San Antonio College Library

In The Glass Cage, best-selling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure and reveals something we already suspect: shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented.

A revolution is under way. In recent years, Google's autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM's Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies -- with hardware, software, and networks at their core -- will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human. In The Second...

Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history characterized by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs, as sophisticated computers, robotics, telecommunications, and other cutting-edge technologies replace human beings in virtually every sector and industry -- from manufacturing, retail, and financial services, to transportation, agriculture, and government. He suggests that it is time to prepare ourselves and our institutions for a...

The global economy is the leitmotif of the end of the twentieth century. Driven by the logic of modern capitalism, the global economy, a product of the Third Industrial Revolution, is a wondrous free-running system that is reordering the world as it transforms the lives and economic prospects of workers, corporations and nations. Having traveled the globe and talked to factory workers, corporate CEOs, economists and government officials, Greider contends...

Human impacts on the environment are largely driven by economic forces. If a more ecologically sustainable world is to be achieved, significant changes must be made to the current growth- and consumption-dependent economic system. The "Frontier Issues in Economic Thought" series was designed to assist the growing number of economists and others who are responding to the need for new thinking about economics in the face of environmental and social...