Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (A Norton Short)

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (A Norton Short) PDF Author: Dennis Yi Tenen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393882195
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the seamstress. Today, it has come for the writer, physician, programmer, and attorney. Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for recent developments in AI, which holds important lessons for the future of humans living with smart technology. Intelligence expressed through technology should not be mistaken for a magical genie, capable of self-directed thought or action. Rather, in highly original and effervescent prose with a generous dose of wit, Yi Tenen asks us to read past the artifice—to better perceive the mechanics of collaborative work. Something as simple as a spell-checker or a grammar-correction tool, embedded in every word-processor, represents the culmination of a shared human effort, spanning centuries. Smart tools, like dictionaries and grammar books, have always accompanied the act of writing, thinking, and communicating. That these paper machines are now automated does not bring them to life. Nor can we cede agency over the creative process. With its masterful blend of history, technology, and philosophy, Yi Tenen’s work ultimately urges us to view AI as a matter of labor history, celebrating the long-standing cooperation between authors and engineers.

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (A Norton Short)

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (A Norton Short) PDF Author: Dennis Yi Tenen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393882195
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the seamstress. Today, it has come for the writer, physician, programmer, and attorney. Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for recent developments in AI, which holds important lessons for the future of humans living with smart technology. Intelligence expressed through technology should not be mistaken for a magical genie, capable of self-directed thought or action. Rather, in highly original and effervescent prose with a generous dose of wit, Yi Tenen asks us to read past the artifice—to better perceive the mechanics of collaborative work. Something as simple as a spell-checker or a grammar-correction tool, embedded in every word-processor, represents the culmination of a shared human effort, spanning centuries. Smart tools, like dictionaries and grammar books, have always accompanied the act of writing, thinking, and communicating. That these paper machines are now automated does not bring them to life. Nor can we cede agency over the creative process. With its masterful blend of history, technology, and philosophy, Yi Tenen’s work ultimately urges us to view AI as a matter of labor history, celebrating the long-standing cooperation between authors and engineers.

Explorers: A New History (A Norton Short)

Explorers: A New History (A Norton Short) PDF Author: Matthew Lockwood
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324073888
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
The impulse to seek out new worlds is universal to humanity. Unfurling a tapestry of surprising and historically overlooked figures spanning forty centuries and six continents, historian Matthew Lockwood narrates lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange. Familiar icons of exploration like Pocahontas, Columbus, Sacagawea, and Captain Cook find new company in the untold stories of people usually denied the title “explorers,” including immigrants, indigenous interpreters, local guides, and fugitive slaves. He highlights female voyagers like Gudrid Far-Traveler and Freydís Eiríksdóttir, Viking women who sailed to North America in 1000 AD, and Mary Wortley Montagu, whose pioneering travels to Constantinople would lead to the development of the world’s first smallpox vaccine. Figures like Ghulam Rassul Galwan, a guide for European travelers in the Himalayas, reveal the hidden labor, expertise, and local enthusiasm behind many grand stories of discovery. Other characters, like David Dorr, a man born into slavery in New Orleans who embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe and Egypt, embody discovery and wonder as universal parts of the human condition. As Lockwood makes clear, people of every background imagine new worlds. Adventurers from every corner of the globe search for the unknown and try to understand it, remaking the world and themselves in the process. Exploration is for everyone who sets off into the unknown. It is the inheritance of all.

Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism (A Norton Short)

Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism (A Norton Short) PDF Author: Brooke Harrington
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324064951
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
An eye-opening account of offshore finance: a secretive system making the rich richer while corroding democracy, capitalism, and the environment. How do the rich keep getting richer, while dodging the long arm of the law? From playboy billionaires avoiding taxes on private islands to Russian oligarchs sailing away from sanctions on their superyachts, the ultra-rich seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. That world is called offshore. Hidden from view, the world’s ultra-rich can use offshore finance to escape tax obligations, labor and environmental safety regulations, campaign finance rules, and other laws that get in their way. In Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, sociologist Brooke Harrington reveals how this system works, as well as how it degrades democracy, the economy, and the public goods on which we all depend. Harrington spent eight years infiltrating this secretive world by training as a wealth manager, traveling from glossy European and North American capitals to developing countries in South America and Africa, to islands in the Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and South Pacific regions. Through interviews with dozens of wealth managers in nineteen countries, Harrington uncovered how this global network of offshore financial centers arose from the remnants of colonialism and has created a new, hidden imperial class This engrossing deep dive reveals what offshore finance costs all of us, and how it has colonized the world—not on behalf of any one country, but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires, who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilizing the world, Harrington’s exposé of the offshore system is a vital resource for understanding the most pressing crises of our time.

Digital Keywords

Digital Keywords PDF Author: Benjamin Peters
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400880556
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
How the digital revolution has shaped our language In the age of search, keywords increasingly organize research, teaching, and even thought itself. Inspired by Raymond Williams's 1976 classic Keywords, the timely collection Digital Keywords gathers pointed, provocative short essays on more than two dozen keywords by leading and rising digital media scholars from the areas of anthropology, digital humanities, history, political science, philosophy, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, and sociology. Digital Keywords examines and critiques the rich lexicon animating the emerging field of digital studies. This collection broadens our understanding of how we talk about the modern world, particularly of the vocabulary at work in information technologies. Contributors scrutinize each keyword independently: for example, the recent pairing of digital and analog is separated, while classic terms such as community, culture, event, memory, and democracy are treated in light of their historical and intellectual importance. Metaphors of the cloud in cloud computing and the mirror in data mirroring combine with recent and radical uses of terms such as information, sharing, gaming, algorithm, and internet to reveal previously hidden insights into contemporary life. Bookended by a critical introduction and a list of over two hundred other digital keywords, these essays provide concise, compelling arguments about our current mediated condition. Digital Keywords delves into what language does in today's information revolution and why it matters.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies PDF Author: Erik Brynjolfsson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393239357
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The big stories -- The skills of the new machines : technology races ahead -- Moore's law and the second half of the chessboard -- The digitization of just about everything -- Innovation : declining or recombining? -- Artificial and human intelligence in the second machine age -- Computing bounty -- Beyond GDP -- The spread -- The biggest winners : stars and superstars -- Implications of the bounty and the spread -- Learning to race with machines : recommendations for individuals -- Policy recommendations -- Long-term recommendations -- Technology and the future (which is very different from "technology is the future").

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition PDF Author: James Paul Gee
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466886420
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Cognitive Development in a Digital Age James Paul Gee begins his classic book with "I want to talk about video games–yes, even violent video games–and say some positive things about them." With this simple but explosive statement, one of America's most well-respected educators looks seriously at the good that can come from playing video games. This revised edition expands beyond mere gaming, introducing readers to fresh perspectives based on games like World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2. It delves deeper into cognitive development, discussing how video games can shape our understanding of the world. An undisputed must-read for those interested in the intersection of education, technology, and pop culture, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy challenges traditional norms, examines the educational potential of video games, and opens up a discussion on the far-reaching impacts of this ubiquitous aspect of modern life.

The Enlightened Economy

The Enlightened Economy PDF Author: Joel Mokyr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300124552
Category : BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"In a vigorous discussion, which goes beyond the standard explanations that credit geographical factors, the role of markets, politics and society, Mokyr argues that the bases of the emergence of modern economic growth in Britain are to be found in what key players knew and believed, and how those convictions affected their economic behaviour. The belief in progress, coupled with the strategies to bring it about led Britain, and eventually most of the western world, into the modern era." "With a remarkably wide range of reference, and covering sectors of the British economy often neglected, this masterful book both synthesizes existing scholarship and provides a wholly new perspective for understanding Britain's economic development in the ageof the Industrial Revolution." --Book Jacket.

Understanding Physics

Understanding Physics PDF Author: Isaac Asimov
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Publishing
ISBN: 9780880292511
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 798

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Book Description
Motion, Sound, and Heat.

Being There

Being There PDF Author: Andy Clark
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262260527
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Brain, body, and world are united in a complex dance of circular causation and extended computational activity. In Being There, Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and techniques needed to make sense of the emerging sciences of the embodied mind. Clark brings together ideas and techniques from robotics, neuroscience, infant psychology, and artificial intelligence. He addresses a broad range of adaptive behaviors, from cockroach locomotion to the role of linguistic artifacts in higher-level thought.

Writing Machines

Writing Machines PDF Author: N. Katherine Hayles
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262582155
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
A pseudo-autobiographical exploration of the artistic and cultural impact of the transformation of the print book to its electronic incarnations.