Böcker i Think Media: Egs Media Philosophy-serien

What do you fear about the future? Is it robots? Is it our inability to keep up with emerging technologies? Within a few decades, we could see technological changes never before witnessed-ageless societies, software-based immortal humans, cybernetic organisms, and means of transport at lightning speed. Can we coexist with machines that will be smarter, faster, and wiser than humans? Will we blend with technology, or will a new dimension of "humans" emerge? What are the implications of human intervention in evolution, and can we do it responsibly? Ultimately, should ethics play a role? If yes, how? Ethics must keep up with the exponential progress of technology. Ethics should leapfrog and facilitate public debates, not only among rulers but also among influential contemporary thinkers, philosophers, scientists, engineers, and prominent science fiction authors. Students should also be empowered to reflect before creating new disruptive innovations. We don't want to slow down progress; we want to befriend it. This coming decade will be the most pioneering decade in history, and exponential technologies will lead to exponential innovation. We should strive to take this journey, conscious of the risks we are facing, and raise a call to action for openly discussing the social repercussions these technologies could have if left only to their "makers"-a call to action in pursuit of exponential ethics.

Long the province of connoisseurs, collectors, hipsters, and eccentrics, the music and art of the margins has begun to find its way into the mainstream. Kurt Cobain took to wearing Daniel Johnston t-shirts before his death; Sufjan Stevens organized a concept album based on the work of Royal Robertson; an illustration by Henry Darger recently sold at auction for more than half a million dollars; The Shaggs' story was turned into a Broadway play. But aside from the ways in which the boundaries of the artworld, music criticism, and even popular taste are being redrawn, it is becoming increasingly clear that the creations of artists and musicians working on the margins may be invested with a particular kind of philosophical significance as well. American Idiots is neither a book of traditional art or music criticism nor an encomiastic work written from the uncritical perspective of a fan. Rather, it argues that outsider art and music pose significant philosophical problems concerning the nature and meaning of incompetence in the arts. It argues specifically that particular tokens of incompetent outsider art may be regarded as staging important aesthetic and ethical problems with regard to the phenomenon of responsibility. Drawing upon figures such as Heidegger, Levinas, and Simon Critchley, American Idiots examines the work of prominent outsider artists and musicians/composers, exploring how in each case their work is invested with a philosophical significance that is tied directly to its deficiencies and shortcomings. In each instance the incompetence on display provides us with key clues regarding the phenomenological structure of obligation and answerability.