Download or read book Animal Machines written by Ruth Harrison and published by CABI. This book was released on 2013 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1964, Ruth Harrison's book Animal Machines had a profound and lasting impact on world agriculture, public opinion and the quality of life of millions of farmed animals. Concerned with welfare standards at a time when animal production was increasing in scale and mechanization, Ruth Harrison set about investigating the situation in a fair and even-handed way. Reporting her findings in this book, Harrison alerted the public to the undeniable suffering of calves living in veal crates and birds in battery cages. Written at the beginning of the intensive farming movement, which promised progress but in reality worsened conditions for domesticated animals, Animal Machines provides a fascinating insight into the system we are living with today and must continue with as the global population increases. Harrison's work brought about legal reforms, a greater understanding of farm conditions for animals and increased public awareness. Animal Machines is reprinted here in its entirety, accompanied by new chapters by world-renowned experts in animal welfare discussing the legacy and impact of Animal Machines 50 years on.
Download or read book God Human Animal Machine written by Meghan O'Gieblyn and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future." —Phillip Lopate “[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.
Download or read book Bearing Witness written by Claas Kirchhelle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book is the biography of one of Britain’s foremost animal welfare campaigners and of the world of activism, science, and politics she inhabited. In 1964, Ruth Harrison’s bestseller Animal Machines triggered a gear change in modern animal protection by popularising the term ‘factory farming’ alongside a new way of thinking about animal welfare. Here, historian Claas Kirchhelle explores Harrison’s avant-garde upbringing, Quakerism, and how animal welfare debates were linked to concerns about the wider ethical and environmental trajectories of post-war Britain. Breaking the myth of Harrison as a one-hit wonder, Kirchhelle reconstructs Harrison’s 46 years of campaigning and the rapid transformation of welfare politics and science during this time. Exacerbated by Harrison’s own actions, the decades after 1964 saw a polarisation of animalpolitics, a professionalisation of British activism, and the rise of a new animal welfare science. Harrison’s belief in incremental reform allowed her to form ties to leading scientists but alienated her from more radical campaigners. Many of her 1964 demands gradually became part of mainstream politics. However, farm animal welfare’s increasing marketisation has also led to a relative divorce from the wider agenda of social improvement that Harrison once bore witness to. This is the first book to cast light on the interlinked histories of British farm animal welfare activism, science, and legislation. Its unique scope allows it to go beyond existing accounts of modern British animal welfare and will be of interest to those interested in animal welfare, environmentalism, and the behavioural sciences.
Download or read book Can Animals and Machines be Persons written by Justin Leiber and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Written in a lively and entertaining style, this little book, which deals with topics such as 'personhood,' animal rights, and artificial intelligence . . . makes some rather difficult philosophical points clear in an unpedantic fashion." -- M E Winston, Trenton State College
Download or read book Animals Machines and AI written by Erika Quinn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentient animals, machines, and robots abound in German literature and culture, but there has been surprisingly limited scholarship on non-human life forms in German studies. This volume extends interdisciplinary research in emotion studies to examine non-humans and the affective relationships between humans and non-humans in modern German cultural history. In recent years, fascination with emotions, developments in robotics, and the burgeoning of animal studies in and beyond the academy have given rise to questions about the nature of humanity. Using sources from the life sciences, literature, visual art, poetry, philosophy, and photography, this collection interrogates not animal or machine emotions per se, but rather uses animals and machines as lenses through which to investigate human emotions and the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans. The COVID-19 pandemic made us more keenly aware of the importance of both animals and new technologies in our daily lives, and this volume ultimately sheds light on the centrality of non-humans in the human emotional world and the possibilities that relationships with non-humans offer for enriching that world.
Download or read book Humans Animals Machines written by Glen A. Mazis and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the overlap and blurring of boundaries among humans, animals, and machines.
Download or read book Animal Electricity written by Robert B. Campenot and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like all cellular organisms humans run on electricity. Cells work like batteries: slight imbalances of electric charge across cell membranes, caused by ions moving in and out of cells, result in sensation, movement, awareness, and thinking—the things we associate with being alive. Robert Campenot offers an accessible overview of animal electricity.
Download or read book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine Reissue of the 1961 second edition written by Norbert Wiener and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory and a timely text for contemporary informations theorists and practitioners. With the influential book Cybernetics, first published in 1948, Norbert Wiener laid the theoretical foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics, the study of controlling the flow of information in systems with feedback loops, be they biological, mechanical, cognitive, or social. At the core of Wiener's theory is the message (information), sent and responded to (feedback); the functionality of a machine, organism, or society depends on the quality of messages. Information corrupted by noise prevents homeostasis, or equilibrium. And yet Cybernetics is as philosophical as it is technical, with the first chapter devoted to Newtonian and Bergsonian time and the philosophical mixed with the technical throughout. This book brings the 1961 second edition back into print, with new forewords by Doug Hill and Sanjoy Mitter. Contemporary readers of Cybernetics will marvel at Wiener's prescience—his warnings against “noise,” his disdain for “hucksters” and “gadget worshipers,” and his view of the mass media as the single greatest anti-homeostatic force in society. This edition of Cybernetics gives a new generation access to a classic text.
Download or read book Descartes s Dog written by Gareth Southwell and published by WoodPig Press. This book was released on 2020-06-05 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals feel pain – so much is obvious. But René Descartes didn't think so. In fact, the man who has been called the Father of Modern Philosophy thought there was no more to the yelps and cries of a suffering animal than the squeaks and groans of an unoiled hinge, and (for the purposes of science) he was even rumoured to have dissected living dogs and nailed cats to trees. For, he reasoned, we wouldn't worry about the “feelings” of a watch or a clock, no matter what noises it made. Descartes’s views on animals now seem callous and outdated, and we might readily consign them to the dustbin of the history of ideas – except for the fact that many people still share them. For curiously, Descartes's views have formed the basis for modern developments in computing and artificial intelligence – from which point of view, we are all just machines. Written in an engaging and humorous style, this short book investigates the roots of this philosophy, exploring the connections between Descartes’s view of animals, AI, and the persisting puzzle of consciousness.
Download or read book Humans Animals Machines written by Glen A. Mazis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the overlap and blurring of boundaries among humans, animals, and machines.
Download or read book Time Machines written by Paul J. Nahin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2001-04-20 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the idea of time travel from the first account in English literature to the latest theories of physicists such as Kip Thorne and Igor Novikov. This very readable work covers a variety of topics including: the history of time travel in fiction; the fundamental scientific concepts of time, spacetime, and the fourth dimension; the speculations of Einstein, Richard Feynman, Kurt Goedel, and others; time travel paradoxes, and much more.
Download or read book Huge Machines written by Kim Mitzo Thompson and published by Twin Sisters®. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children will learn about all of the different machines that farmers use each day! "Trucks, tractors, forklifts, and bulldozers, too. Any huge machine, I like. How about you?" Young readers will be amazed by what trucks, tractors, forklifts and other huge machines can do in this brightly-illustrated rhyming book! "Huge Machines" is a great book to reinforce early literacy skills.
Download or read book The New Breed written by Kate Darling and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of The Second Machine Age or The Soul of an Octopus, a bold, exciting exploration of how building diverse kinds of relationships with robots—inspired by how we interact with animals—could be the key to making our future with robot technology work There has been a lot of ink devoted to discussions of how robots will replace us and take our jobs. But MIT Media Lab researcher and technology policy expert Kate Darling argues just the opposite, suggesting that treating robots with a bit of humanity, more like the way we treat animals, will actually serve us better. From a social, legal, and ethical perspective, she shows that our current ways of thinking don’t leave room for the robot technology that is soon to become part of our everyday routines. Robots are likely to supplement—rather than replace—our own skills and relationships. So if we consider our history of incorporating animals into our work, transportation, military, and even families, we actually have a solid basis for how to contend with this future. A deeply original analysis of our technological future and the ethical dilemmas that await us, The New Breed explains how the treatment of machines can reveal a new understanding of our own history, our own systems, and how we relate—not just to nonhumans, but also to one another.
Download or read book Divine Machines written by Justin E. H. Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-05 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "his book provides a comprehensive survey of G. W. Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the sciences of life, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. It is shown that these sundry interests were not only relevant to his core philosophical interests, but indeed often provided the insights that in part led to some of his most familiar philosophical doctrines, including the theory of corporeal substance and the theory of organic preformation"--
Download or read book Earth Movers written by M. T. Martin and published by Bellwether Media. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Simple text and supportive images introduce young readers to earth movers. Intended for students in kindergarten through third grade"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The World in My Mind My Mind in the World written by Igor Aleksander and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not consciousness, but knowledge of consciousness: that is what this book communicates in a fascinating way. Consciousness is the thread that links the disappearing gorilla with the octopus suffering from a stomach ache, and the person under anaesthetic with a new born baby. How these are different, yet illustrative of consciousness, is revealed in this accessible book by one of the world's leading thinkers and neural computing engineers. Igor Aleksander addresses this enigmatic topic, by making us understand the difference between what happens to us when thinking consciously and when sort of thinking when dreaming or when not conscious at all, as when sleeping, anaesthetised or knocked out by a blow on the head. The book also tackles the larger topics of free will, choice, God, Freud (what is 'the unconscious'?), inherited traits and individuality, while exploding the myths and misinformation of many earlier mind-hijackers. He shares the journey towards building a new model of consciousness, with an invitation to understand 5 axioms or basic ideas, which we easily recognise in ourselves.
Download or read book Amazing Machines Amazing Aeroplanes written by Tony Mitton and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buckle up and take off to learn all about flying! Amazing Aeroplanes follows the animal crew as they become pilots, baggage handlers and air stewards. Each page is filled with details that machine-mad kids will love: the check-in desks, the flight-control tower, the landing gear and much more! This book is perfect for budding pilots or happy holidaymakers! From aeroplanes to fire engines, the internationally bestselling Amazing Machines series is the perfect way for preschoolers to learn about all sorts of vehicles! Each book introduces a new vehicle and the many jobs it can do. Bright, engaging artwork and simple, rhyming text combine to make these fantastic books for young children. Kids will love getting to know the friendly, animal characters who feature throughout the series and reading about their fast-paced adventures! There is also a page at the back of each book that features an amazing, annotated machine to teach kids all of the different vehicle parts. The Amazing Machines series is celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2017 - the perfect opportunity to introduce a whole new generation of mini machine-lovers to these fantastic books!
