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Many today believe the world has entered the Third Industrial Age, during which technological improvements in robotics and automation will boost productivity and efficiency, implying significant gains for companies. These advancements have three biases: they tend to be capital-intensive (favoring those with financial resources), skill-intensive (favoring those with a high level of technical proficiency), and labor saving (reducing the total number of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs). The pundits speculate the economic impact on the job market will be significant and will present serious social and political challenges for society in growing inequality and the provision of safety nets to mitigate the consequences of disruptive technological progress. History has shown capitalist markets and business enterprises are incredibly efficient at turning technological advances into profitable businesses and providing incentives to discover new technologies. They succeed because companies that compete successfully with each other to provide benefits for clients are rewarded handsomely.

This chapter discusses some economic, moral, and social issues that technology, IT, and especially cloud computing bring up. Many of these issues are intractable, and this chapter’s objective is to inform you of the role that technology is playing in shaping our society and world. In particular, the following topics are outlined: tool for democracy; the rich-poor gap; personal information and security; productivity; business scalability.

During the 1954 recession, tens of thousands of Detroit autoworkers experienced prolonged layoffs and relied on unemployment pay and secondary jobs. Industry officials and civic leaders denied that there was a recession, blamed any problems on negative thinking, and tried to convince the public that volatility in the auto industry was normal and of no great concern. Many Detroiters blamed working women and southern white migrants for high unemployment. Automation contributed to joblessness, while some UAW skilled workers benefited from building the new machinery. The demise of independent automakers and local auto suppliers resulted in thousands of additional lost jobs. While many autoworkers returned to work late in the year, most remained concerned about how long the upswing would last.

Powerful claims are being made about revolution in the transport sector, with digital technology seen as underpinning a new ‘ecosystem’ of more efficient, more pleasant and less environmentally-damaging mobility. The chapter examines how far such claims are based on evidence, and the contextual conditions that would be necessary for such benefits to be realised. The four key technological shifts identified as part of the transition are interrogated: automation, electrification, digitally-enabled mobility, and collaborative-shared mobility. The benefits of ‘connected autonomous vehicles’ are found to be highly uncertain, in terms of extent and evolution, whereas electrification is confirmed as a necessary but not sufficient condition for more sustainable mobility. Digitally-enabled mobility is technically quite feasible, but continues to face considerable regulatory, institutional and financial barriers. Collective mobility is identified as the development which can potentially have the greatest impact on the sustainability of mobility, but its core claim, that middle-income citizens will choose to share small vehicles to achieve modest cost savings, is least supported by evidence. We conclude that the traditional concerns of transport planning, such as congestion and inequality of access, will likely be persistent features of the new regime.

This chapter addresses the following questions: Why cloud computing? What is so special about cloud computing? How will it affect you, your work, and our society? Just as Microsoft Windows became ubiquitous at home and work, and changed our lives, cloud computing represents a paradigm shift. This is because cloud computing is an enabling technology that bypasses many functions provided by your computer, the software installedon it, your workplace’s IT and finance departments, businesses and government departments. Cloud computing’s paradigm shift is considered from three different viewpoints: (1) how it should affect you socially and personally, (2) how it will affect you in your work, and (3) how it will affect businesses.The personal paradigm shift viewpoint is extended using a novel concept: a cloud of things and services. Such a cloud serves an internet-of-things device and, by the application of service automation, it further provides related services on a personal basis. The combination of a cloud of things and a process-as-a-service deployment model culminates in a Cloud of Things and Services (COTS).

Stack architectures are designed to be remade. Each modular layer can contain any technology able to communicate with the layer above and below it. This chapter examines not the Stack-we-have but the Stack-to-come. It considers possible futures for each of the six layers, recognizing both the potential and the risks that each may bring. As each layer is considered in relation to its own potential accidents, as The Stack as a whole is a composite accident. Some scenarios suggest further ecological calamity, Cloud Feudalism, and revitalized political theological fundamentalisms. Others may suggest instead robust ecological polities, rationalized algorithmic governance, and a vibrant proliferation of human and non-human agents. Whether the latter wins out over the former depends on how well we cope with the Copernican traumas of planetary-scale computation.

This chapter investigates the history of the ubiquitous yet banal Automated Teller Machine, or ATM. There is no single inventor of the ATM. Rather, it emerged through innovation around the globe and across the industry. In order to build a successful ATM system, engineers and bankers had to overcome challenges that ranged from security and authorization to weather-proofing electronics. This chapter surveys some of those developments. Increasingly, ATMs are being designed to offer a variety of services beyond dispensing cash. In the future, the ATM may prove to an important site of automated retail banking and consumer financial services.

This chapter discusses the sixth and top layer in The Stack, the User layer. It describes how Users initiate chains of interaction up and down layers, from Interface to Earth and back again. It sees the “user” as a contemporary mediated image of the self, one that is often reduced to narrow and utilitarian frames, but also open to a diverse variety of possible human and non-human agencies. The user position can both over-individuate that agent’s sense of self and also radically multiply it. For example, data generated by Users and producing traces and shadows of their worldly transactions, initially creates a high-resolution portrait of a single user (for example as seen in the Quantified Self movement) but as overlapping external data streams are introduced, the coherency the user’s subjectivity is dissolved by the overdetermination by external relations and forces. Any durable politics of the User must understand this dynamic of platform sovereignty.

The afterward to Life by Algorithms assesses the implications of a world of ubiquitous roboprocesses, or algorithmic ordering systems. In addition to their lack of transparency, accountability, and consent, and their reliance on secrecy, algorithmically based systems of quantification, ordering and automation have a massive reach and offer few opportunities for contestation. Algorithms fuel the spreading security state of constant surveillance and the neoliberal drive toward profitability. The consequences of roboprocesses include zombification, the transformation of citizen-subjects into consumer-subjects, the proliferation of secrecy that underwrites the rise of new institutions of wealth and power, expanding inequality, and the transformation of selfhood through algorithmic self-monitoring. The chapter concludes with some examples of new efforts toward algorithmic accountability.

This chapter considers the challenges that the automation of trading poses to the regulation of capital markets. It first discusses recent advances in information technology with respect to order execution, generation and routing, as well as the rise of high-frequency trading and other algorithmic trading strategies. It then considers their consequences for the efficiency, liquidity, and integrity of capital markets, as well as their impact on the regulation of and fair access to various information flows. The chapter then critiques policy proposals for regulating automation that aim to suppress deleterious trading (such as financial transaction taxes) or limit its negative externalities. The chapter ends with an assessment of how policy makers might adapt to automation through policies that promote fair disclosure and flexible access to information flows.

This chapter introduces many of the main themes and ideas for the rest of the book, especially the role of cinema in the emergence of visual technology’s specific ascendancy during the twentieth century, and cinema’s reflexive engagement with visual culture and the various scopic regimes and tech- nologies that constitute it. The chapter includes discussions of autotechnological education, the changing status of the image, and early animation while addressing several theorists central to the book and contextualizing it within extant work on cinematic comedy. The material (technological, exis- tential, sensory) and immaterial (ideological, conceptual, systemic) roles played by cinema writ large, and the inevitable but not necessarily predictable disruption of their functioning (the comic), are identified as the main ares of inquiry.

The third chapter inspects both the automation of city making and the geo-political possibilities of architecture itself by first tracing Walmart’s increasingly technologically sophisticated location strategies. Afterwards, it examines what happens to those strategies in practice.

Chapter Seven studies how antagonistic labor-management contract negotiations between the U.S. Postal Service and its two major unions, the National Association of Letter Carriers and the American Postal Workers Union, almost ended with a called strike by those unions in the first year of President Ronald Reagan’s administration (1981-1989). This strike was averted by an arbitration mechanism built into the PRA. Union solidarity was embodied in the Joint Bargaining Committee. This chapter also charts the effects of automation on the workforce from the 1970s through the early 2000s.

The software industry really came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a time of technological transformation in the workplace. The computer expanded from the backroom to the front office and evolved from simple data processing to integrated information systems. The growth of the independent software vendor led to an important change in software design. User firms began to purchase large, standard or semicustom systems from thirdparty vendors rather than purchasing software with hardware and having most applications software custom designed by an in-house programming staff. This added another dimension to the software design process: Software became the product of at least two organizations (the vendor and one or more user firms) and its design and production became mediated by the market. The organizational simplicity of software design occurring within one organization, as difficult a process as that may be, became relatively more complex organizationally. This chapter examines one part of the process of technology design and use: the activities internal to the software design firm. It concentrates on the structure and dynamics of the design process rather than on specific design decisions. The findings presented in this chapter are based on a survey of vendor firms and may represent a different perspective than findings on software developed within a user firm. By focusing on dynamics that transcend choices of particular individuals, we show how decisions are shaped and constrained by the structure of the design process itself. The three chapters following this one present case studies that describe specific choices of software features and functions and analyze the impacts of those choices on software users and customers. Taken together, this chapter and the case studies present the dual perspective necessary to appreciate how software is a socially constructed technology. The business applications software industry for mainframes and minicomputers is composed of hardware manufacturers such as IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation, several large vendors, and numbers of small specialty firms.

Drought is the most significant natural phenomenon that affects the agriculture of northern Mexico. The more drought-prone areas in Mexico fall in the northern half of the country, in the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Zacatecas, and Aguascalientes (figure 10.1). The north-central states form part of the Altiplanicie Mexicana and account for 30.7% of the national territory of 1,959,248 km2. This area is characterized by dry and semidry climates (Garcia, 1981) and recurrent drought periods. The climate of Mexico varies from very dry to subhumid. Very dry climate covers 21%, dry climate covers 28%, and temperate subhumid and hot subhumid climates prevail in 21% and 23% of the national territory, respectively. About 20 years ago, almost 75% of Mexico’s agricultural land was rainfed, and only 25% irrigated (Toledo et al., 1985), making the ratio of rainfed to irrigated area equal to 3. However, for the northern states this ratio was 3.5 during the 1990–98 period (table 10.1). Because of higher percentage of rain-fed agriculture, drought is a common phenomenon in this region, which has turned thousands of hectares of land into desert. Though the government has built dams, reservoirs, and other irrigation systems to alleviate drought effects, rain-fed agriculture (or dryland farming) remains the major form of cultivation in Mexico. In Mexico, there is no standard definition for agricultural drought. However, the Comisión Nacional del Agua (CNA; i.e., National Water Commission), which is a federal agency responsible for making water policies, has coined its own definition for drought. This agency determines whether a particular region has been affected by drought, by studying rainfall records collected from the national climatic network. The national climatic network is spread throughout the country and is managed by the Servicio Meteorológico Nacional (SMN; i.e., National Meteorological Services). The CNA determines, for a municipal region, if the rainfall is equal to or less than one standard deviation from the long-term mean over a time period of two or more consecutive months. If it is, then the secretary of state declares drought for the region.