Download or read book The World Computer written by Jonathan Beller and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-22 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The World Computer Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression—language, image, music, communication—into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.
Download or read book Artificial Unintelligence written by Meredith Broussard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right. In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right. Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it's just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can't pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.
Download or read book The Closed World written by Paul N. Edwards and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a " Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series
Download or read book The History of the Computer written by Rachel Ignotofsky and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strikingly illustrated overview of the computing machines that have changed our world—from the abacus to the smartphone—and the people who made them, by the New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of Women in Science. “A beautifully illustrated journey through the history of computing, from the Antikythera mechanism to the iPhone and beyond—I loved it.”—Eben Upton, Founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Public Library Computers are everywhere and have impacted our lives in so many ways. But who created them, and why? How have they transformed the way that we interact with our surroundings and each other? Packed with accessible information, fun facts, and discussion starters, this charming and art-filled book takes you from the ancient world to the modern day, focusing on important inventions, from the earliest known counting systems to the sophisticated algorithms behind AI. The History of the Computer also profiles a diverse range of key players and creators—from An Wang and Margaret Hamilton to Steve Jobs and Sir Tim Berners-Lee—and illuminates their goals, their intentions, and the impact of their inventions on our everyday lives. This entertaining and educational journey will help you understand our most important machines and how we can use them to enhance the way we live. You’ll never look at your phone the same way again!
Download or read book A Computer Called LEO written by Georgina Ferry and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2003 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the eccentric story of one of the most bizarre marriages in the history of British business: the invention of the world's first office computer and the Lyons Teashop. The Lyons teashops were one of the great British institutions, providing a cup of tea and a penny bun through the depression, the war, austerity and on into the 1960s and 1970s. Yet Lyons also has a more surprising claim to history. In the 1930s John Simmons, a young graduate in charge of the clerks' offices that totalled all the bills issued by the Nippies and kept track of the costs of all the tea, cakes and other goods distributed to the nation's cafes and shops, became obsessed by the new ideas of scientific management. He had a dream: to build a machine that would automate the millions of tedious transactions and process them in as little time as possible.
Download or read book Computers in Our World Today and Tomorrow written by Sandy Hintz and published by Franklin Watts. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the roles of computers, now and in the future, in the spheres of medicine, business and government, law enforcement, science and technology, entertainment, education, and the home. Includes a glossary of terms.
Download or read book Shaping a Digital World written by Derek C. Schuurman and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on the work of Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, as well as a wide range of Reformed thinkers, Derek Schuurman provides a brief theology of technology—rooted in the Reformed tradition and oriented around the grand themes of creation, fall, redemption and new creation.
Download or read book Ideas That Created the Future written by Harry R. Lewis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic papers by thinkers ranging from from Aristotle and Leibniz to Norbert Wiener and Gordon Moore that chart the evolution of computer science. Ideas That Created the Future collects forty-six classic papers in computer science that map the evolution of the field. It covers all aspects of computer science: theory and practice, architectures and algorithms, and logic and software systems, with an emphasis on the period of 1936-1980 but also including important early work. Offering papers by thinkers ranging from Aristotle and Leibniz to Alan Turing and Nobert Wiener, the book documents the discoveries and inventions that created today's digital world. Each paper is accompanied by a brief essay by Harry Lewis, the volume's editor, offering historical and intellectual context.
Download or read book Alan Turing s Electronic Brain written by B. Jack Copeland and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rev. ed. of: Alan Turing's automatic computing engine / edited by B. Jack Copeland.
Download or read book The Cinematic Mode of Production written by Jonathan Beller and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revolutionary reconceptualization of capital and perception during the twentieth century.
Download or read book The History of the Television written by Elizabeth Raum and published by Capstone Classroom. This book was released on 2007-09-26 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relates what life was like before the invention of the television and explains how the invention developed through time into what it is today.
Download or read book A People s History of Computing in the United States written by Joy Lisi Rankin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silicon Valley gets all the credit for digital creativity, but this account of the pre-PC world, when computing meant more than using mature consumer technology, challenges that triumphalism. The invention of the personal computer liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto. By imagining computing as an interactive commons, the early denizens of the digital realm seeded today’s debate about whether the internet should be a public utility and laid the groundwork for the concept of net neutrality. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.
Download or read book The First World War in Computer Games written by C. Kempshall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First World War in Computer Games analyses the depiction of combat, the landscape of the trenches, and concepts of how the war ended through computer games. This book explores how computer games are at the forefront of new representations of the First World War.
Download or read book ENIAC written by Scott McCartney and published by Berkley Trade. This book was released on 2001 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on original interviews with surviving participants and the first study of John Mauchly and Presper Eckert's personal papers, ENIAC tells the story of the three-year race to complete the world's first computer--and of the three-decade struggle to take credit for it. 10 illustrations.
Download or read book Computer Game Worlds written by Claus Pias and published by Diaphanes. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computer games have become ubiquitous in today's society. Many scholars have speculated on the reasons for their massive success. Yet we haven't considered the most basic questions: Why do computer games exist? What specific circumstances led to the creation of this entirely new type of game? What sorts of knowledge facilitated the requisite technological and institutional transformations? With Computer Game Worlds, Claus Pias sets out to answer these questions. Tracing computer games from their earliest forms to the unstoppable commercial and cultural phenomena they have become today, Pias then provides a careful epistemological reconstruction of the process of playing games, both at computers and by computers themselves. The book makes a valuable theoretical contribution to the ongoing discussion about computer games.
Download or read book Geeks Bearing Gifts written by Ted Nelson and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE PERFECT GIFT - Whether you love the computer world the way it is, or consider it a nightmare honkytonk prison, you'll giggle and rage at Ted Nelson's telling of computer history, its personalities and infights. Computer movies, music, 3D; the eternal fight between Jobs and Gates; the tangled stories of the Internet and the World Wide Web; all these and more are punchily told in brief chapters on many topics such as The Web Browser Salad, Voting Machines, Google, Web 2.0 and much more. These short stories make great reading - it's a book to dip in and out of. You'll find answers to such questions as # Why do alphabets have upper case, why not numbers? # Why does everything have to be hierarchical on computers? That's not how *my* projects are organized! Where did WYSIWYG come from? The answer will surprise you. Plus, you'll find out why the author, a well-known computer veteran, hopes it can all become much better.
Download or read book The Computer Speaks written by Rashad Khalifa and published by Islamic Productions. This book was released on 1981 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
