New Books in Technology

How much of US power is underground? We hear a lot about the US military assets used on land, on the sea, and in the air - but not much about what’s going on underground and on the sea bed. It turns out what goes on down there is a significant source of US power – which has been documented by Henry Farrell in his co-authored book (with Abraham Newman), Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Henry Holt, 2023). Listen to him describe it all with Owen Bennett-Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Philosophy professor Jacob Howland applies the lessons of Greek classics and Jewish scripture to this our curious moment at the inception of Artificial intelligence when computers are doing more and more work for us, and we humans—like miniature Gods—can make up new simulated realities and even identities for ourselves. There’s a word for when people worship the things they create: idolatry. Looking to the Bible (from the Garden of Eden, the Fall, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, and the Golden Calf) and literature (from Homer, Plato, and Hesiod, all the way to Milton), Professor Howland and I talk about where we are, and where we might be headed. Jacob Howland’s website and his faculty pages at the University of Tulsa and the University of Austin Jacob Howland’s article, “AI is a False Prophet: Our enslavement to idolatry will end in disaster.” (Unherd, April 2023) Jacob Howland’s article, “AI has always plagued mankind: Technological arrogance brought about our Fall.” (Unherd, July 2023) Jacob Howland’s article, “Henry Adams and the Crisis of Education: How the famed historian foresaw our civilizational predicament” (City Journal, July 2023) Jacob Howland and Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast (June 2023) Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

From facial recognition―capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents―to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.In How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms (Norton, 2023), Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. They explore how data was created and curated, as well as how new mathematical and computational techniques developed to contend with that data serve to shape people, ideas, society, military operations, and economies. Although technology and mathematics are at its heart, the story of data ultimately concerns an unstable game among states, corporations, and people. How were new technical and scientific capabilities developed; who supported, advanced, or funded these capabilities or transitions; and how did they change who could do what, from what, and to whom?Wiggins and Jones focus on these questions as they trace data’s historical arc, and look to the future. By understanding the trajectory of data―where it has been and where it might yet go―Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Big Tech locked us into their systems by making their platforms hard to leave by design. The impossibility of staying connected to people on their platforms after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it's an intentional business strategy.In The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso, 2023), Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission.This book comes out September 5, 2023. See seizethemeansofcomputation.org for book details.Note: Cory mentioned that the book website is seizethemeansofcommunication.org it is actually seizethemeansofcomputation.org.Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Gretchen Sorin, Director and Distinguished Professor of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York - Oneonta, talks about her book, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright, 2020), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Driving While Black examines how cars fit into black lives and sheds light on how this technology fits into much larger patterns of history, including the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements. Sorin and Vinsel also talk about the field of public history and communicating to non-academic audiences.Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

We may think of video games as being "fun," but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, our facial expressions are rarely those of happiness or bliss. Instead, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration as we lose, or die, or fail to advance to the next level. Humans may have a fundamental desire to succeed and feel competent, but game players choose to engage in an activity in which they are nearly certain to fail and feel incompetent. So why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? Juul examines this paradox.In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Reader or audience reaction to tragedy is often explained as catharsis, as a purging of negative emotions. But, Juul points out, this doesn't seem to be the case for video game players. Games do not purge us of unpleasant emotions; they produce them in the first place. What, then, does failure in video game playing do?Juul argues that failure in a game is unique in that when you fail in a game, you (not a character) are in some way inadequate. Yet games also motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy, and the feeling of escaping failure (often by improving skills) is a central enjoyment of games. Games, writes Juul, are the art of failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it.The Art of Failure is essential reading for anyone interested in video games, whether as entertainment, art, or education.Jesper Juul is Assistant Professor at the New York University Game Center. He is the author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds and A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, both published by the MIT Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The expansion of space travel is much discussed but always seems subject to delay. Why is that and when will it happen on a much larger scale? Douglas Ligor has been considering that issue for the Rand corporation – and he talks to Owen Bennett-Jones about the prospects for space travel. Ligor is co-author of Assessing the Readiness for Human Commercial Spaceflight Safety Regulations (Rand, 2023) and International Space Traffic Management: Charting a Course for Long-Term Sustainability (Rand, 2023).Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings.Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh examines the underlying technology and the social consequences of each scenario. He also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.Illah Reza Nourbakhsh is Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also directs the Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab. He is a coauthor of Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (MIT Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand.This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms—spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent governance for themselves.Finn Brunton is Assistant Professor of Information in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie and Buzz Lightyear, between ping pong and PONG. It began in 1963 when an MIT graduate student named Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad, the first true computer animation program. Sutherland noted: "Since motion can be put into Sketchpad drawings, it might be exciting to try making cartoons." This book, the first full-length history of CG, shows us how Sutherland's seemingly offhand idea grew into a multibillion dollar industry.In Moving Innovation, Tom Sito--himself an animator and industry insider for more than thirty years--describes the evolution of CG. His story features a memorable cast of characters--math nerds, avant-garde artists, cold warriors, hippies, video game enthusiasts, and studio executives: disparate types united by a common vision. Sito shows us how fifty years of work by this motley crew made movies like Toy Story and Avatar possible.Tom Sito has been a professional animator since 1975. One of the key players in Disney’s animation revival of the 1980s and 1990s, he worked on such classic Disney films as The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and The Lion King (1994). He left Disney to help set up the Dreamworks Animation Unit in 1995. He is Professor of Cinema Practice in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology