Technology companies claim to connect people through touchscreens, but by conflating physical contact with emotional sentiments, they displace the constructed aspects of devices and women and other oppressed individuals’ critiques of how such technologies function. Technology companies and device designers correlate touchscreens and online sites with physical contact and emotional sentiments, promising unmediated experiences in which the screen falls away in favor of visceral materiality and co...
An interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collection that decenters familiar narratives to provide a fresh perspective on what artificial intelligence is today, and what it might become. Historians, media theorists, science-fiction writers, philosophers, and artists from China and elsewhere reexamine the nation’s intense engagement with AI, moving beyond the clichés that still dominate contemporary debate. Today, visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Co...
This book is an update, extension and radicalization of Guattari’s philosophy of the postmedia. It is the first of its kind to comprehensively apply Guattari’s thought on postmedia to post-millennium technological developments. Given the considerable interest in Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s work and its influence in Asia and South-East Asia and beyond, the book is a timely contribution and update of Guattari’s essential concepts. It offers a fresh approach to applying Guattari and Deleuze...
In The Risk Perception of Artificial Intelligence, Hugo Neri examines how society has come to understand artificial intelligence by studying how cultural productions, intellectuals, and the media have shaped society's views, understandings, and fears of artificial intelligence. As an abstract term, artificial intelligence has been understood both as a discipline and a "robot's mind." In the twenty and twenty-first centuries, cultural representations in comics, television shows, and movies conver...
David L. Morton examines the process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of communications technology, using the history of sound recording as the focus. Off the Record demonstrates how the history of both the hardware and the ways people used it is essential for understanding why any particular technology became a fixture in everyday life or faded into obscurity. Morton's approach to the topic differs from most previous works, which have examined the technology's social impact, but not the...
The history of information is a rapidly emerging new subfield of history. Historians are identifying the issues they need to examine, crafting novel research agendas, and locating research materials relevant to their work. Like the larger world around them, historians are discovering what it means to live and work in a world that increasingly sees itself as an information society. Long a discussion point among sociologists, economists, political leaders, and media experts, historians are integra...
A thousand years before Isaac Asimov set down his Three Laws of Robotics, real and imagined automata appeared in European courts, liturgies, and literary texts. Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, and silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed disciplinary or surveillance functions. Variously ascribed to artisanal genius, inexplicable cosmic forces, or demonic powers, these marvelous fabrications raised fundamental ques...
Consumers and Nanotechnology
by Harald Throne-Holst, Eivind Soto, Pal Strandbakken, and Gerd Scholl
In recent years, questions about democratic influence on science and technology have received much attention. The lesson from the European unrest over GMO is that consumer-citizens will react negatively to being forced to accept the introduction of new, partly untested technologies. A number of political bodies have started to involve citizens and
Whose Time Is It? (Sternberg Press / The Contemporary Condition)
by Stamatia Portanova
Following the “emerging life adventures and experiences” of Sophia, a robot animated by blockchain and AI, to present a study in temporal automation. In what way do the two technologies of blockchain and artificial intelligence actualize and, crucially, automatize the cognition of time? These kinds of machines are increasingly part of both our contemporary present and our prospective future, but how do we really define a present and a future? And more important, how do these machines themselves...
Re-envisioning your relationship with technology to reclaim health, happiness, and sanity in a plugged-in world Evolution shapes behavior--and as a species, we've evolved to be drawn to the instant gratification, constant connectivity, and the shiny lights, beeps, and chimes of our ever-present devices. In earlier eras, these hardwired evolutionary patterns may have set us up for success, but today they confuse our instincts, leaving us vulnerable and stressed out from fractured attention, miss...
Our attention has been hijacked by the tsunami of devices, games and social media which now dominate our lives. This new technology brings efficiency, cost-savings and instantaneous information. But when our attention is the currency being traded by big tech firms, what price are we willing to pay for convenience? Addiction, anxiety, depression, loneliness, low self-esteem, empathy development, troubled relationships, fake news, propaganda and even threats to democracy are just some of challenge...
Gen Z, Explained
by Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead, MBE
Born since the mid-1990s, Generation Z is the first generation never to know the world without the internet, and it is the most diverse generation yet. As Gen Z starts to emerge into adulthood and enter the workforce, what do we really know about them? And what can we learn from them? Gen Z, Explained is the authoritative portrait of this significant generation. It draws on extensive interviews that display this generation's candor, surveys that explore their views and attitudes, and a vast data...
Military, Education, Business, and Health Implications of the Internet of Bodies
Digitization of the human body, philosophically is "mating" with technology, and it represents the fusion of electronic technology with human biology, which reduces the barriers of physical, digital and biological life. The Internet of Bodies, that is the imminent development of the field of digitization of the human body on a large scale, is the inevitable future of technology at this moment. Instead of devices being connected to the Internet as in Internet of Things (IoT), human bodies can be...