New Books in Technology

Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment.  As savants attempted to appropriate leadership of the mechanical arts while deriding artisans as mere laborers, some of these refashioned themselves as artistes, capable of blending craft knowledge with intellectual esprit.  Through the little studied and understood Société des Arts, these advertised their service and utility to the state and French economic and imperia expansion.  As they fought for official appointments and academic recognition, they help solidify key the Enlightenment concept of technological progress.  Through the eyes and experiences of artistes, the Enlightenment appears much less the product of intellectual breakthroughs, and instead, a reflection of the political economic strategies of artisans as they defined their role within the French empire.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico.  He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today, televisions are both less visible and more present than ever, thanks to screens on our walls and in our pockets. Chris Horrocks traces the cultural history of the television set in The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television (Reaktion Press, 2017). Horrocks is a filmmaker and professor in the School of Critical Studies and Creative Industries at Kingston University in London. His previous books include Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual (Berghahn, 2012), and Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality (Icon, 2000). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cultural Policy Research, explores this question by focusing on the idea of talent. The book offers a rich theoretical and empirical engagement with the contemporary television landscape, giving detailed analysis of the history of talent development, as well as the impact of digital and new platforms. The shifting landscape of talent, television, and the infrastructure of cultural intermediaries is illustrated with key case studies, ultimately showing how the winners and losers of the talent industry map onto existing inequalities. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What if guns “are not merely carriers of action, but also actors themselves?” That’s the question that animates and unites Jonathan Obert‘s and Andrew Poe‘s, and Austin Sarat‘s unique collection of essays, The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press, 2018). In it, contributors discuss the political, social and personal “lives” of guns from a variety of perspectives. Join us to hear editors Obert and Poe help us consider new ways of thinking about American narratives of ballistic weapons. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians(New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit.  This event prompted the United States to open up its own crash program to put first a satellite, then later, human beings, into space.  The primary motivating factor for all this, was the fear of missiles being the primary delivery system for nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War.  Our guest in this episode –Nicholas Michael Sambaluk – makes the case for another perspective on the Eisenhower Administration’s decision to engage in space exploration.  In his book The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security (Naval Institute Press, 2015), Sambaluk describes the checkered history of the Dynamic Soarer Space Glider Bomber – a.k.a. “Dyna-Soar,” a heat-resistant single seat-space shuttle that was intended to guarantee American aerospace superiority.  Though ultimately canceled, the Dyna-Soar program’s legacy continues to this day in the form of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance Aircraft, the Space Shuttle, and future orbiting space vehicles.  Sambaluk is an associate professor of strategy at the Air University, at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Physical journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums all offer their owners the opportunity to chronicle both mundane and extravagant events. But unlike social media posting, this analog memorializing of life happenings is not encumbered with the negative theorizing about why people choose to record experiences. In her new book, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2018), Cornell University associate professor Lee Humphreys argues that selfies and other social media life logging, like traditional journaling, is media accounting, which offers us a deeper understanding of ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future. Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds. The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technology Review. The series explores the future implications of emerging technologies through the lens of fiction. It’s the first time Roush, who hosts the podcast Soonish and specializes in writing about science and technology, has edited fiction. “The mission of Twelve Tomorrows is to highlight stories that are totally plausible from an engineering point of view,” Roush says. In “The Heart of the Matter,” Nnedi Okorafur explores how suspicion of new technology can have real life consequences. In this case, plotters against the reformist president of Nigeria try to muster support for a coup by manipulating fears about the president’s new artificial heart, claiming that the organ—which was grown in a Chinese laboratory from plant cells—is powered by witchcraft. In “The Woman Who Destroyed Us,” SL Huang describes the plight of a mother who wants to exact revenge on a doctor who used deep brain stimulation to treat her son’s behavioral and mental health issues. The changes in her son are so dramatic that the mother feels she’s lost her child, and yet the son is happy with the result, feeling that the treatment has revealed his true self. If there’s one message Roush hopes readers take from the collection, it’s that people are in the driver’s seat when it comes to building and using new technologies. He hopes the book reminds people “that we do have the power to adopt or shun technology, that we can decide how to bring it into our lives, to what extent we want to use it or not use it. We can even influence the way innovation happens. We can tell scientists and engineers, ‘You know what? This isn’t good enough’ or ‘We’re worried about this. We want you to build in more safeguards.’… We have that power.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now make it possible to quantify and standardize every conceivable human activity, from keeping track of personal bests at the gym to getting a good night’s sleep—all from the comfort of our homes. But what do these measurements actually tell us about ourselves? What happens when the data sets for these functions are subjective? And how do we know whether we’re measuring ourselves accurately? In her debut collection of essays, nonfiction writer Rachel Z. Arndt explores the answers to these questions, interrogating the methods through which we measure our lives in the modern world. Through a series of 19 researched personal essays, Arndt speaks from her own experiences managing her narcolepsy, participating in judo tournaments, analyzing the rituals of online dating and more in order to answer the question of what can be measured—or, more accurately, what cannot. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Rachel Z. Arndt to hear more about Beyond Measure available now from Sarabande Books (2018). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language; 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare; and 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state. He tells us that we are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. His book provides an essential background on how we got to this point, and how—rather than what—we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing, such as machine consciousness, automation, changes in employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity. By asking questions like “Are you a machine?” and “Could a computer feel anything?”, Reese cultivates discussion at the cutting edge in robotics and AI, and provides a framework by which we can all understand, discuss, and act on the issues of the Fourth Age and how they’ll transform humanity. Byron Reese is the CEO and publisher of the industry-leading technology research company Gigaom, and the founder of several high-tech companies. He has spent the better part of his life exploring the interplay of technology with human history. Reese has patents, obtained and pending, in disciplines as varied as crowdsourcing, content creation, and psychographics. The websites he has launched, which cover the intersection of technology, business, science, and history, have together received over a billion visitors and he is author of the acclaimed book, Infinite Progress: How Technology and the Internet Will End Ignorance, Disease, Hunger, Poverty, and War. He joins me today to talk about his new book, The Fourth Age. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology