Download or read book The Body Machines written by Alexander Bard and published by Stockholm Text. This book was released on 2012-02-24 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final episode of The Futurica Trilogy. It departs from repeated questions about the Death of the Individual in the Age of Interactivity. The authors rehabilitate Descartes old concept of the body machine and transform it into the foundation of a very anti-cartesian, materialist image of humanity, relevant for the new, emerging paradigm—we’re entering The Age of The Body Machines.
Download or read book The Body Electric written by Carolyn Thomas de la Pena and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the years 1850 and 1950, Americans became the leading energy consumers on the planet, expending tremendous physical resources on energy exploration, mental resources on energy exploitation, and monetary resources on energy acquisition. A unique combination of pseudoscientific theories of health and the public’s rudimentary understanding of energy created an age in which sources of industrial power seemed capable of curing the physical limitations and ill health that plagued Victorian bodies. Licensed and “quack” physicians alike promoted machines, electricity, and radium as invigorating cures, veritable “fountains of youth” that would infuse the body with energy and push out disease and death. The Body Electric is the first book to place changing ideas about fitness and gender in dialogue with the popular culture of technology. Whether through wearing electric belts, drinking radium water, or lifting mechanized weights, many Americans came to believe that by embracing the nation's rapid march to industrialization, electrification, and “radiomania,” their bodies would emerge fully powered. Only by uncovering this belief’s passions and products, Thomas de la Peña argues, can we fully understand our culture’s twentieth-century energy enthusiasm.
Download or read book Bodies and Machines Routledge Revivals written by Mark Seltzer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bodies and Machines is a striking and persuasive examination of the body-machine complex and its effects on the modern American cultural imagination. Bodies and Machines, first published in 1992, explores the links between techniques of representation and social and scientific technologies of power in a wide range of realist and naturalist discourses and practices. Seltzer draws on realist and naturalist writing, such as the work of Hawthorne and Henry James, and the discourses which inform it: from scouting manuals and the programmes of systematic management to accounts of sexual biology and the rituals of consumer culture. He explores other mass-produced and mass-consumed cultural forms, including visual representations such as composite photographs, scale models, and the astonishing iconography of standardization.
Download or read book The Outline of Science The wonders of microscopy The body machine and its work How Darwinism stands to day Natural history birds Natural history mammals Natural history the insect world The science of the mind the new psychology psycho analysis written by John Arthur Thomson and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Pilates Body written by Brooke Siler and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2000-01-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pilates® method may be today's hottest exercise, but it has been endorsed by physicians for almost a century. Originally developed by Joseph H. Pilates to help strengthen and condition muscles, Pilates is the ultimate mind-body exercise for anyone who wants to tone, streamline, and realign their body without the bulked-up results of more conventional workout methods. Now, in The Pilates® Body, author Brooke Siler--one of the most sought-after personal trainers in the country and owner of New York's top studio for Pilates training, re:AB--provides a complete, easy-to follow program of Pilates exercises that can be done anywhere, anytime, and without machines. With step-by-step instructions, Siler guides the reader through the complete circuit of mat exercises, each of which is clearly illustrated by photographs, line drawings, and unique visualization exercises. With Pilates you will not only streamline your figure--you will dramatically improve your posture, flexibility, and balance, and enhance your physical and emotional well-being. The Pilates Body shows you how.
Download or read book Machines written by Abraham P. DeLeon and published by IAP. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about machines: those that have been actualized, fantastical imaginal machines, to those deployed as metaphorical devices to describe complex social processes. Machines argues that they transcend time and space to emerge through a variety of spaces and places, times and histories and representations. They are such an integral fabric of daily reality that their disappearance would have immediate and dire consequences for the survival of humanity. They are part and parcel to our contemporary social order. From labor to social theory, art or consciousness, literature or television, to the asylums of the 19th century, machines are a central figure; an outgrowth of affective desire that seeks to transcend organic limitations of bodies that whither, age and die. Machines takes the reader on an intellectual, artistic, and theoretical journey, weaving an interdisciplinary tale of their emergence across social, cultural and artistic boundaries. With the deep engagement of various texts, Machines offers the reader moments of escape, alternative ways to envision technology for a future yet to materialize. Machines rejects the notion that technological innovations are indeed neutral, propelling us to think differently about those “things” created under specific economic or historical paradigms. Rethinking machines provides a rupture to our current technocratic impetus, shining a critical light on possible alternatives to our current reality. Let us sit back and take a journey through Machines, holding mechanical parts as guides to possible alternative futures.
Download or read book Technology and Medical Practice written by Dr Ericka Johnson and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-12-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advanced technologies being used in diagnosis and care within modern medicine, whilst supporting and making medical practices possible, may also conflict with established traditions of medicine and care. What happens to the patient in a technologized medical environment? How are doctors', nurses' and medical scientists' practices changed when artefacts are involved? How is knowledge negotiated, or relations of power reconfigured? Technology and Medical Practice addresses these developments and dilemmas, focusing on various practices with technologies within hospitals and sociotechnical systems of care. Combining science and technology studies with medical sociology, the history of medicine and feminist approaches to science, this book presents analyses of artefacts-in-use across a variety of settings within the UK, USA and Europe, and will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology alike.
Download or read book Blood in the Machine written by Brian Merchant and published by . This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of what happened the first time machines came for human jobs, when an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the industrialists that were automating their work--and how it explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech today. The most pressing story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley, Seattle, or even Shenzhen. It begins two hundred years ago in rural England, when working men and women rose up en masse rather than starve at the hands of the factory owners who were using machines to erase and degrade their livelihoods. They organized guerilla raids, smashed those machines, and embarked on full-scale assaults against the wealthy machine owners. They won the support of Lord Byron, inspired Mary Shelley, and enraged the Prince Regent and his bloodthirsty government. Before it was over, much blood would be spilled--of rich and poor, of the invisible and of the powerful. This all-but-forgotten and deeply misunderstood class struggle nearly brought 19th century England to its knees. We live now in the second machine age, when similar fears that big tech is dominating our lives and machines replacing human labor run high. We worry that technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are ousting workers from factories, and artificial intelligence will soon remove drivers from cars. How will this all reshape our economy and the way we live? And what can we do about it? The answers lie in the story of our first machine age, when mechanization first came to British factories at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Intertwined with a lucid examination of our current age, the story of the Luddites, the working-class insurgency that took up arms against automation (at a time when it was punishable by death to break a machine), Blood in the Machine reaches through time and space to tell a story about how technology changed our world--and how it's already changing our future.
Download or read book Body by Science written by John Little and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2009-01-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building muscle has never been faster or easier than with this revolutionary once-a-week training program In Body By Science, bodybuilding powerhouse John Little teams up with fitness medicine expert Dr. Doug McGuff to present a scientifically proven formula for maximizing muscle development in just 12 minutes a week. Backed by rigorous research, the authors prescribe a weekly high-intensity program for increasing strength, revving metabolism, and building muscle for a total fitness experience.
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 Machines That Become Us written by James E. Katz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social critics and artificial intelligence experts have long prophesized that computers and robots would soon relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Many among the general population seem to have shared this fear of a dehumanized future. But how are people in the twenty-first century actually reacting to the ever-expanding array of gadgets and networks at their disposal? Is computer anxiety a significant problem, paralyzing and terrorizing millions, or are ever-proliferating numbers of gadgets being enthusiastically embraced? Machines that Become Us explores the increasingly intimate relationship between people and their personal communication technologies.In the first book of its kind, internationally recognized scholars from the United States and Europe explore this topic. Among the technologies analyzed include the Internet, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, networked homes, smart fabrics and wearable computers, interactive location badges, and implanted monitoring devices. The authors discuss critical policy issues, such as the problems of information resource access and equity, and the recently discovered digital dropouts phenomena.The use of the word become in the book's title has three different meanings. The first suggests how people use these technologies to broaden their abilities to communicate and to represent themselves to others. Thus the technologies become extensions and representatives of the communicators. A second sense of become applies to analysis of the way these technologies become physically integrated with the user's clothing and even their bodies. Finally, contributors examine fashion aspects and uses of these technologies, that is, how they are used in ways becoming to the wearer. The conclusions of many chapters are supported by data, including ethnographic observations, attitude surveys and case studies from the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Finland, and Norway. This approach is especially valuable
Download or read book The Age of Spiritual Machines written by Ray Kurzweil and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Bold futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, offers a framework for envisioning the future of machine intelligence—“a book for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next” (The New York Times Book Review). “Kurzweil offers a thought-provoking analysis of human and artificial intelligence and a unique look at a future in which the capabilities of the computer and the species that invented it grow ever closer.”—BILL GATES Imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the line between humanity and technology fades, and where the soul and the silicon chip unite. This is not science fiction. This is the twenty-first century according to Ray Kurzweil, the “restless genius” (The Wall Street Journal), “ultimate thinking machine” (Forbes), and inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era. In his inspired hands, life in the new millennium no longer seems daunting. Instead, it promises to be an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. More than just a list of predictions, Kurzweil’s prophetic blueprint for the future guides us through the inexorable advances that will result in: • Computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain (with human-level capabilities not far behind) • Relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers • Information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways Eventually, the distinction between humans and computers will have become sufficiently blurred that when the machines claim to be conscious, we will believe them.
Download or read book To Be a Machine written by Mark O'Connell and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (editor's choice) Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our biology—of our senses, intelligence, and lifespans—with technology. Its supporters have reached a critical mass and now include some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and beyond, among them Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Ray Kurzweil. In this provocative and eye-opening account, journalist Mark O’Connell explores the staggering (and terrifying) possibilities that present themselves when you think of your body as an outmoded device. He visits the world’s foremost cryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall death, discovers an underground collective of biohackers boosting their senses by implanting electronics under their skin, and meets with members of a team urgently investigating how to protect mankind from rogue artificial superintelligence. In investigating what it means to be a machine, O’Connell shines a light on our ancient desire to transcend the animal condition—and offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human.
Download or read book Human and Machine Consciousness written by David Gamez and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines. Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation for the scientific study of consciousness. It sets out a bold interpretation of consciousness that neutralizes the philosophical problems and explains how we can make scientific predictions about the consciousness of animals, brain-damaged patients and machines. Gamez interprets the scientific study of consciousness as a search for mathematical theories that map between measurements of consciousness and measurements of the physical world. We can use artificial intelligence to discover these theories and they could make accurate predictions about the consciousness of humans, animals and artificial systems. Human and Machine Consciousness also provides original insights into unusual conscious experiences, such as hallucinations, religious experiences and out-of-body states, and demonstrates how ‘designer’ states of consciousness could be created in the future. Gamez explains difficult concepts in a clear way that closely engages with scientific research. His punchy, concise prose is packed with vivid examples, making it suitable for the educated general reader as well as philosophers and scientists. Problems are brought to life in colourful illustrations and a helpful summary is given at the end of each chapter. The endnotes provide detailed discussions of individual points and full references to the scientific and philosophical literature.
Download or read book The Lives of Machines written by Tamara S. Ketabgian and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVExpanded views of the connection between humans and machines in the Victorian era/div
Download or read book The Soft Machine written by William S. Burroughs and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.
Download or read book Cyber Humans written by Woodrow Barfield and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is predicted that robots will surpass human intelligence within the next fifty years. The ever increasing speed of advances in technology and neuroscience, coupled with the creation of super computers and enhanced body parts and artificial limbs, is paving the way for a merger of both human and machine. Devices which were once worn on the body are now being implanted into the body, and as a result, a class of true cyborgs, who are displaying a range of skills beyond those of normal humans-beings, are being created. There are cyborgs which can see colour by hearing sound, others have the ability to detect magnetic fields, some are equipped with telephoto lenses to aid their vision or implanted computers to monitor their heart, and some use thought to communicate with a computer or to manipulate a robotic arm. This is not science-fiction, these are developments that are really happening now, and will continue to develop in the future. However, a range of legal and policy questions has arisen alongside this rise of artificial intelligence. Cyber-Humans provides a deep and unique perspective on the technological future of humanity, and describes how law and policy will be particularly relevant in creating a fair and equal society and protecting the liberties of different life forms which will emerge in the 21st century. Dr Woodrow (Woody) Barfield previously headed up the Sensory Engineering Laboratory, holding the position of Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor at the University of Washington. His research revolves around the design and use of wearable computers and augmented reality systems and holds both JD and LLM degrees in intellectual property law and policy. He has published over 350 articles and major presentations in the areas of computer science, engineering and law. He currently lives in Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
