Technology & AI

Robotics usually answers each new problem with another motor or sensor. This makes the case for the opposite: a small craft whose wings first slow its fall from the sky and then become its sails on the water.

When people believe they are talking to an AI rather than a person, they push back less and change their minds more. The persuasive edge comes from the listener, not the machine.

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

The public argument about AI has been about what it says. Meanwhile a different class of system has been quietly acting — screening applications, pricing insurance, routing patrol cars, closing claims — at a speed no review process was built to match, and usually without the person affected knowing a decision occurred. The problem isn't capability; it's that when something goes wrong, responsibility scatters and everyone in the chain has a defensible answer except the person harmed.

As a folklorist and historian of ancient science, I investigate the crossroads of classical antiquity, literature and art, archaeology, and history. My goal is uncovering historical and scientific realities embedded...

Everybody knows the idea, now usually humorous, that some people have more accidents than other people. Accident proneness was once a technical term, used to separate some people, identified as...

Raiford Guins on King PONG, his history of Atari's launch product as a masterclass in market creation. Three engineers with no business background reinvented coin-op amusement, then pivoted into consumer electronics via Sears — becoming the engine behind ubiquitous gaming today.

I am an engineer. I design and build things that never before existed (mostly software, these days). For most of my life, I thought these things were my personal creations,...

The cover of the book is a water strider—an insect that stands on water as if it were land. As the animal rows, it generates waves on the water surface,...

Chapter 5 opens with an anecdote, a true story. A few years back I was giving a talk in Taiwan about the state of the biotech sector there. The government had...

This is a book about the equipment that James Bond uses: its origins, function, and the essential role it plays in Bond’s missions. The book also describes the role these...

A lot of people assume it’s an antinuclear book. When you put “wretched” in the title, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s interpreted that way. I’ve even gotten...

One of the key objectives in Program Earth is to rework theories of sensing by decentering the human subject that is meant to be the key locus through which sensation...

What is this book all about? Tyrants on Twitter makes three main points. The first point is that we’ve been experiencing a period globally for about the last 15 years of...

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is about the millennia-long fascination in the West with the self-moving machine that mimics living beings, better known today by the word “robot.” There are works...

In 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM’s corporate image at every level, from the logo...

This book asks what happens when we take something we’re familiar with and consider it in an unfamiliar light. The “thing” in question is film: not films, the things we...

The Internet is a technology based on control systems, yet it is also a mass medium celebrated as fostering personal and political freedom. How? Why? What dreams and desires drove...

Analog is about how we live our lives today—with digital technology. The book is about analog; but it is also about digital because both technological forms are inextricably conjoined in...

My previous research was about the French movie industry. In 2014, Netflix was just arriving in France, opening up an office in Paris. I got funding for studying this company...

Who, if anyone, is right, and how can we tell? Do we learn everything from scratch, or could some knowledge be innate? Is our brain one big network, or is it built out of modules, language being one of them?

I found that synthetic intimacy is not emerging in a vacuum; it is meeting a real, unmet need, or perhaps more cynically speaking, entering and widening a wound that was already there, exacerbated by elements like the loneliness epidemic. That is why it is so powerful, and also why it is so complicated.

Every election night, the experts ask the same question: what will the voters do? Listen to the grammar. Millions of people, treated as a system you can predict, model, run. Politics was supposed to be the one thing we insisted stayed irreducibly human. Somewhere it quietly became a computation.

It connects economics, technology, and ethics, while also exploring practical implications for business functions such as marketing, human resources, and supply chain management. At the same time, it looks beyond the corporate world to broader fields such as education, healthcare, and sustainability.

The internet, if you think about what a website is — the engineering is underneath it, but it's really about the design, and the creative expression, and the writing. So it's a different thing. And relatedly, the people who were interested in the culture of Burning Man were also the people who were interested in the design end of technology. That became central, much more than the kind of hard engineering part of it.

The Code Economy is a book about the past and likely future of human progress. My aim in writing it was to combine history with economics to explain how human...

Biological weapons are the least well understood of the so-called weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Despite the growing awareness of the threat posed by biological weapons, the history of...

Let me share my personal perspective on my research journey. My interest began with the fascinating question of Japan's industrialization. How did Japan, a small island nation viewed by the...

In a 1931 essay, Aldous Huxley asked a brilliant question: “Has modernity, with all its stress on progress, on inventiveness and on the new, actually give humankind any truly new...

Artificial intelligence is an act of mimicry. We design systems we fully and deliberately control to reproduce our own ability to purposefully manipulate matter. What we build has no soul. What we build has no biological intent...

As someone who trained in comparative literature, I have been taught to focus on literary text and ignore science and technology. I was among the first generation of graduate students...

I did not write this book to “debunk” the lie detector. Eminent psychologists have been trying to do that for eighty years, ever since interrogators first re-purposed some basic physiological...

Today, on just about every desk there is a gray box emitting a range of wires. Eighty years ago, this data processing box was less conspicuous, non-electronic, and made from...

You wake up in the morning and find that you need to visit a number of cities or towns before returning in the evening. What is the shortest possible route...

The New York Times once published a piece that described mobile device users as a “cretins” who “lovingly hug” their devices “with a look of rapt idiocy.” The year was 1965 and the author was annoyed by transistor radios.

Technosystem should be read as a attempt to link up several different traditions of social thought in an innovative theory of modernity. The big question to which Technosystem is addressed...

I set out to write a book not so much about the varieties and comparative deficiencies of cars in the Soviet Union as what these objects meant to Soviet citizens....

The United States Constitution laid the groundwork for the intellectual property regime—giving Congress the power: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to...

Using the Iron Man suit (if it existed) would require a technological interface bridging the gap between our nervous systems and devices like computers and robots. Let’s say that was...

The Essential Engineer is about the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers, and between science and engineering, and how they relate to contemporary technological issues. The book provides historical...

The Toothpick is a technical and cultural history of what is arguably the simplest of manufactured things. A wooden toothpick consists of a single part made of a single material...

Robotics usually answers each new problem with another motor or sensor. This makes the case for the opposite: a small craft whose wings first slow its fall from the sky and then become its sails on the water.

When people believe they are talking to an AI rather than a person, they push back less and change their minds more. The persuasive edge comes from the listener, not the machine.

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

The public argument about AI has been about what it says. Meanwhile a different class of system has been quietly acting — screening applications, pricing insurance, routing patrol cars, closing claims — at a speed no review process was built to match, and usually without the person affected knowing a decision occurred. The problem isn't capability; it's that when something goes wrong, responsibility scatters and everyone in the chain has a defensible answer except the person harmed.

As a folklorist and historian of ancient science, I investigate the crossroads of classical antiquity, literature and art, archaeology, and history. My goal is uncovering historical and scientific realities embedded...

Everybody knows the idea, now usually humorous, that some people have more accidents than other people. Accident proneness was once a technical term, used to separate some people, identified as...

Raiford Guins on King PONG, his history of Atari's launch product as a masterclass in market creation. Three engineers with no business background reinvented coin-op amusement, then pivoted into consumer electronics via Sears — becoming the engine behind ubiquitous gaming today.

I am an engineer. I design and build things that never before existed (mostly software, these days). For most of my life, I thought these things were my personal creations,...

The cover of the book is a water strider—an insect that stands on water as if it were land. As the animal rows, it generates waves on the water surface,...

Chapter 5 opens with an anecdote, a true story. A few years back I was giving a talk in Taiwan about the state of the biotech sector there. The government had...

This is a book about the equipment that James Bond uses: its origins, function, and the essential role it plays in Bond’s missions. The book also describes the role these...

A lot of people assume it’s an antinuclear book. When you put “wretched” in the title, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s interpreted that way. I’ve even gotten...

One of the key objectives in Program Earth is to rework theories of sensing by decentering the human subject that is meant to be the key locus through which sensation...

What is this book all about? Tyrants on Twitter makes three main points. The first point is that we’ve been experiencing a period globally for about the last 15 years of...

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is about the millennia-long fascination in the West with the self-moving machine that mimics living beings, better known today by the word “robot.” There are works...

In 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM’s corporate image at every level, from the logo...

This book asks what happens when we take something we’re familiar with and consider it in an unfamiliar light. The “thing” in question is film: not films, the things we...

The Internet is a technology based on control systems, yet it is also a mass medium celebrated as fostering personal and political freedom. How? Why? What dreams and desires drove...

Analog is about how we live our lives today—with digital technology. The book is about analog; but it is also about digital because both technological forms are inextricably conjoined in...

My previous research was about the French movie industry. In 2014, Netflix was just arriving in France, opening up an office in Paris. I got funding for studying this company...

Who, if anyone, is right, and how can we tell? Do we learn everything from scratch, or could some knowledge be innate? Is our brain one big network, or is it built out of modules, language being one of them?

I found that synthetic intimacy is not emerging in a vacuum; it is meeting a real, unmet need, or perhaps more cynically speaking, entering and widening a wound that was already there, exacerbated by elements like the loneliness epidemic. That is why it is so powerful, and also why it is so complicated.

Every election night, the experts ask the same question: what will the voters do? Listen to the grammar. Millions of people, treated as a system you can predict, model, run. Politics was supposed to be the one thing we insisted stayed irreducibly human. Somewhere it quietly became a computation.

It connects economics, technology, and ethics, while also exploring practical implications for business functions such as marketing, human resources, and supply chain management. At the same time, it looks beyond the corporate world to broader fields such as education, healthcare, and sustainability.

The internet, if you think about what a website is — the engineering is underneath it, but it's really about the design, and the creative expression, and the writing. So it's a different thing. And relatedly, the people who were interested in the culture of Burning Man were also the people who were interested in the design end of technology. That became central, much more than the kind of hard engineering part of it.

The Code Economy is a book about the past and likely future of human progress. My aim in writing it was to combine history with economics to explain how human...

Biological weapons are the least well understood of the so-called weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Despite the growing awareness of the threat posed by biological weapons, the history of...

Let me share my personal perspective on my research journey. My interest began with the fascinating question of Japan's industrialization. How did Japan, a small island nation viewed by the...

In a 1931 essay, Aldous Huxley asked a brilliant question: “Has modernity, with all its stress on progress, on inventiveness and on the new, actually give humankind any truly new...

Artificial intelligence is an act of mimicry. We design systems we fully and deliberately control to reproduce our own ability to purposefully manipulate matter. What we build has no soul. What we build has no biological intent...

As someone who trained in comparative literature, I have been taught to focus on literary text and ignore science and technology. I was among the first generation of graduate students...

I did not write this book to “debunk” the lie detector. Eminent psychologists have been trying to do that for eighty years, ever since interrogators first re-purposed some basic physiological...

Today, on just about every desk there is a gray box emitting a range of wires. Eighty years ago, this data processing box was less conspicuous, non-electronic, and made from...

You wake up in the morning and find that you need to visit a number of cities or towns before returning in the evening. What is the shortest possible route...

The New York Times once published a piece that described mobile device users as a “cretins” who “lovingly hug” their devices “with a look of rapt idiocy.” The year was 1965 and the author was annoyed by transistor radios.

Technosystem should be read as a attempt to link up several different traditions of social thought in an innovative theory of modernity. The big question to which Technosystem is addressed...

I set out to write a book not so much about the varieties and comparative deficiencies of cars in the Soviet Union as what these objects meant to Soviet citizens....

The United States Constitution laid the groundwork for the intellectual property regime—giving Congress the power: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to...

Using the Iron Man suit (if it existed) would require a technological interface bridging the gap between our nervous systems and devices like computers and robots. Let’s say that was...

The Essential Engineer is about the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers, and between science and engineering, and how they relate to contemporary technological issues. The book provides historical...

The Toothpick is a technical and cultural history of what is arguably the simplest of manufactured things. A wooden toothpick consists of a single part made of a single material...