Philosophy Of Technology Book

Here we have yet another introduction into the field of Science and Technology Studies. The author, as the title states, is a philosopher, and somewhat uninterested in sociological insights into the field. As such, while his discussions or introductions of philosophers and traditions is generally decent, a lot of more recent insights are missing in the book.
The book seems to be aimed at beginning undergraduate students, presuming little to no background knowledge on the part of the student. (Although his discussion can at times be quite subtle, so readers may well get the feeling they're missing something.)
Dusek starts out with a historical introduction of the field, and how philosophers eventually became aware of the fact that science nor technology are given, intuitive, or automatically/magically found, developed, etc., and that the course of history is actually quite dependent on individual, political and cultural quirks. For instance, an apparently useful technology (the car) is only really useful if you've already got a road network, and fuel pumps. As such, technology is something that exists, and is useful in, specific contexts.
As was noted halfway during the past century, science is not the "mirror of nature", nor is technology (somehow) "Applied science". Moreoever, technology is often necessary for scientific discovery, making it rather hard to claim that they are independent, or that science is primary. Scientists don't neutrally decide between theories, nor do they discard theories as soon as a problem is noticed. Similarly, the question of who does the science plays a large role in what is developed, and science is often used to justify the viewing as inferior, or suppressing of women or alien cultures.
Also, scientific and technological innovations are not always beneficial, and it has been argued that the negative effects of these improvements should not be discarded as "unwanted side-effects", as they are side-effects just as much as the positive effects are. This insight will give rise to the Environmental movements of the 20th century, and the critiques leveled against the unchecked belief in progress have come in many guises. One of the most curious (and valid) critiques is that we only acknowledge nature as being worthwhile insofar as we acknowledge its usefulness; nature is no longer viewed as intrinsically valuable, as we look at it through the eyes of the tool-maker.
The "solutions" presented by these authors are not particularly helpful, though, and the larger problem is that human (brain size) evolution is inextricably linked with increased dependence on tools, and the development of language. So the question becomes whether we could even be called human if we wouldn't use tools any more. Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and Karl Marx have pointed towards this fact in different ways, suggesting that, while technology and economic development of society can be good and useful, the trend has resulted in a society in which people do fairly little creative work any more, especially not work for which they can claim responsibility or authorship, and this may well lead to a decrease of the amount of enjoyment experienced by most humans.
Heidegger has pointed out that the first relationship in which we stand to tools is an unreflective one of "use", where we view, say, a hammer as an extension of our body and use it as such until it breaks. Only at this point will we critically examine it to see how it works; and to him this indicates that technology is prior to science.

While the treatment on the whole is certainly informative, it contains a number of redundant passages, factual errors or passages that are unnecessarily unclear (e.g., when discussing Cyril Burt), and it seems to leave out a few relevant details in its discussion of the "Science Wars".
The author more than once gets bogged down in details (e.g., in his discussion surrounding risk/benefit analysis) that could've easily been avoided (by stating that "risk determination is of course dependent on methodological issues, and politicians often get to decide who writes the methodological section of the analysis, which means that the definition of risk, and how to measure it, is to some extent dependent upon whether or not critical voices have political access"), and his choice of form seems to force him to discuss developments in such a way that it is easy to lose track of which traditions are criticized and for what reason, as his examples are often fairly specific, while the critiques that have been levelled at them by later writers are formulated in a fairly general way by Dusek.
While the different chapters treat the various sub-fields, within chapters the information is ordered historically, and this (because of the lack of an obvious 'thread') can make it hard to guess why subsequent sections are presented when they are, which resulted in confusion on my part on a number of occasions (esp. where he discusses Neo-Malthusianism). The points are often made in a fairly roundabout way, in which the reader apparently has to decide when an argument is finished or a point is made, and this annoyed me to no end on multiple occasions.
The most problematic point, however, (which becomes clear when you scan the included bibliography) seems to be that the author is not particularly interested in the developments of recent years. While the book is from 2006, most of the books in the bibliography were written well before the year 2000. And considering how lively the field is, that seems very odd to me. As such, while the philosophical parts are at times fairly interesting, and there is definitely quite a bit of information here, I would recommend trying to find another book if you are also interested in being introduced in what is said about the interaction between man, technology and society, and how they influence each other.