Sensation Machines

Sensation Machines PDF Author: Adam Wilson
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1641291656
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Set in a near-future New York City, where the ubiquity of automation has caused mass unemployment and a major market crash, Sensation Machines is by turns a portrait of a marriage in decline, a murder mystery, and a panoramic vision of a post-Trump economic dystopia. Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Jewish Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of their daughter's stillbirth. Michael, a Wall Street trader, has secretly lost the couple's life savings. Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a Cambridge Analytica--style data mining project, whose mysterious owner has ambitions to reshape America's social and political landscapes. When Michael's best friend is murdered, the evidence leads back to Wendy's client, setting off a dangerous chain of events that will profoundly change the couple--and the country. Sensation Machines inhabits the perspectives of the Wall Street bros, the marketing mad men, the Silicon Valley sociopaths--and uncomfortably humanizes them, while considering the ways everyone is complicit in the consequences of late capitalism. Sensation Machines is a novel of big ideas, intricate plotting, and keenly observed human drama.

Sensation Machines

Sensation Machines PDF Author: Adam Wilson
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1641291656
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Set in a near-future New York City, where the ubiquity of automation has caused mass unemployment and a major market crash, Sensation Machines is by turns a portrait of a marriage in decline, a murder mystery, and a panoramic vision of a post-Trump economic dystopia. Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Jewish Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of their daughter's stillbirth. Michael, a Wall Street trader, has secretly lost the couple's life savings. Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a Cambridge Analytica--style data mining project, whose mysterious owner has ambitions to reshape America's social and political landscapes. When Michael's best friend is murdered, the evidence leads back to Wendy's client, setting off a dangerous chain of events that will profoundly change the couple--and the country. Sensation Machines inhabits the perspectives of the Wall Street bros, the marketing mad men, the Silicon Valley sociopaths--and uncomfortably humanizes them, while considering the ways everyone is complicit in the consequences of late capitalism. Sensation Machines is a novel of big ideas, intricate plotting, and keenly observed human drama.

Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture

Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture PDF Author: Sven Brodmerkel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137496568
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This study argues that the defining feature of contemporary advertising is the interconnectedness between consumer participation and calculative media platforms. It critically investigates how audience participation unfolds in an algorithmic media infrastructure in which brands develop media devices to codify, process and modulate human capacities and actions. With the shift from a broadcast to an interactive media system, advertisers have reinvented themselves as the strategic interface between computational media systems and the lived experience and living bodies of consumers. Where once advertising relied predominantly on symbolic appeals to affect consumers, it now centres on the use of computational devices that codify, monitor, analyse and control their behaviours. Advertisers have worked to stimulate and harness consumer participation for several generations. Consumers undertook the productive work of making brands a part of their cultural identities and practices. With the emergence of a computational mode of advertising consumer participation extends beyond the expressive activity of creating and circulating meaning. It now involves making the lived experience and the living body available to the experimental capacities of media platforms and devices. In this mode of advertising brands become techno-cultural processes that integrate calculative and cultural functions. Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture conceptualises and theorises these significant changes in advertising. It takes consumer participation and its interconnectedness with calculative media platforms as the fundamental aspect of contemporary advertising and critically investigates how advertising, consumer participation and technology are interrelated in creating and facilitating lived experiences that create value for brands.

Sensation Machines

Sensation Machines PDF Author: Adam Wilson
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1641291664
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
A razor-sharp, darkly funny, and deeply human rendering of a Post-Trump America in economic free fall Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of a personal tragedy. Michael, a Wall Street trader, is meanwhile keeping a secret: he lost the couple’s life savings when a tanking economy caused a major market crash. And Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a data-mining project of epic scale, whose mysterious creator has ambitions to solve a national crisis of mass unemployment and reshape America’s social and political landscapes. When Michael’s best friend is murdered, the evidence leads back to Wendy’s client, setting off a dangerous chain of events that will profoundly change the couple—and the country. Set in an economic dystopia that’s just around the corner, Sensation Machines is both an endlessly twisty novel of big ideas, and a brilliantly observed human drama that grapples with greed, automation, universal basic income, wearable tech, revolutionary desires, and a broken justice system. Adam Wilson implicates not only the powerbrokers gaming the system and getting rich at the intersection of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, and Capitol Hill, but all of us: each one of us playing our parts, however willingly or unwillingly, in the vast systems that define and control our lives.

Machine Sensation

Machine Sensation PDF Author: Tessa Leach
Publisher: Open Humanities Press
ISBN: 9781785420825
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Emphasising the alien qualities of anthropomorphic technologies, Machine Sensation makes a conscious effort to increase rather than decrease the tension between nonhuman and human experience. In a series of rigorously executed cases studies, including natural user interfaces, artificial intelligence as well as sex robots, Leach shows how object-oriented ontology enables one to insist upon the unhuman nature of technology while acknowledging its immense power and significance in human life. Machine Sensation meticulously engages OOO, Actor Network Theory, the philosophy of technology, cybernetics and posthumanism in innovative and gripping ways.

The Age of Spiritual Machines

The Age of Spiritual Machines PDF Author: Ray Kurzweil
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101077883
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Bold futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, offers a framework for envisioning the future of machine intelligence—“a book for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next” (The New York Times Book Review). “Kurzweil offers a thought-provoking analysis of human and artificial intelligence and a unique look at a future in which the capabilities of the computer and the species that invented it grow ever closer.”—BILL GATES Imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the line between humanity and technology fades, and where the soul and the silicon chip unite. This is not science fiction. This is the twenty-first century according to Ray Kurzweil, the “restless genius” (The Wall Street Journal), “ultimate thinking machine” (Forbes), and inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era. In his inspired hands, life in the new millennium no longer seems daunting. Instead, it promises to be an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. More than just a list of predictions, Kurzweil’s prophetic blueprint for the future guides us through the inexorable advances that will result in: • Computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain (with human-level capabilities not far behind) • Relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers • Information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways Eventually, the distinction between humans and computers will have become sufficiently blurred that when the machines claim to be conscious, we will believe them.

What's Important Is Feeling

What's Important Is Feeling PDF Author: Adam Wilson
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062284770
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
Bankers prowl Brooklyn bars on the eve of the stock market crash. A debate over Young Elvis versus Vegas Elvis turns existential. Detoxing junkies use a live lobster to spice up their love life. Students on summer break struggle to escape the orbit of a seemingly utopic communal house. And in the title story, selected for The Best American Short Stories, two film school buddies working on a doomed project are left sizing up their own talent, hoping to come out on top—but fearing they won't. In What's Important Is Feeling, Adam Wilson follows the through-line of contemporary coming-of-age from the ravings of teenage lust to the staggering loneliness of proto-adulthood. He navigates the tough terrain of American life with a delicate balance of comedy and compassion, lyricism and unsparing straightforwardness. Wilson's characters wander through a purgatory of yearning, hope, and grief. No one emerges unscathed.

Embodiment and Co-Adaptation Through Human-Machine Interfaces: at the Border of Robotics, Neuroscience and Psychology

Embodiment and Co-Adaptation Through Human-Machine Interfaces: at the Border of Robotics, Neuroscience and Psychology PDF Author: Philipp Beckerle
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889749258
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description


The Emotion Machine

The Emotion Machine PDF Author: Marvin Minsky
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416579303
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
In this mind-expanding book, scientific pioneer Marvin Minsky continues his groundbreaking research, offering a fascinating new model for how our minds work. He argues persuasively that emotions, intuitions, and feelings are not distinct things, but different ways of thinking. By examining these different forms of mind activity, Minsky says, we can explain why our thought sometimes takes the form of carefully reasoned analysis and at other times turns to emotion. He shows how our minds progress from simple, instinctive kinds of thought to more complex forms, such as consciousness or self-awareness. And he argues that because we tend to see our thinking as fragmented, we fail to appreciate what powerful thinkers we really are. Indeed, says Minsky, if thinking can be understood as the step-by-step process that it is, then we can build machines -- artificial intelligences -- that not only can assist with our thinking by thinking as we do but have the potential to be as conscious as we are. Eloquently written, The Emotion Machine is an intriguing look into a future where more powerful artificial intelligences await.

Machines in the Head

Machines in the Head PDF Author: Anna Kavan
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1681374145
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Enter the strange and haunting world of Anna Kavan, author of mind-bending stories that blend science fiction and the author's own harrowing experiences with drug addiction, in this new collection of her best short stories. Anna Kavan is one of the great originals of twentieth-century fiction, comparable to Leonora Carrington and Jean Rhys, a writer whose stories explored the inner world of her imagination and plumbed the depths of her long addiction to heroin. This new selection of Kavan’s stories gathers the best work from across the many decades of her career, including oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and institutionalization from Asylum Piece (1940), moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958), and stories of addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). Kavan’s turn to science fiction in her final novel, Ice, is reflected in her late stories, while “Starting a Career,” about a mercenary dealer of state secrets, is published here for the first time. Kavan experimented throughout her writing career with results that are moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling, always unique. Machines in the Head offers American readers the first full overview of the work of a fearless and dazzling literary explorer.

Signals, Sound, and Sensation

Signals, Sound, and Sensation PDF Author: William M. Hartmann
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781563962837
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 680

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Book Description
Designed to follow an introductory text on psychoacoustics, this book takes readers through the mathematics of signal processing from its beginnings in the Fourier transform to advanced topics in modulation, dispersion relations, minimum phase systems, sampled data, and nonlinear distortion. While organised like an introductory engineering text on signals, the examples and exercises come from research on the perception of sound. A unique feature of this book is its consistent application of the Fourier transform, which unifies topics as diverse as cochlear filtering and digital recording. More than 250 exercises are included, many of them devoted to practical research in perception, while others explore surprising auditory illusions generated by special signals. Periodic signals, aperiodic signals, and noise -- along with their linear and nonlinear transformations -- are covered in detail. More advanced mathematical topics are treated in the appendices. A working knowledge of elementary calculus is the only prerequisite. Indispensable for researchers and advanced students in the psychology of auditory perception.