Download or read book Artificial Intimacy written by Rob Brooks and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-19 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons, stimulating and sometimes exploiting the ways people make friends, gossip with neighbors, and grow intimate with lovers. Sex robots present the humanoid face of this technological revolution—yet although it is easy to gawk at their uncanniness, more familiar technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are insinuating themselves into human interactions. Digital lovers, virtual friends, and algorithmic matchmakers help us manage our feelings in a world of cognitive overload. Will these machines, fueled by masses of user data and powered by algorithms that learn all the time, transform the quality of human life? Artificial Intimacy offers an innovative perspective on the possibilities of the present and near future. The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider the interaction of new technologies and fundamental human behaviors. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs—and are getting better at what they do. Brooks combines an understanding of core human traits from evolutionary biology with analysis of how cultural, economic, and technological contexts shape the ways people express them. Beyond the technology, he asks what the implications of artificial intimacy will be for how we understand ourselves.
Download or read book Brand Intimacy written by Mario Natarelli and published by Hatherleigh Press. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Patagonia to Apple, Whole Foods to New Balance, we love our favorite products--and, by extension, the companies that provide them. The emotional connections we form with our beloved brands and services are important relationships--relationships that are potentially worth billions. In the fast-paced, constantly-changing world of the modern marketplace, brands must adapt or perish—strategies, methods, and techniques must evolve to remain effective and relevant. Are you using yesterday’s thinking for tomorrow’s challenges? Brand Intimacy details ways to build better marketing through the cultivation of emotional connections between brand and consumer. The book provides lessons for marketers and business leaders alike who are seeking to understand these ultimate brand relationships and the opportunities they represent. Divided into three sections, Brand Intimacy starts with Context and Understanding. This explains today’s marketing landscape, the effects of technology, consumer behaviors and the advancements around decision making. Through research we discovered that people form relationships with brands the same way they develop relationships with other people. This section provides guidance on how to think about complimentary concepts such as loyalty, satisfaction and brand value. We then explore and compare established approaches and methodologies and showcase why intimacy is a compelling new and enhanced opportunity to build your brand or market your business. The second section, Theory and Model reveals and dimensions the brand intimacy model and dissects it into steps to help you better factor it into your marketing approaches or frameworks. Here you will learn the core concepts and components that are essential to build bonds and the role emotion can play to help you achieve greater customer engagement. You can also review the rankings of the best brands in terms of Brand Intimacy. A summary of our annual research reveals the characteristics of best performers, the most intimate industries, and differences based on geography, age, gender and income. By examining the top intimate brands, we reveal and decode the secrets of the bonds they form with their customers. The third section is Methods & Practice, this details the economic benefits and advantages of a strategy that factors Brand Intimacy. Intimate brands are proven to outperform the Fortune 500 and Standards and Poors’ index of brands. Intimate brands create more revenue and profit and last longer. Consumers are also willing to pay more for a brand they are more intimate with. Conversely, we also explore a series of brand failures and lessons learned to help you avoid common pitfalls in brand management. We articulate the steps to build a more intimate brand as well as share a glimpse on the future where software will play a more important role in brand building. The book outlines a proprietary digital platform that we use to help manage and enable intimacy through collaboration, simulators and real-time tracking of emotions. Business and marketing owners face an increasing difficult task to build brands that rise above the clutter, engage more and grow. Brand Intimacy explains how to better measure, build and manage enduring brands. Brands that are built to inspire as well as profit. Written by experienced marketers and backed by extensive research, Brand Intimacy rewrites the rulebook on how to establish and expand your marketing. The book is equal parts theory, research and practice, the result of 7 year journey and a new marketing paradigm for the modern marketer.
Download or read book The Empathy Diaries written by Sherry Turkle and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A beautiful book… an instant classic of the genre.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times • A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by Kirkus • Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Autobiography & Memoir • Winner of the New England Society Book Award in Nonfiction MIT psychologist and bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together, Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Turkle has spent a career composing an intimate ethnography of our digital world; now, marked by insight, humility, and compassion, we have her own. In this vivid and poignant narrative, Turkle ties together her coming-of-age and her pathbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn,Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother's secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father--and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival. Turkle's intellect and curiosity brought her to worlds on the threshold of change. She learned friendship at a Harvard-Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the antiwar movement, she mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and she followed her ambition while fighting for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail--and offers a master class in finding meaning through a life's work.
Download or read book Turned On written by Kate Devlin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Illuminating, witty and written with a wide open mind' Sunday Times The idea of the seductive sex robot is the stuff of myth, legend and science fiction. From the myth of Laodamia in Ancient Greece to twenty-first century shows such as Westworld, robots in human form have captured our imagination, our hopes and our fears. But beyond the fantasies there are real and fundamental questions about our relationship with technology as it moves into the realm of robotics. Turned On explores how the emerging and future development of sexual companion robots might affect us and the society in which we live. It explores the social changes arising from emerging technologies, and our relationships with the machines that someday may care for us and about us. Sex robots are here, and here to stay, and more are coming. Computer scientist and sex-robot expert Kate Devlin is our guide as we seek to understand how this technology is developing. From robots in Greek myth and the fantastical automata of the Middle Ages through to the sentient machines of the future that embody the prominent AI debate, she explores the 'modern' robot versus the robot servants we were promised by twentieth century sci-fi, and delves into the psychological effects of the technology, and issues raised around gender politics, diversity, surveillance and violence. This book answers all the questions you've ever had about sex robots, as well as all the ones you haven't yet thought of.
Download or read book AI Love You written by Yuefang Zhou and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book explores the emerging topics and rapid technological developments of robotics and artificial intelligence through the lens of the evolving role of sex robots, and how they should best be designed to serve human needs. An international panel of authors provides the most up-to-date, evidence-based empirical research on the potential sexual applications of artificial intelligence. Early chapters discuss the objections to sexual activity with robots while also providing a counterargument to each objection. Subsequent chapters present the implications of robot sex as well as the security and data privacy issues associated with sexual interactions with artificial intelligence. The book concludes with a chapter highlighting the importance of a scientific, multidisciplinary approach to the study of human - robot sexuality. Topics featured in this book include: The Sexual Interaction Illusion Model. The personal companion system, Harmony, designed by RealbotixTM. An exposition of the challenges of personal data control and protection when dealing with artificial intelligence. The current and future technological possibilities of projecting three-dimensional holograms. Expert discussion notes from an international workshop on the topic. AI Love You will be of interest to academic researchers in psychology, robotics, ethics, medical science, sociology, gender studies as well as clinicians, policy makers, and the business sector.
Download or read book Out of Touch written by Michelle Drouin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A behavioral scientist explores love, belongingness, and fulfillment, focusing on how modern technology can both help and hinder our need to connect. A Next Big Idea Club nominee. Millions of people around the world are not getting the physical, emotional, and intellectual intimacy they crave. Through the wonders of modern technology, we are connecting with more people more often than ever before, but are these connections what we long for? Pandemic isolation has made us even more alone. In Out of Touch, Professor of Psychology Michelle Drouin investigates what she calls our intimacy famine, exploring love, belongingness, and fulfillment and considering why relationships carried out on technological platforms may leave us starving for physical connection. Drouin puts it this way: when most of our interactions are through social media, we are taking tiny hits of dopamine rather than the huge shots of oxytocin that an intimate in-person relationship would provide. Drouin explains that intimacy is not just sex—although of course sex is an important part of intimacy. But how important? Drouin reports on surveys that millennials (perhaps distracted by constant Tinder-swiping) have less sex than previous generations. She discusses pandemic puppies, professional cuddlers, the importance of touch, “desire discrepancy” in marriage, and the value of friendships. Online dating, she suggests, might give users too many options; and the internet facilitates “infidelity-related behaviors.” Some technological advances will help us develop and maintain intimate relationships—our phones, for example, can be bridges to emotional support. Some, on the other hand, might leave us out of touch. Drouin explores both of these possibilities.
Download or read book Sex Genes and Rock n Roll written by Rob Brooks and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are people getting fatter? Why do so many rock stars end up dead at 27? Is there any hope of curbing population growth, rampant consumerism and the environmental devastation they wreak? Evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks argues that the origins of these twenty-first century problems can be found where the ancient forces of evolution collide w...
Download or read book Reclaiming Conversation written by Sherry Turkle and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In a time in which the ways we communicate and connect are constantly changing, and not always for the better, Sherry Turkle provides a much needed voice of caution and reason to help explain what the f*** is going on.” —Aziz Ansari, author of Modern Romance Renowned media scholar Sherry Turkle investigates how a flight from conversation undermines our relationships, creativity, and productivity—and why reclaiming face-to-face conversation can help us regain lost ground. We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. Preeminent author and researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over thirty years. Long an enthusiast for its possibilities, here she investigates a troubling consequence: at work, at home, in politics, and in love, we find ways around conversation, tempted by the possibilities of a text or an email in which we don’t have to look, listen, or reveal ourselves. We develop a taste for what mere connection offers. The dinner table falls silent as children compete with phones for their parents’ attention. Friends learn strategies to keep conversations going when only a few people are looking up from their phones. At work, we retreat to our screens although it is conversation at the water cooler that increases not only productivity but commitment to work. Online, we only want to share opinions that our followers will agree with – a politics that shies away from the real conflicts and solutions of the public square. The case for conversation begins with the necessary conversations of solitude and self-reflection. They are endangered: these days, always connected, we see loneliness as a problem that technology should solve. Afraid of being alone, we rely on other people to give us a sense of ourselves, and our capacity for empathy and relationship suffers. We see the costs of the flight from conversation everywhere: conversation is the cornerstone for democracy and in business it is good for the bottom line. In the private sphere, it builds empathy, friendship, love, learning, and productivity. But there is good news: we are resilient. Conversation cures. Based on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools, and the workplace, Turkle argues that we have come to a better understanding of where our technology can and cannot take us and that the time is right to reclaim conversation. The most human—and humanizing—thing that we do. The virtues of person-to-person conversation are timeless, and our most basic technology, talk, responds to our modern challenges. We have everything we need to start, we have each other. Turkle's latest book, The Empathy Diaries (3/2/21) is available now.
Download or read book Technologies of Speculation written by Sun-ha Hong and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inquiry into what we can know in an age of surveillance and algorithms Knitting together contemporary technologies of datafication to reveal a broader, underlying shift in what counts as knowledge, Technologies of Speculation reframes today’s major moral and political controversies around algorithms and artificial intelligence. How many times we toss and turn in our sleep, our voluminous social media activity and location data, our average resting heart rate and body temperature: new technologies of state and self-surveillance promise to re-enlighten the black boxes of our bodies and minds. But Sun-ha Hong suggests that the burden to know and to digest this information at alarming rates is stripping away the liberal subject that ‘knows for themselves’, and risks undermining the pursuit of a rational public. What we choose to track, and what kind of data is extracted from us, shapes a society in which my own experience and sensation is increasingly overruled by data-driven systems. From the rapidly growing Quantified Self community to large-scale dragnet data collection in the name of counter-terrorism and drone warfare, Hong argues that data’s promise of objective truth results in new cultures of speculation. In his analysis of the Snowden affair, Hong demonstrates an entirely new way of thinking through what we could know, and the political and philosophical stakes of the belief that data equates to knowledge. When we simply cannot process all the data at our fingertips, he argues, we look past the inconvenient and the complicated to favor the comprehensible. In the process, racial stereotypes and other longstanding prejudices re-enter our newest technologies by the back door. Hong reveals the moral and philosophical equations embedded into the algorithmic eye that now follows us all.
Download or read book Communication from an Artificial Intelligence Perspective written by Andrew Ortony and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1992-11-10 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Castel Ivano, originally built in 1375, is one of many beautiful and impressive castles strategically placed atop hills in Trentino's Valsugana in Northern Italy. It was in this castle on a series of brilliant sunny crisp November days in 1990 that an international group of computer scientists and cognitive scientists met at a workshop to discuss theoretical and applied issues concerning communi cation from an Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science perspective. About forty people, representing nine countries, participated in the workshop, either as speakers, discussants, or observers. The main motivationfor the workshop wasto address the questionofwhether and how current computational approaches to communication can or might be able to accommodate the range of complexities that characterize both human human and human-machine communication. The chapters in this book are based on the papers that were presented at the workshop. They are presented in an order that is determined primarily by the specificity of the topics they address. The initial chapters are more theoretical in nature with an emphasis on formal approaches to communication. The middle chapters focus on particular application issues, such as the generation ofmultimedia documents and the role of planning in building systems to support human-human or human-machine interaction. The final few chapters consider more general issues relating to com munication, such as the influence ofsocial structure on, and the role of affect in communication.
Download or read book Satisfaction written by Anita H. Clayton and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are so many women dissatisfied with their sex lives? Something is missing from their intimate encounters: either they’re not interested in sex anymore, or they are interested but can’t get aroused, or they can get aroused but have neither the desire nor the energy to follow through. Their relationships are suffering. Many women find themselves wondering what’s wrong with them. If you’re a woman and any of this sounds familiar, Dr. Anita H. Clayton wants you to know that there’s nothing wrong with you–what’s wrong is the ridiculous fantasies you’ve been sold about sex, and the unrealistic expectations you cling to. We all want to make love the way they do in the movies, where the woman swoons with desire before the man even gets near her and, once he does, gasps, collapses, and hurtles headlong into orgasm in twenty seconds tops. Now, how often does that happen in real life? Not very–because in real life it takes at least that long to get your panty hose off, not to mention locking the door locked so the kids don’t barge in. In this irreverent and revolutionary volume, Dr. Clayton lays bare hidden facets of female sexuality that are rooted in the psyche and can catapult a woman either into a cathartic bout of ecstasy or against the headboard into yet another disappointment. Through compelling case histories she explores why many women would rather put up with unsatisfying sex than tell their lovers how to please them; how buried feelings about childbearing can affect a woman’s erotic potential; and why an orgasm you have during intercourse is no more “real” or legitimate than one you achieve through other means. Dr. Clayton also shines a light on sexual attitudes that have a dramatic impact on young girls and teens, and details how motherhood and menopause may affect but need not diminish a woman’s capacity for sexual pleasure. Dr. Clayton believes that women should have high expectations for their sex lives, but that these expectations should come from visceral, intimate knowledge of ourselves–what is normal for us and what feels good to us. She wants you to consider and eventually own the concept of yourself as every bit as sexual as a sex symbol. Indeed, the only person who should symbolize sex for you is you.
Download or read book Intimacy Cover Up written by P. Roger Hillerstrom and published by Kregel Publications. This book was released on with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A straight-forward, biblical approach to the why's and how's of sexual abstinence before marriage by a counselor and his twenty-something daughter. Includes relevant, non-offensive discussions about some of the most common intimacy myths.
Download or read book Loving written by Sheryll Cashin and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landmark story of how interracial love and marriage changed American history—and continues to alter the landscape of American politics When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case—the first to use the words “white supremacy” to describe such racism. Drawing from the earliest chapters in US history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America’s original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of nonwhite blood merited exclusion from full citizenship. In vivid detail, she illustrates how the idea of whiteness was created by the planter class of yesterday and is reinforced by today’s power-hungry dog-whistlers to divide struggling whites and people of color, ensuring plutocracy and undermining the common good. Not just a hopeful treatise on the future of race relations in America, Loving challenges the notion that trickle-down progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible and sharp, Cashin reanimates the possibility of a future where interracial understanding serves as a catalyst of a social revolution ending not in artificial color blindness but in a culture where acceptance and difference are celebrated.
Download or read book Artificial Mythologies written by Craig J. Saper and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artificial Mythologies was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Cultural critics teach us that myths are artificial. Cultural innovators use the artificial to make something new. In this exhilarating guide, Craig J. Saper takes us on an eye-opening tour of the process of cultural invention-willfully entertaining foolish, absurd, even fake, solutions as a way of reaching new perspectives on cultural problems. Saper deploys this method to reveal unsuspected connections among major cultural issues, such as urban decay, the dangers of television's power, family values, and conservative criticism of higher education. The model Saper uses builds on the later works of the revered French cultural critic Roland Barthes. These works, Saper argues, suggest poignant, playful, and productive ways of engaging dominant methodologies and mythologies. Artificial Mythologies shows us how, by allowing the artificial-our received ideas, common responses, and cultural mythologies-full play, we can arrive at provocative new solutions. The book demonstrates that the very conceptions of media and sociocultural issues that stymie innovation can be made to serve the cause of invention. Craig J. Saper is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Intimacies written by Katie Kitamura and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE 2021 READS AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A BEST BOOK OF 2021 FROM Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly “Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller…. Katie Kitamura is a wonder.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document “One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths. An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes. A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.
Download or read book Mediated Intimacy written by Meg-John Barker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mediated Intimacy looks at contemporary sex and relationship advice, exploring how our intimate lives are shaped through different media, from manuals and magazines to television and Twitter. By exploring how intimacy is constructed through different media texts, the authors consider which ideas and practices these changing forms of 'sexpertise' open up, and which they close down. The book reveals the intimate operation of power in mediated advice, how words and images, stories and sound can work to shore up social injustice. It critically engages with the ideas of choice and responsibility in sex self-help, arguing that these can obscure and/or justify oppression, even if they're sometimes experienced as empowering and/or pleasurable. This bold and incisive book provides a radical challenge to the assumptions underlying the sex advice industry, and presents a critical, collaborative and consensual vision for sex advice of the future.
Download or read book Work s Intimacy written by Melissa Gregg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.
