Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents

Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents PDF Author: Ariane Hanemaayer
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030886158
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
On what basis can we challenge Artificial Intelligence (AI) - its infusion, investment, and implementation across the globe? This book answers this question by drawing on a range of critical approaches from the social sciences and humanities, including posthumanism, ethics and human values, surveillance studies, Black feminism, and other strategies for social and political resistance. The authors analyse timely topics, including bias and language processing, responsibility and machine learning, COVID-19 and AI in health technologies, bio-AI and nanotechnology, digital ethics, AI and the gig economy, representations of AI in literature and culture, and many more. This book is for those who are currently working in the field of AI critique and disruption as well as in AI development and programming. It is also for those who want to learn more about how to doubt, question, challenge, reject, reform and otherwise reprise AI as it been practiced and promoted.

Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents

Artificial Intelligence and Its Discontents PDF Author: Ariane Hanemaayer
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030886158
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
On what basis can we challenge Artificial Intelligence (AI) - its infusion, investment, and implementation across the globe? This book answers this question by drawing on a range of critical approaches from the social sciences and humanities, including posthumanism, ethics and human values, surveillance studies, Black feminism, and other strategies for social and political resistance. The authors analyse timely topics, including bias and language processing, responsibility and machine learning, COVID-19 and AI in health technologies, bio-AI and nanotechnology, digital ethics, AI and the gig economy, representations of AI in literature and culture, and many more. This book is for those who are currently working in the field of AI critique and disruption as well as in AI development and programming. It is also for those who want to learn more about how to doubt, question, challenge, reject, reform and otherwise reprise AI as it been practiced and promoted.

Close to the Machine

Close to the Machine PDF Author: Ellen Ullman
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250024587
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
With a New Introduction by Jaron Lanier A Salon Best Book of the Year In 1997, the computer was still a relatively new tool---a sleek and unforgiving machine that was beyond the grasp of most users. With intimate and unflinching detail, software engineer Ellen Ullman examines the strange ecstasy of being at the forefront of the predominantly male technological revolution, and the difficulty of translating the inherent messiness of human life into artful and efficient code. Close to the Machine is an elegant and revelatory mediation on the dawn of the digital era.

Hacking Life

Hacking Life PDF Author: Joseph M. Reagle, Jr.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262538997
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
In an effort to keep up with a world of too much, life hackers sometimes risk going too far. Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool.They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life, Joseph Reagle examines these attempts to systematize living and finds that they are the latest in a long series of self-improvement methods. Life hacking, he writes, is self-help for the digital age's creative class. Reagle chronicles the history of life hacking, from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack through Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. He describes personal outsourcing, polyphasic sleep, the quantified self movement, and hacks for pickup artists. Life hacks can be useful, useless, and sometimes harmful (for example, if you treat others as cogs in your machine). Life hacks have strengths and weaknesses, which are sometimes like two sides of a coin: being efficient is not the same thing as being effective; being precious about minimalism does not mean you are living life unfettered; and compulsively checking your vital signs is its own sort of illness. With Hacking Life, Reagle sheds light on a question even non-hackers ponder: what does it mean to live a good life in the new millennium?

The Digital and Its Discontents

The Digital and Its Discontents PDF Author: Aden Evens
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452970645
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
A groundbreaking critique of the digital world that analyzes its universal technological foundations Whence that nagging sense that something in the digital is amiss—that, as wonderful as our devices are, time spent on smartphones and computers leaves us sour, enervated, alienated? The Digital and Its Discontents uniquely explains that worry and points us toward a more satisfying relationship between our digital lives and our nondigital selves, one that requires a radical change in the way we incorporate technology into our lives. Aden Evens analyzes universal technological principles—in particular, the binary logic—to show that they encourage certain ways of thinking while making others more challenging or impossible. What is out of reach for any digital machine is contingency, the ontological principle that refuses every rule. As humans engage ourselves and our world ever more through digital machines, we are losing touch with contingency and so banishing from our lives the accidental and unexpected that fuel our most creative and novel possibilities for living. Taking cues from philosophy rather than cultural or media theory, Evens argues that the consequences of this erosion of contingency are significant yet often overlooked because the same values that make the digital seem so desirable also make contingency seem unimportant—without contingency the digital is confined to what has already been thought, and yet the digital’s ubiquity has allowed it to disguise this inherent sterility. Responsive only to desires that meet the demands of its narrow logic, the digital requires its users to practice those same ideological dictates, instituting a hegemony of thought and value sustained by the pervasive presence of digital mechanisms. Interweaving technical and philosophical concepts, The Digital and Its Discontents advances a powerful and urgent argument about the digital and its impact on our lives. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Celebrity

Celebrity PDF Author: Milly Williamson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509511431
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.

The Digital Age and Its Discontents

The Digital Age and Its Discontents PDF Author: Matteo Stocchetti
Publisher: Helsinki University Press
ISBN: 9523690132
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Three decades into the ‘digital age’, the promises of emancipation of the digital ‘revolution’ in education are still unfulfilled. Furthermore, digitalization seems to generate new and unexpected challenges – for example, the unwarranted influence of digital monopolies, the radicalization of political communication, and the facilitation of mass surveillance, to name a few. This volume is a study of the downsides of digitalization and the re-organization of the social world that seems to be associated with it. In a critical perspective, technological development is not a natural but a social process: not autonomous from but very much dependent upon the interplay of forces and institutions in society. While influential forces seek to establish the idea that the practices of formal education should conform to technological change, here we support the view that education can challenge the capitalist appropriation of digital technology and, therefore, the nature and direction of change associated with it. This volume offers its readers intellectual prerequisites for critical engagement. It addresses themes such as Facebook’s response to its democratic discontents, the pedagogical implications of algorithmic knowledge and quantified self, as well as the impact of digitalization on academic profession. Finally, the book offers some elements to develop a vision of the role of education: what should be done in education to address the concerns that new communication technologies seem to pose more risks than opportunities for freedom and democracy.

Life in Code

Life in Code PDF Author: Ellen Ullman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374711410
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the Machine The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective. When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution. Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology’s loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn’t. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years—and the next twenty.

Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism

Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism PDF Author: Hamid R. Ekbia
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262036258
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
An exploration of a new division of labor between machines and humans, in which people provide value to the economy with little or no compensation. The computerization of the economy—and everyday life—has transformed the division of labor between humans and machines, shifting many people into work that is hidden, poorly compensated, or accepted as part of being a “user” of digital technology. Through our clicks and swipes, logins and profiles, emails and posts, we are, more or less willingly, participating in digital activities that yield economic value to others but little or no return to us. Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi call this kind of participation—the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks—“heteromation.” In this book, they explore the social and technological processes through which economic value is extracted from digitally mediated work, the nature of the value created, and what prompts people to participate in the process. Arguing that heteromation is a new logic of capital accumulation, Ekbia and Nardi consider different kinds of heteromated labor: communicative labor, seen in user-generated content on social media; cognitive labor, including microwork and self-service; creative labor, from gaming environments to literary productions; emotional labor, often hidden within paid jobs; and organizing labor, made up of collaborative groups such as citizen scientists. Ekbia and Nardi then offer a utopian vision: heteromation refigured to bring end users more fully into the prosperity of capitalism.

Cyber Security Using Modern Technologies

Cyber Security Using Modern Technologies PDF Author: Om Pal
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 100090802X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
1. Addresses a broad range of cyber security issues of modern networks 2. The book will comprise state-of-the-art techniques, methods and solutions for today's privacy / security issues. 3. Interdisciplinary approaches for countering the latest attacks on networks. 4. Will be excellent book for students, postgraduates and professionals.

Humanism and its Discontents

Humanism and its Discontents PDF Author: Paul Jorion
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303067004X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book explains that while posthumanism rose in opposition to the biblical contention that ‘Man was created in the image of God’, transhumanism ascertained the complementary view that ‘Man has been assigned dominion over all creatures’, further exploring a path that had been opened up by the Enlightenment’s notion of human perfectibility. It explains also how posthumanism and transhumanism relate to deconstruction theory, and on a broader level to capitalism, libertarianism, and the fight against human extinction which may involve trespassing the boundary of the skin, achieving individual immortality or dematerialization of the Self and colonisation of distant planets and stars. Two authors debate about truth and reason in today’s world, the notion of personhood and the legacy of the Nietzschean Superhuman in the current varieties of anti-humanism.