Automania

Automaniaexplores the ways in which motor vehicles reshaped how people lived, worked, and enjoyed themselves over the course of the 20th century, and the continuing positive and negative imprint on the design and organization of today's built environment. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, the catalogue showcases ten cars in MoMA's collection: a Jeep (designed 1952), a Citroën DS23 (1973), a Volkswagen Beetle (designed 1938), a Fiat Cinquecento City Car (launched 1957), a Pininfarina Cisitalia 202 GT Car (designed 1946), a Formula 1 Racing Car, (1990), a Porsche 911 coupé (1965), an Airstream Bambi Traveler (1960), E-type Roadster (1966), and a Smart Car (1998). Presented alongside the vehicles are car parts, architectural models, films, photographs, posters, paintings, and sculptures, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's 1898 print L'Automobiliste, Lily Reich's 1930s designs for a tubular-steel car seat, photographs of American car factories (c. 1930-32) by Margaret Bourke-White, Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963) by Andy Warhol, and Jorge Rigamonti's 1966-70 photocollage illustrating a dystopic view of environmental destruction in Venezuela.Organized into six thematic chapters, Automania includes an introductory essay by curator Juliet Kinchin and examines the car as a modern industrial product, transportation innovator, and style icon, as well as the generator of fatalities, traffic-choked environments, and ecological disaster in the oil age. "Cars have reimagined mobility, connecting us across great distances at ever greater speed, but this increased freedom and economic empowerment have come at the expense of tremendous human suffering and environmental damage," says Kinchin.

The twentieth-century American experience with the automobile has much to tell us about the relationship between consumer capitalism and the environment, Tom McCarthy contends. In Auto Mania he presents the first environmental history of the automobile that shows how consumer desire (and manufacturer decisions) created impacts across the product lifecycle--from raw material extraction to manufacturing to consumer use to disposal. From the provocative public antics of young millionaires who owned the first cars early in the twentieth century to the SUV craze of the 1990s, Auto Mania explores developments that touched the environment. Along the way McCarthy examines how Henry Ford’s fetish for waste reduction tempered the environmental impacts of Model T mass production; how Elvis Presley’s widely shared postwar desire for Cadillacs made matters worse; how the 1970s energy crisis hurt small cars; and why baby boomers ignored worries about global warming. McCarthy shows that problems were recognized early. The difficulty was addressing them, a matter less of doing scientific research and educating the public than implementing solutions through America’s market economy and democratic government. Consumer and producer interests have rarely aligned in helpful ways, and automakers and consumers have made powerful opponents of regulation. The result has been a mixed record of environmental reform with troubling prospects for the future.

A look at the world of muscle cars.

4000 A.D. Far off in an unknown galaxy, Pierre Zeyfur is ready to prove himself. Having just obtained his SENTINELS license, he's anxious to sign up for important missions that will help him achieve his ultimate dream: to become the highest ranking SENTINELS. The problem is, he is merely a cassleon, the bottom rung in the ranking system, and there are no missions available to help him move up. So when a fateful encounter with Eva Lyn, the best SENTINELS in the world, offers him the opportunity to be mentored, he agrees wholeheartedly, disregarding any doubts or warnings about the danger ahead. Little does he know the adventures that await him as he impulsively agrees to this partnership. Eva Lyn becomes his teacher, showing him his own strength and abilities, but it soon becomes clear that beneath her pretty face and distinguished title, there's a dark secret she's working hard to keep hidden. Join Pierre as he embarks on the battle of a lifetime. Will he uncover the truth about Eva Lyn? Will he learn to wield The Orbiter, a weapon of unique abilities, and save the galaxy from peril? And does he have the strength to risk all in his quest to find his true destiny?

Introduces earlier built automobiles, who built them, and how we view them today.

The robot population is rising on Earth and other planets. (Mars is inhabited entirely by robots.) As robots slip into more domains of human life--from the operating room to the bedroom--they take on our morally important tasks and decisions, as well as create new risks from psychological to physical. This makes it all the more urgent to study their ethical, legal, and policy impacts. To help the robotics industry and broader society, we need to not only press ahead on a wide range of issues, but also identify new ones emerging as quickly as the field is evolving. For instance, where military robots had received much attention in the past (and are still controversial today), this volume looks toward autonomous cars here as an important case study that cuts across diverse issues, from liability to psychology to trust and more. And because robotics feeds into and is fed by AI, the Internet of Things, and other cognate fields, robot ethics must also reach into those domains, too. Expanding these discussions also means listening to new voices; robot ethics is no longer the concern of a handful of scholars. Experts from different academic disciplines and geographical areas are now playing vital roles in shaping ethical, legal, and policy discussions worldwide. So, for a more complete study, the editors of this volume look beyond the usual suspects for the latest thinking. Many of the views as represented in this cutting-edge volume are provocative--but also what we need to push forward in unfamiliar territory.

This book, first published in 1992, is a unique repository of language use from 1941-91.