Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History

by Thomas Rid Narrated by Robertson Dean

Overview

As lives offline and online merge, it's easy to forget how we got here.*Rise of the Machines*reclaims the story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine. Thomas Rid delivers a portrait of our technology enraptured era.

Springing from mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of myths about the future of machines. This vision radically transformed the postwar world, ushering in sweeping cultural change. Cybernetics triggered cults, the*Whole Earth Catalog, and feminist manifestos, just as it fueled martial gizmos and the air force's foray into virtual space.

As Rid shows, cybernetics proved a powerful tool for two competing factions-those who sought to make a better world and those who sought to control the one at hand. In the Bay Area, techno-libertarians embraced networked machines as the portal to a new electronic frontier. In Washington, DC, cyberspace provided the perfect theater for dominance and war. That “first cyberwar” went on for years-and indeed has never stopped. In our cybernetic future, the line between utopia and dystopia continues to be disturbingly thin.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Zeynep Tufekci

Rid's book offers a useful history as well as a chance to re-examine our current technological crossroads.

Kevin Kelly

"A common theme connects war machines, computer networks, social media, ubiquitous surveillance, and virtual reality. For fifty years or more the same people and the same ideas weave through these innovations united by the term ‘cyber,’ as in cyberspace and cybernetics. Read this amazing history and you’ll go: ‘Aha!’"

Robert Lee

"Everyone I know should read this book. It will be a classic."

Wall Street Journal - Michael Saler

"Rid’s fascinating survey of the oscillating hopes and fears expressed by the cybernetic mythos offers an implicit lesson."

Financial Times

"Rid, a professor in security studies at King’s College London, is a fine chronicler of the debate, deftly recounting the hope, hype, and fears that have accompanied our thinking on automation…Fascinating…Dazzling."

P. W. Singer

"Rise of The Machines isn't just an insightful history of cybernetics but also a fascinating journey with the twentieth-century thinkers—from tech giants and eccentric mathematicians to science fiction writers and counterculture gurus—who have shaped how we understand machines and ourselves."

Martin Ford

"Rise of the Machines is a fascinating history of cybernetics, and of the visionaries like Norbert Wiener who first imagined the potential—and peril—of machines that would begin to replicate the capabilities of the human mind."

General Michael Hayden

"Sometimes the most important things are hiding in plain sight. At least that’s what I concluded from Rise of the Machines, Thomas Rid’s masterful blending of the art of a storyteller, the discipline of an historian, and the sensitivity of a philosopher. Machines unmasks how really disruptive this “cyber thing” has been and will continue to be to nearly all aspects of human experience. It’s more than food for thought. It’s a banquet."

New Scientist - Bruce Sterling

"[E]very chapter opens up as smoothly as an automated glass door…[A] thoughtful, enlightening book…a melange of history, media studies, political science, military engineering, and, yes, etymology…In Rise of the Machines, Rid has created a meticulous yet startling alternate history of computation."

Boing Boing - Mark Frauenfelder

"Cybernetics came about in the late 1940s as a way to understand the technology of feedback systems as a form of near-life. Thomas Rid's book is a solid, highly readable history on the subject."

AUGUST 2016 - AudioFile

This fascinating history of machine intelligence approaches the subject by examining the mythologies our culture has created about machines that can "think"—and traces the history of such mythology through the last hundred years. Narrator Robertson Dean's deep, gravelly voice is the perfect choice for this production. He skillfully navigates the somewhat technical prose with the right amount of inflection and speed to make the work more compelling than some readers might find it. His baritone voice and deliberate cadence create a foreboding tone that enhance Rid's critical view of these converging mythologies and the ways the technology may promise to revolutionize life for the better but may also leave society in far more precarious situations. L.E. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-05-02
A fascinating study of the "seductive power of the cybernetic mythos."The first triumph of cybernetics, the interaction of humans and machine, occurred during World War II. In 1940, British anti-aircraft gunners almost never hit high-flying Luftwaffe bombers; within a few years, input from early computers and radar vastly increased their accuracy. More triumphs and misfires followed, along with an ongoing debate over what it means, all superbly recounted by Rid (War Studies/King's Coll., London; Cyber War Will Not Take Place, 2013, etc.). He deplores observers who regularly predict that computer "intelligence" will ultimately surpass that of the human brain. Intelligence (i.e. "thinking") is irrelevant, emphasized early scientists led by cybernetics guru and Rid's hero, MIT mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener (1894-1964). "The brain is not a thinking machine, it is an acting machine," wrote cybernetics pioneer Ross Ashby in 1948. "It gets information and then it does something about it." True cybernetics describes a symbiosis between humans and machines, but science-fiction writers missed the point with raging robots à la the movie 2001, and the counterculture delivered products from dianetics to The Whole Earth Catalog. While popular enthusiasm peaked during the 1970s, the pitiful reality was massive computers with less power than an iPhone churning out payrolls and tracking Soviet aircraft. Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth fame, launched modern cybernetics by putting the Catalog online in 1985. Since then, its vision has pitted libertarians, who predict an interconnected world free of government and commerce, against the establishment, who see increasing social control, burgeoning commerce, and efficient, nearly bloodless war. Not a history of computers but an ingenious look at how brilliant and not-so-brilliant thinkers see—usually wrongly but with occasional prescience—the increasingly intimate melding of machines and humans.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171389666
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	06/28/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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