What does the future hold? Designer babies, 24/7 surveillance, artificial life?
These are the sort of questions being asked in a new course open to all Carleton University students this fall entitled “Technology, Nature, Power” (PSCI 1500). The course will examine specific technologies, including those that helped to define modernity—such as the printing press, firearms, chemical fertilizers, and automobiles—and those that are shaping the future: the internet, artificial intelligence, and bio-science.
The course will consider how technological trajectories have influenced, and been influenced by, political experiences and institutions, such as bureaucracy, human rights, inequality, and globalization. It will link all of this to the dramatic remoulding of our planet and the altering of the human experience of nature.
“The course will allow us to explore the interdependence among technology, nature and power,” explains Professor James Meadowcroft, who is cross-appointed to the School of Public Policy and Administration and the Department of Political Science. “We’ve been transforming nature for thousands of years, but are we reaching the limit?”
Students interested in the course can find it listed under PSCI 1500 in the undergraduate calendar. It is open to students from across the university and can be taken as a 1000 level elective.
