New Books in Technology

It’s the UConn Popcast, and when did we really start dreaming about the promise, and the danger, of artificial intelligence? When ChatGPT was released in 2022? When IBMs Deep Blue defeated Chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997? When Stanley Kubrick introduced us to HAL 9000 in 1968? Or perhaps you think it was much earlier. Maybe we have had the dream of AI since the development of the first computers by Von Neumann, or even earlier, by Babbage. Or maybe you think the dawning of the age of science itself is ground zero for our thoughts of artificial intelligence. Kevin LaGrandeur traces our dreams - and fears - of artificial intelligence back way further than this. LaGrandeur argues that ideas of artificial slaves can be found in the writing of Aristotle, in the Renaissance-era idea of the Homunculus, in the Jewish legend of the Golem. LaGrandeur, a longtime professor at the New York Institute of Technology and now an independent scholar and Director of Research at the Global AI Ethics Institute, has more than 25 years of experience teaching, writing and speaking about technology and society. We were thrilled to be able to have a wide-ranging conversation with Professor LaGrandeur about his pathbreaking research on Androids and intelligent networks in early modern culture, and his current work on the ethics and implications of AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use AI in psychiatry has created the conditions to turn the world into an asylum. Most of these systems, he writes, have vanishingly little evidence that they improve patient outcomes, but the risks they pose have less to do with technological shortcomings than with the application of deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale. Oberhaus became interested in the subject of mental health after tragically losing his sister to suicide. In The Silicon Shrink, he argues that these new, ostensibly therapeutic technologies already pose significant risks to vulnerable people, and they won't stop there. These new breeds of AI systems are creating a psychiatric surveillance economy in which the emotions, behavior, and cognition of everyday people are subtly manipulated by psychologically savvy algorithms that have escaped the clinic. Oberhaus also introduces readers to the concept of “swipe psychology,” which is quickly establishing itself as the dominant mode of diagnosing and treating mental disorders. It is not too late to change course, but to do so means we must reckon with the nature of mental illness, the limits of technology, and what it means to be human. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World (Verso, 2024) by Marijiam Did asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead of fuelling hyper-materialist, reactionary agendas. Combining cultural theory and materialist critiques with accessible language and personal anecdotes, industry insider Marijam Did engages both novices and seasoned connoisseurs. From the innovations of Pong and Doom to the intricate multiplayer or narrative-driven games, the author highlights the multifaceted stories of the gaming communities and the political actors who organise among them. Crucially, the focus also includes the people who make the games, shedding light on the brutal processes necessary to bring titles to the public. The videogame industry, now larger than the film and music industries combined, has a proven ability to challenge the status quo. With a rich array of examples, Did argues for a nuanced understanding of gaming’s influence so that this extraordinary power can be harnessed for good. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are being championed as forces for good and as solutions to the complex challenges of the aid sector. Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful (Polity, 2024) argues, however, that digital innovation engenders new forms of violence and entrenches power asymmetries between the global South and North. Dr. Madianou develops a new concept, technocolonialism, to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies. The concept of technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that digital infrastructures, data and AI play in accentuating inequities between aid providers and people in need. Drawing on ten years of research on the uses of digital technologies in humanitarian operations, Dr. Mirca Madianou examines a range of practices: from the normalization of biometric technologies and the datafication of humanitarian operations to experimentation in refugee camps, which are treated as laboratories for technological pilots. In so doing, the book opens new ground in the fields of humanitarianism and critical AI studies, and in the debates in postcolonial studies, by highlighting the fundamental role of digital technologies in reworking colonial genealogies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning author Antonio A. Casilli argues, we fail to recognize how our fellow humans are essential to their efficiency. The danger is not that robots will take our jobs, but that humans will have to do theirs. In this bracing and powerful book, Antonia A. Casilli uses up-to-the-minute research to show how today’s technologies, including AI, continue to exploit human labor—even ours. He connects the diverse activities of today’s tech laborers: platform workers, like Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts; “micro workers,” including those performing atomized tasks like data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk; and the rest of us, as we evaluate text or images to show we’re not robots, react to Facebook posts, or approve or improve the output of generative AI. As Casilli shows us, algorithms, search engines, and voice assistants wouldn’t function without unpaid or underpaid human contributions. Further, he warns that if we fail to recognize this human work, we risk a dark future for all human labor. Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation (U Chicago Press, 2025) urges us to move beyond the simplistic notion that machines are intelligent and autonomous. As the proverbial Godot, robots are the bearers of a messianic promise that is always postponed. Instead of bringing prosperity for all, they discipline the workforce, so we don’t dream of a world without drudgery and exploitation. Casilli’s eye-opening book makes clear that most “automation” requires human labor—and likely always will—shedding new light on today’s consequences and tomorrow’s threats of failing to recognize and compensate the “click workers” of today. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between oneself, identification of place, and the attachment/s they have to those places. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social),Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email ([email protected]) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What are numbers, and where do they come from? Based on her groundbreaking study of material devices used for counting in the Ancient Near East, Karenleigh Overmann proposes a novel answer to these timeless questions. Tune in as we talk with Karenleigh Overmann about her book, The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Gorgias Press, 2024). Karenleigh Overmann earned a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Oxford, and is research fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Peoples and Things host, Lee Vinsel, is joined by guest host and Peoples & Things producer, Joe Forte, Media Projects Manager with Virginia Tech Publishing, in interviewing Marshall Poe, the founder and editor of the New Books Network, the largest academic podcasting platform in the world. The trio discuss how the New Books Network came to be; how digital technologies open up new tools for academic work; changing media landscapes, including the recent bursting of a podcasting bubble; and the future of academic communication and publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

This conversation includes James Boyle, Duke University; Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, UPR-M; Héctor José Huyke, UPR-M, and Natalia Bustos, UPR-M. This is the first of two episodes about The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood. The second, in Spanish, will appear on the New Books Network en español. The series is sponsored by the Encuentros descoloniales focal group at Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at UPRM, a group of scholars who consider how decolonial approaches ​​can provide nuance in scientific knowledge. This episode and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the UPRM have been supported by the Mellon Foundation. The conversation is part of the “STEM to STEAM” project of the “Cornerstone” initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which stresses the importance of integrating humanistic perspectives in the sciences. The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood is available online for free through the MIT website per the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. Shrouded within a labyrinth of oil fields, pipelines, and manufacturies, it tends to be known only through its magical effects: the thrill of the road, the euphoria of flight, and the metamorphic allure of everything from vinyl records to celluloid film and synthetic clothing. In Oil (Bloomsbury, 2024), Dr. Michael Tondre shows how hydrocarbon became today's pre-eminent power. How did oil come to structure selfhood and social relations? And to what extent is oil not only a commercial product but a cultural one-something shaped by widely imagined dreams and desires? Amid a warming world unleashed by fossil fuels, oil appears as a rich resource for thinking about histories of globalization and technology no less than the energetic underpinnings of literature, film, and art. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

If you walk into David Cecchetto‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagements,” strange sonic experiments that help him—and his students—understand the nature of our computer-driven lives. In this episode, we feature an extended chat with David about his recent book, Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press). It’s a book about the eternal impossibility of communication and the texture of that impossibility in our current computer-mediated age. David says we live in the afterlife of data, by which he means we know that our data-driven representations of the world don’t really capture the reality of our inner or outer lives, and we know that algorithms perpetuate injustices of all sorts—and yet, we still live our lives as if we do believe in the data. And this is where his engagements come in, the sonic experiments that confront the distortions and fallacies and textures of a data-driven life. David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, he’s President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He wrote the book Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (2013) and he’s co-authored and edited several others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

This special episode features a discussion between Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society substack newsletter and Executive Director of the Christian Studies Center of Gainesville, Florida. In the first part, Sacasas gives a presentation - riffing on the title of Martin Heidegger’s famous essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” - on the question of the human, which may be more interesting than endless debates about the definition of “technology.” Then Vinsel gives his own presentation before the pair discuss the similarities and differences of their views. The episode includes a live Q&A with audience members. This episode was recorded as a live event at the Bradley Study Center, a Christian studies center at Virginia Tech. Special thanks to Bradley Study Center for making the event possible, especially to its Executive Director Mike Weaver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562. In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come. Elizabeth King, a sculptor and writer, is professor emerita of sculpture and extended media at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond. W. David Todd is associate curator emeritus and former conservator of timekeeping at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a collections management intern in the public sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be fun. The Commodore 64 (C64) is officially the best-selling desktop computer model of all time, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. It was also, from 1985 to 1993, the platform for which most video games were made. But although it sold at least twice as many units as other home computers of its time, such as the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, or Commodore Amiga, it is strangely forgotten in many computer histories. In Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer (MIT Press, 2024), Jesper Juul argues that the C64 was so popular because it was so versatile, a machine developers and users would reinvent again and again over the course of 40 years. First it was a serious computer, next a game computer, then a computer for showcasing technical brilliance (graphical demos using the machine in seemingly impossible ways), then a struggling competitor, and finally a retro device whose limitations are now charming. The C64, Juul shows, has been ignored by history because it was too much fun. Richly illustrated in full color, this book is the first in-depth examination of the C64's design and history, and the first to integrate US and European histories. Containing interviews with Commodore engineers as well as an insightful look at C64 games, music, and software, Too Much Fun will appeal to those who used a Commodore 64, those interested in the history of computing and video games and computational literacy, or just those who wish their technological devices would last longer. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself. In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine (MIT Press, 2024) takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what “counts” as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself. The Unreal platform serves as a kind of technical and political archive of the games industry, highlighting how the techniques and concerns of games have shifted and accreted over the past 30 years. Today, Unreal is also used in contexts far beyond games, including in public communication, biomedical research, civil engineering, and military simulation and training. The author's depth of technical analysis, combined with new archival findings, contributes to discussions of topics rarely covered in games studies (such as the politics of graphical rendering algorithms), as well as new readings of previously “closed” case studies (such as the engine's entanglement with the US military and American masculinity in America's Army). Culture, Malazita writes, is not “built into” software but emerges through human practices with code. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Titel kulturmagazin, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

It’s the UConn Popcast, and Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci fi movie, is a provocative examination of what an updated Turing test for a super-capable AI might look like, if the designer of the test was a megalomaniacal tech-mogul / genius. The movie, starring Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander, is a rich and often confounding text, which seems to posit a horrifying possibility: what if the real alignment problem is teaching AI the worst of humanity’s manipulative and instrumental traits? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? Among the states facing this dilemma of fighting limited wars, only China has given information-age weapons such a prominent role. While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counter-space capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries. In Under the Nuclear Shadow: China's Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton UP, 2024), Fiona Cunningham examines this distinctive aspect of China’s post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of “strategic substitution.” When crises with the United States highlighted the inadequacy of China’s existing military capabilities, Cunningham argues, China pursued information-age weapons that promised to provide credible leverage against adversaries rapidly. Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century. She offers unprecedented insights into China’s military modernization trajectory as she details the strengths and weaknesses of China’s strategic substitution approach. Under the Nuclear Shadow also looks ahead at the uncertain future of China’s strategic substitution approach and briefly explores too how other states might seize upon the promise of emerging technologies to address weaknesses in their own military strategies. Our guest today is Fiona S. Cunningham, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Sue Ollerhead. Dr. Ollerhead is currently a Senior Lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education and the Director of the Secondary Education Program at Macquarie University. Her expertise lies in English language and literacy learning and teaching in multicultural and multilingual education contexts. Her research interests include translanguaging, multilingual pedagogies, literacy across the curriculum and oracy development in schools. Dr. Ollerhead is currently editor of TESOL in Context, the peer reviewed journal of the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. She serves on the executive board of the English as a Medium of Instruction Centre (EMI) at Macquarie University. Brynn and Sue chat about an article that Sue has recently written for the Australian Association for Research in Education entitled “Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn. Does AI?”. They discuss the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT and how these platforms are affecting teacher training. A wonderful companion read to this episode is Distinguished Ingrid Piller’s Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building. If you liked this episode, check out more resources on technology and language: Will technology make language rights obsolete?; the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us; and Are language technologies counterproductive to learning? If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Joshua Brinkman, Assistant Teaching Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina State University, about his book, American Farming Culture and the History of Technology (Routledge, 2024). The book provides a fascinating exploration about how American farmers–contrary to their image as backwards and even anti-technology–have prided and put forward images of themselves as existing on the technological cutting-edge of modernity. Brinkman examines how different ideologies of farming have developed over time in the United States and how these ideologies have shaped the adoption of and ideas around new agricultural technologies. In addition to his academic work, Brinkman is also an accomplished saxophonist and jazz musician, and you can find recordings from two of his current bands, the Fabulous Nite-Life Boogie and Les Trois Chats, online. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool that certainly could not have been imagined at its inception. In their engaging book Twitter: A Biography (NYU Press, 2020), Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym (@nancybaym) tell the fascinating and surprising story of how this platform developed from a quirky SMS tool for publicly sharing intimate details of personal life to a major source of late-breaking news, political activism, and even governmental communication. This story explores how many of Twitter's most ubiquitous and iconic conventions were not systematically rolled out from a centralized corporate strategy, but so often driven by users who continued to innovate within the limitations of the platform they had to democratically create the platform they desired. Yet this story highlights the tensions along the way as Twitter has adapted to new and unforeseen challenges, business models, and social consequences as the experiments of social media have become increasingly powerful, influential, and contested. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the wild and changing landscape of internet communication and communities. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

This episode is based upon three readings: Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence aka The Turing Test paper. Turing starts his paper by asking “can machines think?” before deciding that’s a meaningless question. Instead, he invents something he calls “the imitation game” - a text conversation where the player has to guess whether they are chatting with another person or with an AI. ChatGPT was such a bombshell because it easily and consistently passes this “Turing Test” by giving human-like responses to questions. Here’s the issue: the Turing Test is based upon AI deception, not thinking. Turing set out to ask Can Machines Think? and ended up showing how easily AI can deceive us. Karel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. This is the first AI Takeover story. It’s a play written in 1920 about a factory manufacturing artificial persons. Čapek introduced the word Robot to the English language - it’s derived from robota, a Czech word meaning forced labor. Čapek’s robots are supposed to be the ultimate workers, free from distracting human needs and desires. Yet, they mysteriously start to glitch, gnashing their teeth, freezing up. When they are given guns and asked to fight humanity’s wars, they become super soldiers as well as perfect workers. Anyone who has seen Blade Runner, The Terminator, or Battlestar Galactica - all inspired by Čapek’s play - knows what happens next. Rossum’s Universal Robots is the original AI takeover story, as well as being a dead-on satire of twentieth century ideas like Fordism and nationalism. Joanna Bryson’s Robots Should be Slaves. Bryson, a computer scientist, makes a provocative intervention into AI ethics. She argues that as AI becomes more advanced, and robots more lifelike, we are going to get dangerously confused: we’ll want to give robots rights that they cannot and should not have. Bryson argues that robots are owned by us and should be seen and used as property. She wants to avoid conflating the human and the mechanical, yet, by using the terminology of slavery, she introduces into the AI debate the very thing she seeks to deny - the concept of human rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

As part of our informal series on artificial intelligence, Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Beane, Assistant Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, about his book The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in the Age of Intelligent Machines (HarperCollins, 2024). Beane outlines the fascinating forms of research he did - both his own ethnographic work and reanalyzing the data of other ethnographers - to better understand how automating technologies are being adopted in organizational settings and how such adoption may threaten traditional mentor-mentee relationships through which junior workers learn crucial skills. Beane also discusses ways in which the worst negative skill-learning outcomes may be avoided and his own work trying to create new training systems to improve our current situation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students' abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, grant solicitations, news reports, tech industry marketing materials, and product demonstrations, Weinberg argues that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities. Mentioned in this episode is this piece that Dr. Weinberg wrote in Inside Higher Ed: Lindsay Weinberg is a clinical assistant professor and the Director of the Tech Justice Lab in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. 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 present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources--our data--exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact, every time we unthinkingly click "Accept" on a set of Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to be kept indefinitely, repackaged by companies to control and exploit us for their own profit. In Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (The University of Chicago Press, 2024), Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry explain why postindustrial capitalism cannot be understood without colonialism, and why race is a critical factor in who benefits from data colonialism, just as it was for historic colonialism. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, Mejias and Couldry explore the concept of data colonialism, revealing how history can help us understand the emerging future--and how we can fight back. Mention in this episode: Tierra Comun (English Version) Ulises A. Mejias is professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. Nick Couldry is professor of media, communications, and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry. Astrosmash, Snafu, Star Strike, Utopia—do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and 1984. This system was Atari’s main rival during a key period when videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie® (MIT Press, 2024), Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze Intellivision’s chips and code, games, marketing and business strategies, organizational and social history, and the cultural and economic context of the early US games industry from the mid-1970s to the great videogame industry crash of 1983. While many remember Atari, Intellivision has largely been forgotten. As such, Intellivision fills a crucial gap in videogame scholarship, telling the story of a console that sold millions and competed aggressively against Atari. Drawing on a wealth of data from both institutional and personal archives and over 150 interviews with programmers, engineers, executives, marketers, and designers, Boellstorff and Soderman examine the relationship between videogames and toys—an under-analyzed aspect of videogame history—and discuss the impact of home computing on the rise of videogames, the gendered implications of play and videogame design at Mattel, and the blurring of work and play in the early games industry. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers (U Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing despite women’s underrepresentation in the industry. Proposing the notion of “companionate computing,” Reem Hilu reimagines the spread of computers into American homes as the history of an interpersonal, romantic, and familial medium. She details the integration of computing into family relationships—from helping couples have better sex and offering thoughtful simulations of masculine seduction to animating cute robot companions and giving voice to dolls that could talk to lonely children—underscoring how these computer applications directly responded to the companionate needs of their users as a way to ease growing pressures on home life. The Intimate Life of Computers is a vital contribution to feminist media history, highlighting how the emergence of personal computing dovetailed with changing gender roles and other social and cultural shifts. Eschewing the emphasis on technologies and institutions typically foregrounded in personal-computer histories, Hilu uncovers the surprising ways that domesticity and family life guided the earlier stages of our all-pervasive digital culture. Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In this episode of High Theory, Marcello Vitali-Rosati tells us about bugs! A bug can be a small insect, an illness, a spy device, or a digital malfunction. The computer bug, the ghost in the machine, derives from an older engineering use of bug as mechanical failure, and the insect, in turn, derives from an earlier sense of bug as specter, an invisible and frightening ghost. Like philosophy itself, the computer bug stops our ordinary workflow and causes us to think, to question the very task we had set out to undertake. Marcello’s new book, Éloge du bug: être libre à l’époque du numérique (Zones, La Découverte, Paris 2024), sings the praises of computer bugs. By stopping things from working as expected, the bug is a veritable Socratic demon: it enables the emergence of critical thinking and allows the multiplicity of thinking paradigms that characterizes philosophy. Instead of letting ourselves be seduced by a discourse which, promising to free us from all the material tasks of our lives, ends up enslaving us completely to a handful of companies, this book, with its praise of the bug, shows how to bring about a true critical spirit and a literacy capable of setting us free in our digital age. You can read the book online here! Marcello Vitali-Rosati is a philosopher and specialist in digital publishing. He works as a professor in the Department of French Literatures at the University of Montreal, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities and the Chair of excellence in digital publishing at the Université de Rouen (France). Through the study and practice of code, he analyzes how algorithms, formats, software, and platforms redefine the notions of human, identity, knowledge, and literature. An active contributor to the theory of editorialization, he works on designing new forms of knowledge production and dissemination as well as innovative editorial workflows. He also works as an editor, publishes widely, and leads several digital humanities projects. You can read more about his work on his website, in English, French, or Italian. The image for this episode shows a drawing of a moth on a purple and black patterned background. It was created by Saronik Bosu by manipulating public domain photograph of the circuitry of IBM 7030 and a drawing from a nineteenth century entomology textbook, also in public domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice (Wiley, 2024) describes former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Ken Wilcox's firsthand challenges he encountered in four years “on the ground” trying to establish a joint venture between SVB and the Chinese government to fund local innovation design―and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) efforts to systematically sabotage the project and steal SVB's business model. This book provides actionable advice drawn from meticulous notes Wilcox took from interviews with people from all walks of Chinese life, including Party and non-Party members, the business elite, and domestic workers. Describing a China he found fascinating and maddeningly complex, this book explores topics including: Difficulties in transplanting SVB's model to China, from misunderstandings about titles and responsibilities to pitched battles over toilet design Ethics and practices widely adopted by Chinese businesses today and why China must be met with realistic expectations Wilcox's own honest missteps and the painfully learned lessons that came afterwards Engrossing, enlightening, and entertaining, The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice is an essential cautionary tale and guidebook for anyone seeking to do business in or with China, and an essential first-person account for academics trying to understand China’s unique political economy and development trajectory. Ken Wilcox was the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) from 2001 to 2011, then the CEO of SVB’s joint venture with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB-SVB) in Shanghai until 2015, followed by four years as its Vice Chairman. He currently serves on the boards of the Asia Society of Northern California, the Asian Art Museum, and UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center, as well as Columbia Lake Partners, a European venture-debt fund. He is on the Board of Advisors of the Fudan University School of Management in Shanghai and teaches as an Adjunct Professor at U.C. Berkeley. Ken holds a PhD in German from Ohio State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He has given numerous speeches in both English and Chinese, published a variety of articles in the banking press, and recently wrote the management book “Leading Through Culture: How Real Leaders Create Cultures That Motivate People to Achieve Great Things” (Waterside Productions, 2020) and its accompanying workbook, “How About You?” (Waterside Productions, 2023). The father of two sons, he lives in San Francisco with his wife, Ruth, and several antique cars. For more of Ken’s insights, follow his substack. Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy. Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s tech sector include From Click to Boom, on the political economy of e-commerce in China, Trafficking Data, on how Chinese and American firms exploit user data, The Tao of Alibaba, on Alibaba’s business model and organizational culture, Surveillance State, on China’s digital surveillance, Prototype Nation, on the culture and politics of China’s innovation economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument? Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Fiona Smyth tells the fascinating story of the scientists, architects and musicians who set out to answer this question. Beginning at the turn of the century, their innovative experiments, which took place at sites ranging from Herbert Baker's Assembly Chamber in Delhi to Abbey Road Studios and a disused munitions factory near Perivale, would come to define the field of 'architectural acoustics'. They culminated in 1951 with the opening of the Royal Festival Hall - the first building to be designed for musical tone. Deeply researched and richly illustrated, Pistols in St Paul's brings to light a scientific quest spanning half a century, one that demonstrates the power of international cooperation in the darkest of times. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

All We All Cyborgs Now? (Basilian Media, 2024) is a series of 32 short essay-length reflections on "Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine." Now is an excellent time to be thinking about our relationship with technologies, digital and non-digital alike. Written from a Christian perspective, this book engages prior works on technology, and offers its own useful perspective on key problems of the technological moment in which we find ourselves. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernisation, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) examines the history of the computer industry in socialist Bulgaria. Combining the histories of technology and political economy with that of the Cold War and the modern Balkans, Balkan Cyberia challenges the notions of backwardness, the importance of small states in large geopolitical systems, the nature of the Iron Curtain, and the concept of 1989 as a convenient end-point in the history of communism. By drawing on Bulgarian, Indian, and Russian archives, as well as a range of interviews, this work reveals how a small Balkan state used its unique advantages to gain major markets, and in the process transform its political thinking. A local and a global story at the same time, the story of the Bulgarian computer offers unique insights into the history of the twentieth century information age. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access. In From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China (Princeton, 2024) Lizhi Liu suggests a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and enforcement to digital platforms—a process she calls “institutional outsourcing.” China’s e-commerce boom showcases this digital path to development. In merely two decades, China built from scratch a two-trillion-dollar e-commerce market, with 800 million users, seventy million jobs, and nearly fifty percent of global online retail sales. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, this market boom occurred because of weak government institutions, not despite them. Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution. For a surprisingly long period, the authoritarian government acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered with this private institutional building despite its disruptive nature. Drawing on a plethora of interviews, original surveys, proprietary data, and a field experiment, Liu shows that the resulting e-commerce boom had far-reaching effects on China. Institutional outsourcing nonetheless harbors its own challenges. With inadequate regulation, platforms may abuse market power, while excessive regulation stifles institutional innovation. China’s regulatory oscillations toward platforms—from laissez-faire to crackdown and back to support—underscore the struggle to strike the right balance. Lizhi Liu is assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government. Her work has been published by American Economic Review: Insights, Studies in Comparative International Development, Minnesota Law Review, Oxford University Press, and Princeton University Press. She was also listed as a Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professor of 2021. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD), Statistics (MS), and International Policy Studies (MA) from Stanford University and in International Relations (LLB) from Renmin University of China. Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy. Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s tech sector include Trafficking Data, on how Chinese and American firms exploit user data, The Tao of Alibaba, on Alibaba’s business model and organizational culture, Surveillance State, on China’s digital surveillance, Prototype Nation, on the culture and politics of China’s innovation economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Modern biotechnology--genetic engineering and cell manipulation--originated with the 1973 demonstration that genes from different organisms could be recombined and propagated in Escherichia coli. More than 50 years on, biotech is now a science that defines the 21st century. While still a young scientist, Tim Harris committed himself to this emerging industry. Now an accomplished investigator who became an astute, seasoned, and successful biotech business executive, he has written a captivating memoir chronicling the birth and maturation of the industry that now touches everyone's lives. He combines accounts of scientific successes and failures with a personal story of ambition, challenge, and discovery. From the pioneering early days of gene cloning and monoclonal antibodies to the current cutting-edge advancements in cell therapy, gene editing, and personalized medicine, Harris provides a candidly honest insider's view of biotech's remarkable evolution and its profound impact on health care. In Pursuit of Unicorns: A Journey Through 50 Years of Biotechnology (Cold Springs Harbor, 2024) is rich in detail about the accomplishments, struggles, and triumphs played out in the laboratories and boardrooms of the many different companies set up to exploit the technology, and the often colourful personalities involved. It is a fascinating blend of science, business, and ethics. Harris's reflections on the complexities that come with rapid technological progress, and the responsibilities of scientists in shaping the future, are thought-provoking and timely. Tim Harris's story is one of passion, resilience, and an unwavering commitment from those involved to making a difference. His book is a compelling read for working scientists (especially early- and mid-career academic and industry researchers wondering how to apply their research to human health), biotechnology entrepreneurs and investors, and anyone fascinated by how profoundly biotechnology has changed our world and where it is leading us in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

How are human computation systems developed in the field of citizen science to achieve what neither humans nor computers can do alone? In At the Edge of AI: Human Computation Systems and Their Intraverting Relations (Transcript, 2024), Libuse Hannah Veprek examines the imagination of these assemblages, their creation, and everyday negotiation in the interplay of various actors and play/science entanglements at the edge of AI. Focusing on their human-technology relations, this ethnographic study shows how these formations are marked by intraversions, as they change with technological advancements and the actors' goals, motivations, and practices. This work contributes to the constructive and critical ethnographic engagement with human-AI assemblages in the making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting where they are. For millennia, these four directions have been foundational to our travel, navigation and exploration and are central to the imaginative, moral and political geography of virtually every culture in the world. Yet they are far more subjective and various – sometimes contradictory – than we might realise. Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024) by Dr. Jerry Brotton takes the reader on a journey of directional discovery. Dr. Brotton reveals why Hebrew culture privileges east; why Renaissance Europeans began drawing north at the top of their maps; why the early Islam revered the south; why the Aztecs used five colour-coded cardinal directions; and why no societies, primitive or modern, have ever orientated themselves westwards. He ends by reflecting on our digital age in which we, the little blue dot on the screen, have become the most important compass point. Throughout, Dr. Brotton shows that the directions reflect a human desire to create order and that they only have meaning, literally and metaphorically, depending on where you stand. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern California, and Jason Resnikoff, assistant professor of contemporary history at the University of Groningen, about the history of automation. The discussion takes as its launching point an essay Elzway and Resnikoff published in the journal Labor titled, “Whence Automation?: The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept.” The conversation approaches the history of automation and how to study it from a number of angles, including diving into Elzway’s and Resnikoff’s individual research agendas, as well as discussion of the nature of collaborative work in history, a field that can sometimes be all-too competitive and turf-like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920). Čapek’s play invented the word “robot” and pioneered the genre of the AI uprising. The play - a clear influence on works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica – is a deep rumination on the boundary between the natural and artificial, the mechanical and the ineffable, and the sacred and the profane. We react to this seminal work in popular thinking about artificial intelligence, written more than a century ago yet retaining deep resonance today. Music by Aiva. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton University Press, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, which explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Dr. Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Dr. Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works. Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world. Our guest is: Dr. Allison Pugh, who is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the 2024-25 Vice President of the American Sociological Association. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. She is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity and Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. Her writing has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New Republic. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Playlist for listeners: Talking To Strangers Making A Meaningful Life How to Human Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World More Than A Glitch Meditation and the Academic Life Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Queer men's cultures of intimacy have long been sites of fierce contestation. Indeed, debates have raged for decades over issues such as monogamy, safer sex, sexual racism and gay marriage. The introduction of the smartphone in 2008 only intensified these debates whilst also raising a further set of questions which are explored in this open access book. Through interviews with a diverse group of 43 queer men about their smartphone mediated intimacies, Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2024) reveals that queer men use their smartphones, not simply to arrange intimate encounters, but more specifically to gain a sense of control over the parts of their intimate lives that make them feel most vulnerable. For instance, some use messaging apps to gain a sense of control over intimate conversations that they feel too vulnerable to have in person. Others use the 'block' function on dating apps to feel in control of the racism and transphobia they are vulnerable to on these apps. Digital Intimacies therefore illuminates not only hitherto underexplored aspects of queer men's cultures of intimacy but crucially also brings into view previously obscured cultural dynamics, gaining insight into the historical moments in which they occur. Jamie Hakim is Lecturer at King's College London, UK. James Cummings is Lecturer at the University of York, UK. Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Technology has surpassed religion as the central focus of our lives, from our dependence on smartphones to the way that tech has infused almost every aspect of our lives including our homes, our relationships, and even our bodies. Beyond these practical matters, Tech has become a religion with multiple sects who follow their own beliefs, practices, hierarchies, and visions of heaven and hell. There are zealous prophets and humble servants, messiahs and visions of a coming apocalypse. In Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation (MIT Press, 2024), Harvard and MIT’s humanist chaplain Greg Epstein approaches Tech with the perspective of a critical thinker who is fascinated by technical innovation and also questions the worth of those advancements in human terms. He places the current faith in Tech in historical and personal context by examining the skeptics, mystics, heretics, and whistleblowers who embody the reform mindset he believes we desperately need. Epstein argues for demanding that technology serve the development of human lives that are worth living rather than the extreme "up and to the right" transactional approach that is often rewarded in our current age of capitalism. In this age of global technology worship, Greg Epstein presents the case for taking an agnostic view, one that can both appreciate the benefits of Tech and also remain skeptical about some of the more outlandish claims and seductive promises. Author recommended reading: Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff Hosted by Meghan Cochran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age (John Hopkins University Press, December 2024) explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today. By the mid-1990s, the specter of a "digital dark age" haunted libraries, portending a bleak future with no historical record that threatened cyber obsolescence, deletion, and apathy. People around the world worked to solve this impending problem. In San Francisco, technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle launched his scrappy nonprofit, Internet Archive, filling tape drives with internet content. Elsewhere, in Washington, Canberra, Ottawa, and Stockholm, librarians developed innovative new programs to safeguard digital heritage. Cataloging worries among librarians, technologists, futurists, and writers from WWII onward, through early practitioners, to an extended case study of how September 11 prompted institutions to preserve thousands of digital artifacts related to the attacks, Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how the web gained a long-lasting memory. By understanding this history, we can equip our society to better grapple with future internet shifts. Ian Milligan is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as an associate vice president in the Office of Research. Milligan is the author of The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Edward Duffield (1730–1803) was a colonial Philadelphia clockmaker, whose elegant brass, mahogany, and walnut timekeepers stand proudly in major American museums and collections. Duffield, unlike other leather-apron ‘mechanics,’ was born rich and owned a country estate, Benfield, and many more properties. He was deeply involved in civic and church affairs during crucial years in American history—his lifelong close friend, Benjamin Franklin, was staying at Duffield’s Benfield estate when Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams first discussed the Declaration of Independence. Sally, Franklin’s daughter, brought her family there for extended periods during the Revolution and Franklin’s wife, Deborah, was best friends for fifty years with Duffield’s mother-in-law. Duffield was even one of three executors of Franklin’s will. In Edward Duffield: Philadelphia Clockmaker, Citizen, Gentleman, 1730-1803 (American Philosophical Society Press, 2024), Bob Frishman catalogs and describes seventy-one known Duffield clocks and instruments and reveals how, during the mid-eighteenth century, they largely were not fabricated from scratch by isolated individuals. He contends that Duffield and his fellow clockmakers were not furniture-makers; they were mechanical artisans whose complex metal machines rang the hours and steadily ticked inside wooden cases made by others. Existing books on Philadelphia clocks have focused on these artifacts as furniture, including their woodwork, cabinetmakers, and decorative aspects. However, Frishman, a professional horologist for nearly four decades, brings his vast expertise to bear on this first comprehensive study of Duffield’s life and work. Far more than a treatise on pre-industrial horological timekeeping, this book tells the compelling stories of a man, a city, and an era, while deepening our appreciation for Duffield’s stately sentinels—often a colonial American family’s most valuable possession—and the times and places in which their makers lived. Bob Frishman has professionally repaired nearly 8,000 timepieces and sold more than 1,700 vintage clocks and watches. As a scholar of horology, and assisted by a personal library of 900 books on the subject, he has published more than 100 articles and reviews in Maine Antique Digest, Watch & Clock Bulletin, and elsewhere. Learn more at his website. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?" In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were to pass it, could be said to herald the onset of the age of machine intelligence. With large language models (LLMs) today easily passing this test, we react to the paper and examine the implications from a humanistic standpoint. Did Turing successfully predict contemporary LLMs 75 years ago? What does it mean that Turing’s test was based not on the abilities of a machine per se, but rather on a machine’s ability to deceive humans? How have Turing’s ideas permeated our cultural and popular cultural ideas about AI? And why did Turing think ESP had a role to play in understanding AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?" In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were to pass it, could be said to herald the onset of the age of machine intelligence. With large language models (LLMs) today easily passing this test, we react to the paper and examine the implications from a humanistic standpoint. Did Turing successfully predict contemporary LLMs 75 years ago? What does it mean that Turing’s test was based not on the abilities of a machine per se, but rather on a machine’s ability to deceive humans? How have Turing’s ideas permeated our cultural and popular cultural ideas about AI? And why did Turing think ESP had a role to play in understanding AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023). In addition to being a professor, Alper is also an educational researcher who has worked over the past 20 years to make inclusive and accessible learning products with media organizations such as Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and PBS KIDS. Vinsel and Alper talk about disability studies, the nature of Alper’s empirical work, the arc of Alper’s career, including her future projects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development (U Wisconsin Press, 2023) tells the story of the entanglement of politics and technology during Indonesia's rapid post-World War II development. As a central part of its nation-building project, the Indonesian state sought to supply electricity to the entire country, bringing transformative socioeconomic benefits across its heterogeneous territories and populations. While this project was driven by nationalistic impulses, it was also motivated by a genuine interest in social justice. The entanglement of these two ideologies-nation-building and equity-shaped how electrification was carried out, including how the state chose the technologies it did. Private companies and electric cooperatives vied with the hegemonic state power company to participate in a monumental undertaking that would transform daily life for all Indonesians, especially rural citizens. In this innovative volume, Anto Mohsin brings Indonesian studies together with science and technology studies to understand a crucial period in modern Indonesian history. He shows that attempts to illuminate the country were inseparable from the effort to maintain the new nation-state, chart its path to independence, and legitimize ruling regimes. In exchange for an often dramatically improved standard of living, people gave their votes, and their acquiescence, to the ruling government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What can sound technologies tell us about our relationship to media as a whole? This is one of the central questions in the research of Phantom Power‘s host, Mack Hagood. To find its answer, he studies devices that get little attention from media scholars: noise-cancelling headphones, white noise machines, apps that make nature sounds, tinnitus maskers–even musical pillows. The story these media tell is rather different from the standard narrative, in which media are conveyors of information and entertainment. In his book Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, Mack argues that media are the way we control how–and how much–we let the world affect us. On Phantom Power, Mack has always focused on presenting the ideas of other scholars and sound artists. However, during our summer break we thought we’d share a piece by Mack that appeared in another podcast, the audio edition of Real Life, a razor-sharp magazine on digital culture. “Emotional Rescue” begins with the odd example of pillow-based audio technology to make the point that media are really about something more intimate than information: The cozy conflation of content and comfort… is not a recent digital development. Nor is it, I would argue, a quirky edge case of media use. In fact, this is what media are: tools for altering how the body feels and what it perceives, controlling our relationship to others and the world, enveloping ourselves, and even disappearing ourselves. Misunderstanding the true nature of our media use isn’t merely of academic concern–it has had disastrous effects on our politics and social cohesion. The article was written for the Real Life website, then subsequently dropped in podcast form. Writing for the eye is quite different from writing for the ear, but podcast producer and narrator Britney Gil is amazing at elucidating written prose for the listener. If you listen to nonfiction audiobooks and/or want to hear a great narrator reading insightful takes on digital life, be sure to subscribe to Real Life: Audio Edition. “Emotional Rescue” by Mack Hagood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Over the past decades, under the cover of "innovation," technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality--where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world--is terrible news for democracies and citizens. In The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Princeton UP, 2024), Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies--from social media to artificial intelligence--have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can--and must--resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world. Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world--and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion, 2024) by John Withington illuminates the glittering history of fireworks, from their mysterious beginnings to the dazzling big-budget displays of today. It describes how they enthralled the world’s royal courts and became a sensation across the British Empire. There are stories of innovations like ‘living fireworks’, fiercely fought international competitions and the technology behind modern showpieces viewed by millions. Practitioners say fireworks are an art, and they have inspired artists from Shakespeare, Handel, Dickens and Whistler to Katy Perry. But Withington also covers fireworks’ practical uses – rescues at sea, attempts to control the weather – while not ignoring their dangers, accidents or efforts to make them safer. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the history of ancient and Medieval technologies. The pair use Long’s forthcoming book, Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), as a launching point but also cover her previous work, especially including Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2018), which, among other things, contains deep reflections on the history of maintenance. Long and Vinsel also discuss Long’s future projects, including a fascinating sounding study of the history of sumptuary laws - regulations on expenditures of luxury goods, including food, clothing, and personal items - and their connection to technological change. GET EXCITED! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marco Bastos presents an extensive analysis of social media manipulation. The book examines emerging changes in partisan politics, nationalist and populist values, as well as broader societal changes that are feeding into polarisation and echo-chamber communication. It pulls the curtain back on the techniques employed to interfere with, and potentially distort, the public discussion. Making complex data accessible to non-technical audiences, this unique post-mortem of the Brexit referendum contributes to our understanding of social media disinformation in the UK and beyond. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology