Bøker utgitt av The MIT Press

"Exploration of the largely unknown history of Chinese-language computing systems, accessible to an audience unfamiliar with the Chinese language or the technical workings of personal computers"--

Two of the most important voices in art history discuss their intellectual foundations, the changing role of criticism, and the possibilities for artistic practice today.In Exit Interview, the prominent art critics and historians Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh discuss their intellectual foundations and the projects they've worked on together, from October magazine to Art Since 1900. Through three engaging conversations, Foster engages Buchloh on his early influences and aspirations, his formative years in Berlin, London, and Dusseldorf, and his career in North America, while exploring the impact of other art historians and critics. Buchloh candidly addresses his successes, critical significance, and unexplored avenues in art history, providing a unique window into his motivations and experiences. With a powerful postface by Buchloh, Exit Interview builds from biography and anecdote to important reflection on one’s critical life as a whole.

"The authors examine the implications of AI for the future of life and work, and how this might change the structure and environment of high school education"--

The inside story of the groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think about the life-and-death dilemmas posed by driverless cars.Human drivers don't find themselves facing such moral dilemmas as "should I sacrifice myself by driving off a cliff if that could save the life of a little girl on the road?" Human brains aren't fast enough to make that kind of calculation; the car is over the cliff in a nanosecond. A self-driving car, on the other hand, can compute fast enough to make such a decision--to do whatever humans have programmed it to do. But what should that be? This book investigates how people want driverless cars to decide matters of life and death.In The Car That Knew Too Much, psychologist Jean-François Bonnefon reports on a groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think cars should do in situations where not everyone can be saved. Sacrifice the passengers for pedestrians? Save children rather than adults? Kill one person so many can live? Bonnefon and his collaborators Iyad Rahwan and Azim Shariff designed the largest experiment in moral psychology ever: the Moral Machine, an interactive website that has allowed people --eventually, millions of them, from 233 countries and territories--to make choices within detailed accident scenarios. Bonnefon discusses the responses (reporting, among other things, that babies, children, and pregnant women were most likely to be saved), the media frenzy over news of the experiment, and scholarly responses to it.Boosters for driverless cars argue that they will be in fewer accidents than human-driven cars. It's up to humans to decide how many fatal accidents we will allow these cars to have.

An expert on mind considers how animals and smart machines measure up to human intelligence.Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really have intelligence comparable to that of humans? In Bots and Beasts, Paul Thagard looks at how computers ("bots") and animals measure up to the minds of people, offering the first systematic comparison of intelligence across machines, animals, and humans.Thagard explains that human intelligence is more than IQ and encompasses such features as problem solving, decision making, and creativity. He uses a checklist of twenty characteristics of human intelligence to evaluate the smartest machines--including Watson, AlphaZero, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars--and the most intelligent animals--including octopuses, dogs, dolphins, bees, and chimpanzees. Neither a romantic enthusiast for nonhuman intelligence nor a skeptical killjoy, Thagard offers a clear assessment. He discusses hotly debated issues about animal intelligence concerning bacterial consciousness, fish pain, and dog jealousy. He evaluates the plausibility of achieving human-level artificial intelligence and considers ethical and policy issues. A full appreciation of human minds reveals that current bots and beasts fall far short of human capabilities.

"Is AI a force for ill or for good? How does it work? This book analyzes the potential of AI in many sectors, including global security"--

The exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness experienced under digital capitalism, explored through works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers.Sometimes, interacting with digital platforms, we want to be passive-in those moments of dissociation when we scroll mindlessly rather than connecting with anyone, for example, or when our only response is a shrugging "e;lol."e; Despite encouragement by these platforms to "e;be yourself,"e; we want to be anyone but ourselves. Tung-Hui Hu calls this state of exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness digital lethargy. This condition permeates our lives under digital capitalism, whether we are "e;users,"e; who are what they click, or racialized workers in Asia and the Global South. Far from being a state of apathy, however, lethargy may hold the potential for social change.Hu explores digital lethargy through a series of works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers. These dispatches from the bleeding edge of digital culture include a fictional dystopia where low-wage Mexican workers laugh and emote for white audiences; a group that invites lazy viewers to strap their Fitbits to a swinging metronome, faking fitness and earning a discount on their health insurance premiums; and a memoir of burnout in an Amazon warehouse. These works dwell within the ordinariness and even banality of digital life, redirecting our attention toward moments of thwarted agency. Lethargy, writes Hu, is a drag: it weighs down our ability to rush to solutions and forces us to talk about the unresolved present.

"Crowded Out examines how charitable crowdfunding so quickly overtook public life, where it is taking us, and who gets left behind by this new platformed economy. While crowdfunding has become ubiquitous in our lives, it is largely misunderstood by the public: rather than a friendly free market "powered by the kindness" of strangers, crowdfunding is powerfully reinforcing inequalities and changing the way Americans think about, and access, health care. Drawing on extensive research and rich storytelling, Crowded Out demonstrates how crowdfunding for health is fueled by, and further reinforces, financial and moral "toxicities" in market-based health systems"--

"Interest in psychedelics has grown considerably in recent years -- one might even say psychedelics are experiencing a renaissance. But these mind-altering plants have always been with us. They have a rich and controversial history, in fact: plumbed from the depths of ancient Greek culture, infused with Christian symbols of sacrament, enriched by Buddhist philosophies, protected through Indigenous ceremonies, and, by the latter part of the twentieth century, catapulted into cultural consciousness through science, music, posters, blotter art, and fashion. In Psychedelics: A Visual Odyssey, Erika Dyck takes readers on an epic visual trip through some of the diverse ways that our fascination with psychedelics have been imagined throughout history. Blending academic rigor with rich imagery from around the globe, Psychedelics goes beyond the expected terrain of describing hallucinations. It reveals not only how psychedelic plants have been illustrated and understood, but also how these plants and chemical synthetics have inspired visual representations of health, fear, peace, colonial resistance, creativity, and more. A stunningly beautiful and comprehensive deep dive into the world of psychedelics, Psychedelics: A Visual Odyssey will inspire everyone from the curious general reader to the seasoned psychonaut."--

"In the not-too-distant future, the world is ruled by a male scientific elite. Eugenics has triumphed in this fertility dystopia; from adolescence, women are either made into "vocational mothers," or, if they have no interest in motherhood, they are sterilized by the government and become "neuters." The story introduces a young woman who rebels against this system, and a young man who resists the "happy" norm - a resistance which culminates, like the Savage's in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in suicide"--

"Originally published as Biologia della gentilezza"--Title page verso.

How our sense of smell engages with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political economy—and how it can help enrich our understanding of the nature of truth, language, economy, and sexuality.Why is it that, in Indo-European languages at least, we have no language to describe smells, leaving us (and famously Juliet) no choice but to call the scent of a rose simply “sweet”? In What's That Smell?, a groundbreaking exploration of the intersection between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the oft-neglected sense of smell, Simon Hajdini sets out to answer this complex question. Through new readings of traditional and modern philosophical texts, Hajdini places smell at the very center of a philosophical critique of the traditional notion of truth, challenging the idea that smell is the antiphilosophical sense par excellence.Through fresh engagements with fundamental philosophical issues, original analyses of modern literature and film, and the novel use of scientific research into smell within a humanities context, Hajdini situates problems of olfaction at the very point of inception of cultural life. He proposes that ontology, civilization, and capitalist economy alike can be said to amount to "shit management." And only by following the philosophically most deplorable of the senses, the book argues, can we better understand the central philosophical, psychoanalytical, and political issues of truth, sex, and exploitation.

"This book unpacks the organizing metaphor of the "decisionscape," examining how psychological distance alters our decisions by dictating what we foreground and what we diminish, how our personal worldview influences how we interpret information, how the overall "composition" of the decisions we are faced with has an effect on how we react to them, and how our decisions are bounded and framed by the invisible forces of culture and context"--

"An argument for the inclusion of the human perspective within science and how it makes science possible"--

"This book explores how tools of the Digital Age might be mobilized to solve our most pressing environmental challenges, from climate change to biodiversity loss. It argues that digital technology might accelerate environmental sustainability and that engaging with environmental issues may transform Big Tech for the better, if the sector successfully addresses spiraling energy use, pollution, privacy and surveillance issues"--

A study of contemporary music in light of transformations to work and social life.The emergence of the popular music industry in the early twentieth century not only drove a wedge between music production and consumption, it also underscored a wider separation of labor from leisure and of the workplace from the domestic sphere. These were changes characteristic of an industrial society where pleasure was to be sought outside of work, but these categories have grown increasingly porous today. As the working day extends into the home or becomes indistinguishable from leisure time, so the role and meaning of music in everyday life changes too. In arguing that the experience of popular music is partly conditioned by its segregation from work and its restriction to the time and space of leisure—the evening, the weekend, the dancehall—Take This Hammer shows how changes to work as it grows increasingly precarious, part-time, and temporary in recent decades, are related to transformations in popular music. Connecting contemporary changes in work and the economy to tendencies in popular music, Take This Hammer shows how song-form has both reflected developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon beyond it. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance music, by exploring the intersections of work and song in the current era, not only do we gain a new understanding of contemporary musical culture, we also see how music might gesture towards a horizon beyond the alienating experience of work in capitalism itself.

On the rich history of video art and its enduring relevance to today’s artistic and critical practices.The New Television delves into the rich history of video art, reexamining the pivotal Open Circuits conference held at MoMA in 1974 and exploring its enduring relevance to today’s artistic and critical practices. Open Circuits was an important event in establishing video art in American museums and articulated a range of conflicting teloses for the medium, some which materialized (like local cable television) and others that remain unrealized. The conference proceedings were published in 1977 as The New Television: A Public/Private Art, and the radical design of the book reflected the conference’s utopian aims. This two-part publication includes a facsimile of the long-out-of-print conference proceedings and new essays and discussions by over a dozen scholars and artists. The new scholarly texts and previously unpublished archival documents in The New Television illuminate the network of institutional histories of video art, consider global televisual contexts and alternative critical approaches, and examine contemporary video art and its continued relevance from new perspectives.

How leaders can recast innovation’s toughest trade-offs—efficiency vs. flexibility, consistency vs. change, product vs purpose—as productive tensions.Why is leading innovation in today’s dynamic business environment so distressingly hit-or-miss? More than 90 percent of high-potential ventures don’t reach their projected targets. Surveys show that 80 percent of executives consider innovation crucial to their growth strategy, but only 6 percent are satisfied with their innovation performance. Should leaders aim for Steve Jobs-level genius, shower their projects with resources, or lean in to luck and embrace uncertainty? None of the above, say Christopher Bingham and Rory McDonald. Drawing on cutting-edge research and probing interviews with hundreds of leaders across three continents, in Productive Tensions Bingham and McDonald find that the most effective leaders and successful innovators embrace the tensions that arise from competing aims: efficiency or flexibility? consistency or change? product or purpose? Bingham and McDonald spotlight eight critical tensions that every innovator must master, and they spell out, with dozens of detailed examples of both success and failure, how to navigate them. How do you excite customers about a product they’ve never imagined? When is it wise to accept what the data is telling you, and when should you ignore the data and plow forward anyway? How can you maintain stakeholders’ trust and support during radical unforeseen course corrections? Bingham and McDonald guide readers through innovation’s thorniest tensions, using examples drawn from the experience of organizations as varied as P&G, Instagram, the US military, Honda, In-N-Out Burger, Slack, Under Armour, and the snowboarding company Burton.

How we can create artificial intelligence with broad, robust common sense rather than narrow, specialized expertise.It’s sometime in the not-so-distant future, and you send your fully autonomous self-driving car to the store to pick up your grocery order. The car is endowed with as much capability as an artificial intelligence agent can have, programmed to drive better than you do. But when the car encounters a traffic light stuck on red, it just sits there—indefinitely. Its obstacle-avoidance, lane-following, and route-calculation capacities are all irrelevant; it fails to act because it lacks the common sense of a human driver, who would quickly figure out what’s happening and find a workaround. In Machines like Us, Ron Brachman and Hector Levesque—both leading experts in AI—consider what it would take to create machines with common sense rather than just the specialized expertise of today’s AI systems.Using the stuck traffic light and other relatable examples, Brachman and Levesque offer an accessible account of how common sense might be built into a machine. They analyze common sense in humans, explain how AI over the years has focused mainly on expertise, and suggest ways to endow an AI system with both common sense and effective reasoning. Finally, they consider the critical issue of how we can trust an autonomous machine to make decisions, identifying two fundamental requirements for trustworthy autonomous AI systems: having reasons for doing what they do, and being able to accept advice. Both in the end are dependent on having common sense.

How genomics reveals deep histories of inequality, going back many thousands of years.Inequality is an urgent global concern, with pundits, politicians, academics, and best-selling books all taking up its causes and consequences. In Inequality, Carles Lalueza-Fox offers an entirely new perspective on the subject, examining the genetic marks left by inequality on humans throughout history. Lalueza-Fox describes genetic studies, made possible by novel DNA sequencing technologies, that reveal layers of inequality in past societies, manifested in patterns of migration, social structures, and funerary practices. Through their DNA, ancient skeletons have much to tell us, yielding anonymous stories of inequality, bias, and suffering.Lalueza-Fox, a leader in paleogenomics, offers the deep history of inequality. He explores the ancestral shifts associated with migration and describes the gender bias unearthed in these migrations—the brutal sexual asymmetries, for example, between male European explorers and the women of Latin America that are revealed by DNA analysis. He considers social structures, and the evidence that high social standing was inherited—the ancient world was not a meritocracy. He untangles social and genetic factors to consider whether wealth is an advantage in reproduction, showing why we are more likely to be descended from a king than a peasant. And he explores the effects of ancient inequality on the human gene pool. Marshaling a range of evidence, Lalueza-Fox shows that understanding past inequalities is key to understanding present ones.

How Vera Rubin convinced the scientific community that dark matter might exist, persevering despite early dismissals of her work.We now know that the universe is mostly dark, made up of particles and forces that are undetectable even by our most powerful telescopes. The discovery of the possible existence of dark matter and dark energy signaled a Copernican-like revolution in astronomy: not only are we not the center of the universe, neither is the stuff of which we’re made. Astronomer Vera Rubin (1928–2016) played a pivotal role in this discovery. By showing that some astronomical objects seem to defy gravity’s grip, Rubin helped convince the scientific community of the possibility of dark matter. In Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond, Ashley Jean Yeager tells the story of Rubin’s life and work, recounting her persistence despite early dismissals of her work and widespread sexism in science.Yeager describes Rubin’s childhood fascination with stars, her education at Vassar and Cornell, and her marriage to a fellow scientist. At first, Rubin wasn’t taken seriously; she was a rarity, a woman in science, and her findings seemed almost incredible. Some observatories in midcentury America restricted women from using their large telescopes; Rubin was unable to collect her own data until a decade after she had earned her PhD. Still, she continued her groundbreaking work, driving a scientific revolution. She received the National Medal of Science in 1993, but never the Nobel Prize—perhaps overlooked because of her gender. She’s since been memorialized with a ridge on Mars, an asteroid, a galaxy, and most recently, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory—the first national observatory named after a woman.

What altered states of consciousness—the dissolution of feelings of time and self—can tell us about the mystery of consciousness.During extraordinary moments of consciousness—shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication—our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been ignored by mainstream science, or considered crazy fantasies. Recent research, however, has located the neural underpinnings of these altered states of mind. In this book, neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann shows how experiences that disturb or widen our everyday understanding of the self can help solve the mystery of consciousness.Wittmann explains that the relationship between consciousness of time and consciousness of self is close; in extreme circumstances, the experiences of space and self intensify and weaken together. He considers the emergence of the self in waking life and dreams; how our sense of time is distorted by extreme situations ranging from terror to mystical enlightenment; the experience of the moment; and the loss of time and self in such disorders as depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Dostoyevsky reported godly bliss during epileptic seizures; neurologists are now investigating the phenomenon of the epileptic aura. Wittmann describes new studies of psychedelics that show how the brain builds consciousness of self and time, and discusses pilot programs that use hallucinogens to treat severe depression, anxiety, and addiction.If we want to understand our consciousness, our subjectivity, Wittmann argues, we must not be afraid to break new ground. Studying altered states of consciousness leads us directly to the heart of the matter: time and self, the foundations of consciousness.

An archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture, produced alongside Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, Black Backstage.Life of the Party is an archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture—its poetics and its realities and its ruins, both seen and unseen. Produced concurrent with Black Backstage, Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, the book acts as a blueprint, a script, and a ledger for this exhibition as well as a stand-alone record of the territory it covers. Holiday assembles artifacts from this tradition, especially found photographs taken of artists backstage, to tell the story of the culture within the culture, retrieving a secret history of the gestures, murmurs, shouts, and reversals that occur offstage and off the record. Colliding image, text, and even audio (in an album accompaniment to the book that Holiday will also produce as part of this series of works), Life of the Party reveals the backstage as by turns mundane, vulgar, and glorious: a site of sacred ritual behind the spectacle of performance.

"A history of and a hymn to the diversities of living beings, to understand that imperfection is promise of change and fuel of creativity"--

The first exhibition catalogue of the acclaimed queer, feminist curatorial initiative Ridykeulous, marking the occasion of their first institutional presentation in Europe at Nottingham Contemporary.Founded in 2005, Ridykeulous mounts exhibitions and events primarily concerned with queer and feminist art. This publication will be the first exhibition catalogue by Ridykeulous, joined by Sam Roeck, and will accompany the fall 2023 exhibition Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos at Nottingham Contemporary. With newly commissioned texts by writer and performer Laurie Weeks and Alexandro Segade of the artist collective My Barbarian, the catalogue will be complemented by a conversation between Ridykeulous members Nicole Eisenman and A. L. Steiner, providing insights into the collective’s thinking, politics, behind-the-scenes notations, and methods of exploration, as well as an introduction by Nottingham Contemporary’s Chief Curator Nicole Yip.Using humor to critique the art world and heteropatriarchal culture at-large, Ridykeulous often reinvents language to reflect their sensibilities and concerns—composing communiqués, screeds, and diatribes across various media. The exhibition features an intergenerational mix of 30 contemporary visual artists working across film, video installation, sculpture, and performance. Playfully proposing queer fabulosity as a critical intervention in the capitalist spectacle, the exhibition seeks to erode the secondary positioning of LGBTQ+ art and artists as “alternative.” Designed by the Zürich-based Studio Marie Lusa, the publication will evoke the textual feeling of a zine, with over 100 full-color and black-and-white image plates.

"This book tells the story of how scientific ocean drilling, a crowning achievement of science and engineering in the 20th century, transformed our understanding of Earth's history"--

The stirring speech given by Peter Sloterdijk in Lucerne in October 2022.From time immemorial, humanity has had to organize their “metabolism with nature.” For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labor. When Prometheus, according to the myth, brought fire to earth, another crucial input was added. Fire has been used to cook food and harden tools for hundreds of thousands of years. In this sense, it can be said that all history implies the history of the uses of fire.But whereas trees could only be burnt once, labor and fire shifted with the discovery of underground deposits of coal and oil. Modern humanity, according to Peter Sloterdijk, can be considered a collective of arsonists who set fire to the underground forests and moors. If Prometheus were to return to earth today, he might regret his gift; after all, what looms is nothing less than Ekpyrosis, the demise of the world in fire. And only a new, energetic pacifism can prevent this catastrophe.

Science fiction as a vital bridge between technoscience and culture, an early warning system, a method for imagining differently.In the new millennium, science fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream. At the same time, it has undergone massive transformations. No longer can it be derided as indigestible technobabble or escapist trash or a white man’s playground—not that it ever really was. Sf is rich and diverse, serious, and fun. A vital bridge between technoscience and culture, it is an early warning system, a method for imagining differently, and a way of experiencing our increasingly science-fictional world. It is the vernacular of the 21st century. This Is Not A Science Fiction Textbook brings together leading sf scholars, including some of the most exciting new critical voices, to introduce the genre for the general reader. Its first part outlines some key ideas used to think about sf, such as Estrangement, Extrapolation, and Alterity. Its second part maps some of the genre’s global history, from the Enlightenment and European colonialism to Indigenous and African Futurisms. Its third part surveys sf at the turn of the 2020s, organised by concepts, movements and new academic disciplines, from Afrofuturism and Animal Studies to Queer Theory and the Weird—and each chapter, whether it is on Climate Fiction or Neurodiversity, is accompanied by an introduction to a major contemporary novel and film.

"An EKS book describing the arguments for and against a universal basic income, drawing on research from around the world, with a particular focus on likelihood of adoption within the United States"--