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Rise of the Machines
- A Cybernetic History
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
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This 50th anniversary edition of Men, Machines, and Modern Times, though ultimately concerned with a positive alternative to an Orwellian 1984, offers an entertaining series of historical accounts taken from the 19th century to highlight a main theme: the nature of technological change, the fission brought about in society by such change, and society's reaction to that change.
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What a masterwork
- By Jordan Schneider on 03-06-21
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Spies, Lies, and Algorithms
- The History and Future of American Intelligence
- By: Amy B. Zegart
- Narrated by: Amy B. Zegart
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, Amy Zegart separates fact from fiction as she offers an engaging and enlightening account of the past, present, and future of American espionage as it faces a revolution driven by digital technology. Drawing on decades of research and hundreds of interviews with intelligence officials, Zegart provides a history of US espionage, gives an overview of intelligence basics and life inside America's intelligence agencies, and explores the vexed issues of traitors, covert action, and congressional oversight.
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Superb and insightful!
- By Cameron on 02-01-22
By: Amy B. Zegart
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The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
- Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do
- By: Erik J. Larson
- Narrated by: Perry Daniels
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines? But we aren't really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don't even know where that path might be. Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence and what it would take to get there.
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dead wrong after 2 years
- By K. Lyon on 07-11-23
By: Erik J. Larson
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Blitzed
- Drugs in the Third Reich
- By: Norman Ohler, Shaun Whiteside - translator, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs. On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers.
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The best "Gotterdammerung" book I have ever read.
- By James Carl Barsz, MD on 05-06-17
By: Norman Ohler, and others
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The Rational Optimist
- How Prosperity Evolves
- By: Matt Ridley
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.
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Personal
- By Robert F. Jones on 09-15-17
By: Matt Ridley
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New Cold Wars
- China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West
- By: David E. Sanger, Mary K. Brooks
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, David E. Sanger
- Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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New Cold Wars—the latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon David E. Sanger—is a fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous confrontations with two very different adversaries. For years, the United States was confident that the newly democratic Russia and increasingly wealthy China could be lured into a Western-led order that promised prosperity and relative peace—so long as they agreed to Washington’s terms. By the time America emerged from the age of terrorism, it was clear that this had been a fantasy.
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Gives many insights into our new Cold Wars
- By Amazon Customer on 04-19-24
By: David E. Sanger, and others
What listeners say about Rise of the Machines
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- Gary
- 09-10-16
Seamlessly weaves a tapestry from many pieces
This book deserves to be read and not ignored as this one seems to be. To understand where we are going sometimes one must first understand how we got there.
The author uses a chronological approach by decade and seamlessly ties each of the stories together as if he is a writing a brilliant work of fiction with an overriding narrative leading to a beautiful quilt made of many different tapestries.
He starts the story within WW II and the necessity for an artillery gun to anticipate the movement of manned airplanes and takes the listener through many other excursions such as L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics (and Scientology), Ashbey's Homeostasis contraption (a complicated machine that was said to be alive because of it's innate ability to reach complex state of equilibrium after systematic perturbations, a fascinating story and well told), LSD and Timothy Leary, Psycho Cybernetics (a book in almost everyone's house for all of the 1970s), The Whole Earth Catalog, "The Monkey's Paw Story" (you can watch a version on Youtube) and the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" and how they relate to our cybernetic advancements, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy, the default standard for encryption), and many other fascinating stories all seamlessly woven together.
The author does an amazing job of weaving the stories as a coherent whole and also does a summary chapter explaining how all the pieces fit together. Not to spoil it for the listener, but his theme is along the lines that humans first use tools (such as a peg leg on a pirate or a club in the hands of the baseball player) and slowly makes the tools interact more "magically" with the human, then the next step is the machine itself became the tool, and then the "network is the computer" (not his words, but a slogan from the 90s for Sun Microsystem that seems appropriate) and finally the community itself becomes completely connected and tends towards an organic system as a whole.
Overall, a fine book and deserves to have a larger audience than what it seems to be achieving, and is more satisfying than most of the recent pop science books I've been reading lately.
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- Jonathan
- 10-29-16
Good info but beats a dead horse in places
This book has some interesting material but gets repetitive in places. Nice wholistic view of "cyber" history and first causes. Overall not a bad book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- David Shaw
- 02-03-23
Thank you, Thomas Rid!
This is the cultural historical analysis of human-machine relations I’ve been looking for. Thank you, Thomas Rid, for your clarity and depth of learning!
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- Peirce C.S.
- 04-08-19
Outstanding
Hands down, the best intellectual history of the last 70 years of the development of computers.
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- Victor Mesa Fernandez
- 11-30-16
Good history lesson on cybernetics.
Really enjoyed the the details provided for the past 70 years.
Sometimes it felt as a history lesson and jumped around at times.
Recommend this book to those who are interested in knowing how it all started.
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- Amazon Customer 47
- 09-25-16
Machines? Cybernetics? 80% of the book had nothing to do with it
"Rise of the Internet: A cultural history" would have been more appropriate for a title. The first few chapters on the anti aircraft system used in the Second World War was enlightening and got me excited about the rest of the book. Sadly, instead of talking about industrial automation, Cold War technology and drone strikes, all talks about the "machines" stopped.
The rest of the book was a short history of counterculture, subversion, libertarianism, LSD, encryption, digital money, and hacking. It was a big departure from cybernetics, which implies the interaction between software and HARDWARE (i.e. The MACHINES). There was an interesting bit about Russians hacking the US in the late 90s but the author didn't take it past 2001, and it was about stealing data, rather than about controlling systems and machines. He could have talked about Stuxnet but he didn't.
A pretty disappointing book which started out strong but immediately just turned into another copy and paste job. 5 stars for the WWII info. The rest of the material in the middle can be found on Wikipedia. The book clearly suffers from his limited range of knowledge. It's as if he wrote this book in his 15th year of retirement.
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8 people found this helpful