New Books in Technology

It’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble is we would have to cut back on all the good things that carbon emissions produce, like big houses, cool cars, and tasty food imported from far-away places. We don’t want to do that. So what’s a global citizen to do? One idea is to take control of the environment, engineering-wise. Why cut back when we can simply manage the carbon-cycle a bit like we manage the climate in hothouses? In Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering(Yale UP, 2013), Clive Hamilton surveys the proposals big-thinking engineers have dreamed up to control the carbon-cycle on a truly massive scale. Some are wacky, others less so, but all are, well, very bold. Does any of it make sense? Can any of it be done? Hamilton investigates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

“The humans are dead.” Whether or not you recognize the epigram from Flight of the Conchords (and if not, there are worse ways to spend a few minutes than by looking here, and I recommend sticking around for the “binary solo”), Dominic Pettman‘s Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) will likely change the way you think about humanity, animals, machines, and the relationships among them. Pettman uses a series of fascinating case studies, from television programs to films to Sufi fables to pop songs, to explore the notion of Agamben’s “anthropological machines” and the human being as a “technospecies without qualities” in a modern mediascape that includes Thomas Edison’s film Electrocuting an Elephant, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and the interplanetary soundscape created by NASA (among many, many others). We recently gathered over Skype to talk about some of the major thematic and argumentative threads snaking through this book and Pettman’s recent exploration of totems in Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (Zero Books, 2013). Both books take on the varied ways that love, technology, identity (both human and not), and economies have been transformed in a world that includes pacifist Orcs, voices without bodies, ecologies without nature, reptile-doctors, and pixelated lovers. Enjoy! During our conversation, Pettman mentions a film about the zigzag totem that can be found here. Cabinet Magazine, which also comes up in the course of our conversation, can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Humans understand the world through stories, some short and some long. But what happens when the stories become so short that they, well, aren’t stories at all? In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current, 2013), Douglas Rushkoff explores this question. He points out that always-on, always “new” digital communications have essentially locked us into an ever-more data-rich “moment,” one from which we cannot really escape. The past becomes a few minutes ago; the future a few minutes hence. Of course it’s always always been “now” (as Buddhists will tell you), but now the “now” is far more captivating than ever before. What’s it all mean? Rushkoff explains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

There are pigeons, cats, and Martians here. There are CT scanners, dentures, computers large enough to fill rooms, war games, and neural networks. In Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Joe November mobilizes this ecology of instruments and objects, people and programs, in a story that maps out the early years of the introduction of computers to biology and medicine from 1955 to 1965. As computing technology was gradually integrated into different spaces of biomedicine that were characterized by agents with very different agendas (a set of processes not without significant contestation), biomedicine and computing transformed one another. Life itself was changed as a result, as the objects of biomedical computing were translated into the kinds of system-entities that computers could describe. The historian of technology who reads November’s book will find fascinating stories of machines like LINC, ENIAC, and UNIVAC. The historian of science will find accounts of the ways that military funding shaped the computerization of biomedicine, windows into the mid-century work supported by the NIH, stories of the transformation of diagnostic medicine in the US, and chapters from the history of crystallography and molecular biology. The historian of networks and computing will find analyses of the importance of operations research, expert systems, and transdisciplinary research practices to the work of some of the central figures in the history of the computational sciences. In addition to all of this, November’s book can also be read as a history of the modern personal computer. (There are also men in RNA-themed neckties sprinkled throughout the early part of the story.) Enjoy the interview, and imagine as you listen that you’re here with me at the National Humanities Center, Skyping with Joe as a thunderstorm booms overhead, rain falls loudly outside the window, and brilliant humanities scholars share excited conversation about their work outside the door. It was a special afternoon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

History is in many respects the story of humanity’s quest for transcendence: to control life and death, time and space, loss and memory. When inventors or companies effectively tap into these needs products emerge that help define their times. The Kodak ‘Brownie’ allowed average consumers – without the knowledge of chemistry or math of a Matthew Brady – to capture powerful images. Ford’s Model T gave the ‘working man’ the ability to travel further and faster than wealthy aristocrats of previous generations. The Timex watch made time accessible to anyone with a few bucks, whether they had interest in philosophical debates about the meaning of time or not. The Glock handgun is on this list of iconic products and while it did not democratize deadly force like the AK-47 it has made its own mark on the American psyche. The Glock has become the standard bearer for American handguns, placing it at the center of some of the most important conflicts of our times from gun control to globalization. It was initially invented for the Austrian army, but its many innovations and the growing belief that American cops were outgunned by criminals made it first popular with law enforcement, and then later with gun enthusiasts of all types. Tupac Shakur praised the Glock and was later murdered with one. Municipalities railed against the Glock then later helped flood the streets with them. Paul Barrett‘s Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (Broadway, 2013) is the story of a gun, but in a nation of 300 million guns, it tells a much larger story. Paul was kind enough to speak with us. I hope you enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), David Hochfelder provides a taut and consistently intelligent history of the telegraph in American life. The book is notable for both its topical breadth—encompassing war, politics, business, journalism, and everyday life—as well as its focused, argument-driven chapters. Hochfelder describes how the telegraph’s important role in the Civil War set the stage for Western Union’s postwar dominance, which in turn provoked persistent efforts to nationalize and regulate telegraphy up through World War I. Hochfelder lingers on two of the telegraph’s principal clients, newspapers and businessmen, focusing in the latter case on the crucial importance of the telegraph-enabled stock “ticker” for modern financial capitalism. The book traces the telegraph’s effect not just on institutions but also the lived experience of ordinary people, who came to hunger for breaking news and real-time stock updates. The patterns of communication established by the telegraph live on, Hochfelder concludes, in the billions of texts and emails sent along fiber-optic cables—our own wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Robert W. McChesney, the celebrated political economist of communication, takes the Internet, industry and government head-on in his latest book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2013). Digital Disconnect builds on McChesney’s previous works, spinning forward his scholarship to construct a remarkably current look at the Internet’s corporate and political landscape. “Almost all of the other books on the Internet, some of which are very good, sort of try to take a larger view of it,” McChesney says during the interview. “Because of where I’m coming from, because of my interests, I think that’s the one thing I could inject that draws from my past research, where I can speak with greater authority, that’s really not talked about by anyone else.” McChesney uses the book to argue that the Internet has become a hub of “numbing commercialism,” largely the result of failed government policies. Writes McChesney: “When the dust clears on this critical juncture, if our societies have not been fundamentally transformed for the better, if democracy has not triumphed over capital, the digital revolution may prove to have been a revolution in name only, an ironic, tragic reminder of the growing gap between the potential and the reality of human society.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Somewhere along the line, C.W. Anderson became fascinated with digital journalism and the culture that surrounds it: engaged publics, social networks, and the challenges to “legacy” media. Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Temple University Press, 2013) is the fascinating product of Anderson’s research into the Philadelphia journalism scene during the first decade-plus of the 21st Century. Once a thriving hub of traditional journalism, Philadelphia has become a living case study of the collision of digital media practices. Anderson’s ethnographic research and spot-on academic interpretation paints a vivid picture of a sometimes innovative, sometimes meandering journalism scene. Although we are at the beginning of the digital journalism era, in Rebuilding the News Anderson nonetheless walks us through the new ecosystem, what seems to be working, what doesn’t, and where we go from here. “Given all of the pain journalism has experienced in the past decade and a half,” Anderson writes, “it would be a shame to waste this moment.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

From its earliest years, the United States was a nation of tinkerers: men and women who looked at the world around them and were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw. Guided by their innate curiosity, a desire to know how things work, and a belief that anything can be improved, amateurs and professionals from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison came up with the inventions that laid the foundations for America's economic dominance. Recently, Americans have come to question whether our tinkering spirit has survived the pressures of ruthless corporate organization and bottom-line driven caution. But as Alec Foege shows in The Tinkerers, reports of tinkering's death have been greatly exaggerated. Through the stories of great tinkerers and inventions past and present, Foege documents how Franklin and Edison's modern-day heirs do not allow our cultural obsessions with efficiency and conformity to interfere with their passion and creativity. Tinkering has been the guiding force behind both major corporate-sponsored innovations such as the personal computer and Ethernet, and smaller scale inventions with great potential, such as a machine that can make low-cost eyeglass lenses for people in impoverished countries and a device that uses lasers to shoot malarial mosquitoes out of the sky. Some tinkerers attended the finest engineering schools in the world; some had no formal training in their chosen fields. Some see themselves as solo artists; others emphasize the importance of working in teams. What binds them together is an ability to subvert the old order, to see fresh potential in existing technologies, and to apply technical know-how to the problems of their day. As anyone who has feared voiding a warranty knows, the complexity of modern systems can be needlessly intimidating. Despite this, tinkerers can – and do – come from anywhere, whether it's the R&D lab of a major corporation, a hobbyist's garage, or a summer camp for budding engineers. Through a lively retelling of recent history and captivating interviews with today's most creative innovators, Foege reveals how the tinkering tradition remains, in new and unexpected forms, at the heart of American society and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Ines Mergel, assistant professor of public administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the School of Information Studies (iSchool) at Syracuse University, is the author of Social Media in the Public Sector: A Guide to Participation, Collaboration and Transparency in the Networked World (Jossey-Bass 2012). This timely and insightful book can be read by a host of audiences, from the scholar to the practitioner. The book relates the development of social media technologies to the open government movement of the last generation. It demonstrates how government agencies can better integrate tools such as Twitter and Facebook into their operations. In doing so, agencies can open a door to public input and deliberation. This is a book that should be read by political scientists interested in how federal agencies grown and change, but also by those in federal agencies who want to respond to calls for greater openness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Many of us in the western world don’t rely on bills and coins as much as we used to, yet the idea of cash money is still an ever-present constant in our minds. How often have you stopped to consider the idea of what “money” actually is on a larger scale, or where our changing habits could lead us? In his book The End of Money – Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers, and the Coming Cashless Society (Da Capo Press, 2012), David Wolman examines our commitment to cash, its advantages and drawbacks, how it facilitates crime and poverty, even its health and environmental issues. With an engaging and accessible style he prompts us to rethink the notion of money, how it works, and what forms it could take in the future. Wolman starts with a short history of cash, beginning with the official introduction of paper money to the Chinese monetary system in the 13th century and Marco Polo’s reaction to it 100 years later. Next we follow him around the globe to get a cross-cultural picture of cash today – including explorations of the cultural heritage and emotional value of cash, of an increasing trend in developing countries of people using their cellphones to transfer money to both businesses and family, and of counterfeiting and anti-counterfeiting technology. Along the way he enlists a wide variety of people to help illustrate these concepts: a Georgia pastor who views the end of cash as a sign of the End Times, a convicted counterfeiter (or “Monetary Architect”, depending on who you’re talking to), a coin collector with an ambivalent attitude toward coins, and a British “digital money guru” who views money as a menace. David Wolman is a contributing editor at Wired magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @DavidWolman. He is, in his own words, a “…guy who’s interested in seemingly small, simple, straightforward topics that in fact, when you put them under the microscope, are anything but simple.” This book is an excellent example of that, and an engrossing read. In our interview he spoke of his year-long experiment to go without using coins or bills at all, the meaning of privacy and security as it relates to money in a digital world, and what he sees as the future of “money”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Have you ever illegally downloaded a song from the internet? How about illicitly burned copies of a CD? Made a “party tape?” Bought a bootleg album? You may have done these things, but have you purchased a bootlegged song-sheet? In Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929 (University of Chicago, 2011) Barry Kernfeld fills us in on the history of disobedient music reproduction and distribution since, well, before the advent of recording technology. Along the way he discusses the above mentioned disobedient distribution techniques along with a few others: fake books, music photocopying, and pirate radio round out the book. Kernfeld suggests that the history of pop music piracy is never ending, with battles of different types of disobedience taking similar forms: the music “monopolists” (song owners) attempting to enact prohibitions on illegal production and distribution, the failed containment of said production and distribution systems and, finally, the assimilation of disobedient forms into the mainstream production and distribution industries. Barry Kernfeld is on the staff of the Special Collections Library of the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians and What to Listen for in Jazz, and he is the editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He is also a professional jazz saxophonist playing in Jazza-ma-phone and a clarinetist in local musical theater productions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Popular culture is replete with warnings about the dangers of technology. One finds in recent films, literature, and music cautions about the myriad ways in which technology threatens our very humanity; most frequently, the lesson is that the attempt to harness technology for the betterment of the world always backfires. It’s no wonder, then, that when it comes to biomedical technologies that promise to enhance human physical and cognitive capacities, many people tend to express deep unease or opposition. But once one recognizes that technological enhancement, including biomedical enhancement, is ubiquitous throughout human history (from the technologies involved with cooking and storing food, to medicine and therapy, to even literacy itself), one wonders whether the common concerns are warranted. In Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves (Oxford University Press, 2011), Allen Buchanan surveys the contemporary enhancement debate, offers a diagnosis of what drives some of the views that he finds untenable, and proposes a nuanced view that fully recognizes the moral risks inherent in the enhancement enterprise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

“Guns don’t kill people; people do.” That’s a common refrain from the National Rifle Association, but it expresses a certain view of our relations to the things we make that also affects our thinking about the scope of ethics. On this traditional view, human persons are moral agents, and artifacts, or products of technology in general, are just tools; they have no moral significance in and of themselves. In his new book, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Peter-Paul Verbeek, professor of philosophy at the University of Twente and Delft University, The Netherlands, argues persuasively that this traditional view is no longer tenable. Instead, we need to understand the moral role of technology as one of active mediation, and of ourselves as technologically mediated moral agents. Ultrasound, for example, isn’t just a matter of peeking into the womb; the fetus becomes a potential patient, the womb becomes an environment for moral decisions, and the parents become responsible for making these newly relevant decisions. In general, if “ought” implies “can”, and if what we can do is expanded and conditioned by technology, then the range and nature of moral decisions and actions must also be expanded and conditioned by technology, and the designing of technology itself can be seen explicitly as having an important moral dimension. In Moralizing Technology, Verbeek spells out this new view of the moral relevance of artifacts and some of its implications for moral subjects, technological design, and ethical theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Daqing Yang‘s Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a gift to both historians of East Asia and scholars of science and technology studies (STS). Yang’s book dissects the body of the Japanese empire from 1853-1945 to reveal its pulsing “nerve system” in a network of communication technologies that extended well into Northeast and Southeast Asia. This extraordinarily rich and well-documented account moves from the first public demonstration of a working electric telegraph with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, to the Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. Along the way, Yang’s book offers wonderful glimpses of a range of sources that include the North China Telegraph and Telephone Co. company song, an adventure-action-romance film about telecommunications-enabled espionage, and experiments in early fax technology. We spoke for an hour (and could have spoken for many more) about this fascinating history of techno-imperialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

One hallmark of important art, in any medium, is a thoughtful relation with artistic precursors. Every artist reckons with heroes and rivals, influences and nemeses, and the old work becomes a part of the new. In Adam Bradley’s seminal monograph on hip-hop lyrics, Book of Rhymes, legendary MC Mos Def describes his desire to participate in posterity: “I wanted it to be something that was durable. You can listen to all these Jimi records and Miles records and Curtis Mayfield records; I wanted to be able to add something to that conversation.” In the last thirty years, technology has transformed the conversation between past and present musicians: it is now possible to quote a previous work not only note for note, but byte for byte. The turntable and the sampler are the hip-hop artist’s quintessential instruments. The culture of hip-hop bricolage, coupled with intense commercial pressures in the recording industry and an inevitable proliferation of rip-off artists, has created difficult challenges for copyright law and for the concept of licensing. Several cultures must adapt to each other, and often they are doing so in the courtroom. In a study both comprehensively theoretical and rich with the voices of musicians and producers, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola have addressed together both the legal and the cultural implications of digital sampling in the music industry. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (Duke University Press, 2011), in tandem with related multimedia projects from the Future of Music Coalition, lays out what they have learned and suggests a way forward for the industry in the digital age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In his new book The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press, 2011), Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, takes a close look at the powerful influence Google has on our society. He believes that by valuing popularity over accuracy, Google dictates what information is most useful to users, thereby changing societal perceptions of what information is relevant. In our interview, we talked about how Vaidyanathan’s American Studies training informed his analysis of Google, the problem of Google’s use in authoritarian countries, and how Google emerged out of nowhere to defeat all other search competitors. Read all about it, and more, in Vaidhyanathan’s illuminating new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

A recent editorial in the Moscow Times declared that in Moscow “the car is king.” Indeed, one word Muscovites constantly mutter is probka (traffic jam). The boom in car ownership is transforming Russian life itself, and for some not necessarily for the better. “The joy of personal mobility — that is, automobile ownership — has completely eclipsed the value of community life. But the joy of car ownership has long ceased being a joy and has instead become a burden, with traffic jams causing frequent delays, smog and even clogged sidewalks. We have created an environment that is environmentally, socially and economically harmful.” While the detrimental effects of the car have only recently hit Russia, the automobile’s political, economic, and cultural significance dates from the early Soviet period. According to Lewis Siegelbaum‘s recent book Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Cornell UP, 2008), what the Soviets called “automobilism” had multiple meanings. It represented a particularly Soviet understanding of modernity, one rooted in the promise of the socialist system itself. The car also symbolized power and freedom. Power in that the elite usually had cars and, during the Great Terror, cars came to be equated with the secret police. The car meant freedom in that those citizens lucky enough to get one expanded their “private” sphere through greater mobility and leisure. As Siegelbaum shows, the Soviet car may have been an unobtainable luxury for the vast majority of Soviet citizens, but its effects on the Soviet imagination were deep and long lasting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

If technology is the site of digital culture, then robots are the future platforms of our social projections and interactions. In fact, that future is already here in small but fascinating ways. Mark Stephen Meadows is one of a handful of curious authors who have begun to explore the social ramifications of robotic engineering and his book We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) is intended as a lively assessment of those implications and consequences. The book sees Meadows touring the strange, wonderful, and unnerving production laboratories of Japanese roboticists, lifting unreal loads with the aid of an augmented limb, and being turned on by an uncannily sexy fembot as she smiles at him and moves her android features. In our interview I asked Meadows what we can expect from our machine compatriots of tomorrow, and why human intelligence might be slowly getting written out of the equation for the perfect bot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In their new book Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google (Telescope Books, 2011), Scott Cleland, President of Precursor LLC, and Ira Brodsky, founder of Datacomm Research, aim to expose the unethical internet behemoth they believe to be hiding behind the motto “Don’t be Evil.” Cleland and Brodsky believe that Google has a hidden political agenda, and is attempting to shape the world to match this agenda by controlling your information, as well as who has access to that information. In our interview, we talked about how terrorists have used Google, why “Don’t be Evil” is an unimpressive goal, and the ways individuals can de-Googlify, if they so choose. Read all about it, and more, in Cleland and Brodsky’s troubling new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor official in southern China, Song has earned a major reputation among scholars of Chinese history for writing the Tiangong kaiwu, a work on practical knowledge that covers topics ranging from salt-making, to gunpowder, to metallurgy. Schaefer’s book flesh out Song’s character, the social and physical world in which he lived, and the universe of his many writings, while opening a new stage for the study of technology and craftsmen in the early modern world. In the course of our interview, we explored Song’s fateful picnic, his thoughts on the morality of things, and the use of images as a form of argumentation, and we considered what might happen if you put a fish in a box for three days. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Can computers think? That was the question which provoked English mathematician Alan Turing to come up with what we call the Turing Test, in which a computer engages a human in conversation while a judge, unaware of who is who, looks on and tries to ascertain which participant is made of flesh and blood, and which of bits and bytes. Such a test is held every year in Brighton, England, where the most convincing human confederate is awarded a prize: The Most Human Human. There is also a prize for The Most Human Computer but to date no computer has ever been judged to be more convincingly human than a real person. Enter Brian Christian who, in 2009, took part in this test (known officially as the Loebner Prize) with the aim of being awarded the prize for Most Human Human. He was successful, and in his new book The Most Human Human: A Defense of Humanity in the Age of the Computer (Penguin, 2011) he charts the methodology of his approach, his conclusions on the conceptual value of the Turing Test and the linguistic insights which arise during conversation with a machine. The artificial intelligence of machines remains relatively primitive, but their programming is canny, and they can even appear to have robust personalities and encyclopaedic knowledge on specialist subjects. Christian’s experiences, presented in the form of his book, provide the reader with an accessible and compelling avenue into the reality of contemporary machine ‘intelligence’, the idiosyncratic tapestry that is language and, most of all, the things which make humans human; the things which machines can’t (yet) do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

This week New Books in Public Policy interviews Bob Goldberg about his new book Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit (Simon & Schuster, 2010). The book is a look at the way medical science is discussed and played out over the Internet. As Goldberg says on his website, tabloid medicine is “medical reporting or information based on or consisting of Internet material that sensationalizes and exaggerate the dangers of medical technology without describing the benefits.” In the interview, Goldberg talks about both this problem and its implications, from parents refusing to vaccinate their children to suicidal people avoiding antidepressants for fear of overhyped side effects. He also discusses the role of those who seek to foment fear, as well as discredit their opponents, using new media and innuendo regarding inappropriate conflicts of interest. Finally, Bob takes on the New Books in Public Policy signature question, “What policies would you initiate if you were king for a day?” and gives his policy prescriptions for addressing the problem of Tabloid Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off European empires; both struggled with slavery and its legacy; both are profoundly multiethnic and multiracial; both have spent much of their respective histories settling a vast “wild” frontier (though, to be fair, it was already “settled” by indigenous people); and, most importantly for our purposes, both are car-crazy, and indeed for almost the same reason. In the United States, the automobile meant modernity. It was the implement with which we, Americans of every stripe, would “tame” a continent and thereby realize our national potential. The Brazilians, according to Wolfe, feel the same way. Joel does a masterful job of explaining how the promise of this crucial technology entered the Brazilian psyche and became not only the vehicle of modernity (pardon the pun) but also the symbol of everything modern. Along the way Joel explodes one of the foundational myths of modern anti-globalism (and what used to be called “anti-imperialism”), namely, that powerful “multinational corporations” muscled their way into undeveloped countries and fostered a crippling “dependency.” Not in Brazil. The Brazilians invited Ford, GM, and VW into the country with a full understanding of what they were getting; they embraced the values these corporations fostered, all of which were seen as “modern”; and when things weren’t working out, they essentially forced them to act according to Brazilian interests. The Brazilians were, so to speak, in the driver’s seat of automobilismo; the supposedly all-powerful multinationals were along for the ride. In the end, both enjoyed the journey, despite some rough patches. I’m happy to say, however, that this book has no rough spots at all. You will drive carefree from the first to the last page. Have a good trip. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology