democratic innovations, which are based on four means of participation, namely deliberation, citizen representation, digital engagement, and direct voting. Adopting a pragmatist, problem-driven approach, this Element claims that democratic innovations seek to enhance democracy by addressing public problems through combinations of those four means of participation in pursuit of one or more of five ends of innovations, namely accountability, responsiveness, rule of law, social equality, and political inclusion…(More)”.
Think Bigger: How to Innovate
Book by Sheena Iyengar: “…answers a timeless question with enormous implications for problems of all kinds across the world: “How can I get my best ideas?”
Iyengar provides essential tools to spark creative thinking and help us make our most meaningful choices. She draws from recent advances in neuro- and cognitive sciences to give readers a set of practical steps for coming up with powerful new ideas. Think Bigger offers an innovative evidence-backed method for generating big ideas that Iyengar and her team of researchers developed and refined over the last decade.
For anyone looking to innovate, the black box of creativity is a mystery no longer. Think Bigger upends the myth that big ideas are reserved for a select few. By using this method as a guide to creative thinking, anybody can produce revolutionary ideas…(More)”.
Design for a Better World
Book by Don Norman: “The world is a mess. Our dire predicament, from collapsing social structures to the climate crisis, has been millennia in the making and can be traced back to the erroneous belief that the earth’s resources are infinite. The key to change, says Don Norman, is human behavior, covered in the book’s three major themes: meaning, sustainability, and humanity-centeredness. Emphasize quality of life, not monetary rewards; restructure how we live to better protect the environment; and focus on all of humanity. Design for a Better World presents an eye-opening diagnosis of where we’ve gone wrong and a clear prescription for making things better.
Norman proposes a new way of thinking, one that recognizes our place in a complex global system where even simple behaviors affect the entire world. He identifies the economic metrics that contribute to the harmful effects of commerce and manufacturing and proposes a recalibration of what we consider important in life. His experience as both a scientist and business executive gives him the perspective to show how to make these changes while maintaining a thriving economy. Let the change begin with this book before it’s too late…(More)”
Innovation in Real Places
Book by Dan Breznitz: “Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the early years of the information age, we’ve been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must create good education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism.
But are there other models that don’t rely on a flourishing high-tech industry? In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation. They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere. Breznitz proposes that communities instead focus on where they fit in the four stages in the global production process. Some are at the highest end, and that is where the Clevelands, Sheffields, and Baltimores are being pushed toward. But that is bad advice. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. As he stresses, all localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it. Leaders might think the answer lies in high-tech or high-end manufacturing, but more often than not, they’re wrong. Innovation in Real Places is an essential corrective to a mythology of innovation and growth that too many places have bought into in recent years. Best of all, it has the potential to prod local leaders into pursuing realistic and regionally appropriate models for growth and innovation…(More)”.
AI Ethics
Textbook by Paula Boddington: “This book introduces readers to critical ethical concerns in the development and use of artificial intelligence. Offering clear and accessible information on central concepts and debates in AI ethics, it explores how related problems are now forcing us to address fundamental, age-old questions about human life, value, and meaning. In addition, the book shows how foundational and theoretical issues relate to concrete controversies, with an emphasis on understanding how ethical questions play out in practice.
All topics are explored in depth, with clear explanations of relevant debates in ethics and philosophy, drawing on both historical and current sources. Questions in AI ethics are explored in the context of related issues in technology, regulation, society, religion, and culture, to help readers gain a nuanced understanding of the scope of AI ethics within broader debates and concerns…(More)”