Bøger udgivet af MIT Press

Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs and drudgery, leaving humans to a life of leisure. This hasn't happened. Instead, humans are still doing boring jobs, and even worse, AI researchers have built technology that is creative, self-aware, and emotional--doing the tasks humans were supposed to enjoy. How did we get here? In Moral Codes, Alan Blackwell argues that there is a fundamental flaw in the research agenda of AI. What humanity needs, Blackwell argues, is better ways to tell computers what we want them to do, with new and better programming languages: More Open Representations, Access to Learning, and Control Over Digital Expression, in other words, MORAL CODE. Blackwell draws on his deep experiences as a programming language designer--which he has been doing since 1983--to unpack fundamental principles of interaction design and explain their technical relationship to ideas of creativity and fairness. Taking aim at software that constrains our conversations with strict word counts or infantilizes human interaction with likes and emojis, Blackwell shows how to design software that is better--not more efficient or more profitable, but better for society and better for all people. Covering recent research and the latest smart tools, Blackwell offers rich design principles for a better kind of software--and a better kind of world.

The definitive toolkit for doctoral students in engineering on thesis--and journal--article preparation, project (and stress) management, IP protection, collaborations, and other aspects of the PhD journey. It shouldn't take a PhD to get a PhD, but sometimes the process can seem that confusing--even though, to the mentors and advisors, so obvious that it goes without saying. For doctoral students in engineering confronting this dilemma, Caroline Boudoux, an accomplished researcher and entrepreneur, provides a demystifying guide to the challenges--daunting, seemingly routine, and at times unexpected--of pursuing a PhD in this demanding field. In It Goes without Saying, Boudoux marshals her own considerable experience mentoring graduate students, teaching doctoral workshops, and--not so long ago--earning her own PhD at MIT to give PhD candidates the know-how, and the confidence, to succeed. Among the topics this book takes up are: What a PhD is: the journey, the milestones, and the endgame.Technical questions about what a doctoral project in engineering is and how to lead one.Practical matters including tips on writing, from proposal to dissertation; ethics; and intellectual property.Personal concerns, such as dealing with expectations, imposter syndrome, and stress.From the mundane to the metaphysical, this user-friendly guide gives the doctoral student in engineering the tools to make it from Day 1 to the successful completion of the PhD in a timely, fully informed, and forward-looking manner.

The first comprehensive critical analysis of the practices and consequences of ancient DNA research. This edited collection, Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA, presents a critical enquiry into the much-hyped "ancient DNA revolution" in archaeology. Offering the first comprehensive and in-depth scholarly analysis of the practices and effects of archaeogenetics, editors Daniel Strand, Anna Källén, and Charlotte Mulcare, along with other renowned scholars from Europe and the United States, address a host of questions, such as: What happens with our understanding of the past when archaeology is married to genetic science? What cultural forms and historical narratives are generated by ancient DNA (aDNA) research, and what energies could they unleash? Taking a multidisciplinary and multisite approach to the topic, these essays offer important insights into the epistemological, ethical, and political consequences around and beyond the scientific analysis of aDNA. As such, Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA provides a timely and much-needed critical engagement with the rapidly growing field of aDNA research--a field that, while already having a notable impact on how we view the past in research, museums, and popular media--had not yet been subject to thorough critical scrutiny. ContributorsRuth Amstutz, Chip Colwell, Magnus Fiskesjö, K. Ann Horsburgh, Anna Källén, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Amade M'charek, Charlotte Mulcare, Andreas Nyblom, Venla Oikkonen, Mélanie Pruvost, Marianne Sommer, Daniel Strand

An updated edition of the seminal book that explores why the interest in psychoanalysis in France exploded after 1968 and what it says about culture and therapy. Among Western countries, France may well be the one that resisted Freud the longest. But, in the late 1960s, France was seized by an infatuation with Freudianism. By the end of that decade, France had more than a psychoanalytic movement: it had a widespread and deeply rooted psychoanalytic culture. At the heart of this development was Jacques Lacan's reconstruction of Freudian theory, a reinvention of psychoanalysis that resonated with French culture in the aftermath of the uprisings of 1968. In Psychoanalytic Politics, the second edition of her groundbreaking work, Sherry Turkle tells the fascinating story of Lacan and why his work so profoundly influenced the French psyche. While in the United States psychoanalysis is identified with an essentially conservative medical establishment, the French rediscovery of Freud, in a dramatic enactment of Freud's prophesy, became associated with the most radical elements of French philosophical and political life. In this book, Turkle provides a firsthand account of the psychoanalytic culture that developed in France--as a politicized, Gallicized, and poeticized Freudianism, deeply marked by the work of Jacques Lacan. The clearest introduction in English to Lacan's teaching, Psychoanalytic Politics explores how cultures appropriate theories of mind and how ideas come to connect with individuals. The book's final chapter provides a fascinating portrayal of the last years of Lacan's life--the intrigue and power struggles that resulted in the break-up of the Freudian School he founded and the events that unfolded in the years following his death in 1981. This edition includes a new preface by the author, reflecting on the origins of the book and its relevance for today: a time when the integration of thought and feeling, politics and self-examination is as urgent an endeavor as ever.

The "mapness of maps"--how maps live in interaction with their users, and what this tells us about what they are and how they work. In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw, and use them. They have, for the moment, a cognitive life. To grapple with what this means--to ask how maps can be alive, and what kind of life they have--is to explore the core question of what maps are. And this is what Roberto Casati does in The Cognitive Life of Maps, in the process assembling the conceptual tools for understanding why maps have the power they have, why they are so widely used, and how we use (and misuse) them. Drawing on insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Casati considers the main claims around what maps are and how they work--their specific syntax, peculiar semantics, and pragmatics. He proposes a series of steps that can lead to a precise theory of maps, one that reveals what maps have in common with diagrams, pictures, and texts, and what makes them different. This minimal theory of maps helps us to see maps nested in many cognitive artifacts--clock faces, musical notation, writing, calendars, and numerical series, for instance. It also allows us to tackle the issue of the territorialization of maps--to show how maps can be used to draw specific spatial inferences about territories. From the mechanics of maps used for navigation to the differences and similarities between maps and pictures and models, Casati's ambitious work is a cognitive map in its own right, charting the way to a new understanding of what maps mean.

A provocative edited collection that takes an original approach toward the black box of military technology, surveillance, and AI--and reveals the aesthetic dimension of warfare. War and Aesthetics gathers leading artists, political scientists, and scholars to outline the aesthetic dimension of warfare and offer a novel perspective on its contemporary character and the construction of its potential futures. Edited by a team of four scholars, Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, and Christine Strandmose Toft, this timely volume examines warfare through the lens of aesthetics, arguing that the aesthetic configurations of perception, technology, and time are central to the artistic engagement with warfare, just as they are key to military AI, weaponry, and satellite surveillance. People mostly think of war as the violent manifestation of a political rationality. But when war is viewed through the lens of aesthesis--meaning perception and sensibility--military technology becomes an applied science of sensory cognition. An outgrowth of three war seminars that took place in Copenhagen between 2018 and 2021, War and Aesthetics engages in three main areas of inquiry--the rethinking of aesthetics in the field of art and in the military sphere; the exploration of techno-aesthetics and the wider political and theoretical implications of war technology; and finally, the analysis of future temporalities that these technologies produce. The editors gather various traditions and perspectives ranging from literature to media studies to international relations, creating a unique historical and scientific approach that broadly traces the entanglement of war and aesthetics across the arts, social sciences, and humanities from ancient times to the present. As international conflict looms between superpowers, War and Aesthetics presents new and illuminating ways to think about future conflict in a world where violence is only ever a few steps away. ContributorsLouise Amoore, Ryan Bishop, Jens Bjering, James Der Derian, Anthony Downey, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, Mark B. Hansen, Caroline Holmqvist, Vivienne Jabri, Caren Kaplan, Phil Klay, Kate McLoughlin, Elaine Scarry, Christine Strandmose Toft, Joseph Vogl, Arkadi Zaides

Artist and teacher White delivers and develops art school lessons, striking an instructive balance between technical advice and sage concepts. These 101 maxims, meditations, and demonstrations offer both a toolkit of ideas for the art student and a set of guiding principles for the artist.

An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself. In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what "counts" as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself. The Unreal platform serves as a kind of technical and political archive of the games industry, highlighting how the techniques and concerns of games have shifted and accreted over the past 30 years. Today, Unreal is also used in contexts far beyond games, including in public communication, biomedical research, civil engineering, and military simulation and training. The author's depth of technical analysis, combined with new archival findings, contributes to discussions of topics rarely covered in games studies (such as the politics of graphical rendering algorithms), as well as new readings of previously "closed" case studies (such as the engine's entanglement with the US military and American masculinity in America's Army). Culture, Malazita writes, is not "built into" software but emerges through human practices with code.

A history of architecture, not as the art of what stays but of what changes and moves. We tend to think of architecture as a practice in permanence, but what if we looked instead for an architecture of transience? In Things That Move, Tim Anstey does just that: rather than assuming that architecture is, at a certain level, stationary, he considers how architecture moves subjects (referring to its emotive potential in the experience it creates); how it moves objects (referring to how it choreographs bodies in motion); and how it is itself moved (referring to the mixture of materials, laws, affordances, and images that introduce movement into any architectural condition). The first of the book's three sections, "Cargoes," highlights the mobile peripheries of architectural history through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It asks what kinds of knowledge can be included under a discussion of something called architecture, noting the connections between discourses of the lithe and the technical, on the one hand, and those associated with the production of monumental, static compositions on the other. The second section, "Dispatches," reinterprets early architectural theory by examining the Renaissance ideal of decorum, the nature of the architectural work, and the ways in which architects are constituted as authors. Lastly, "Vehicles" considers building in terms of literal and metaphorical movement, using two cases from the twentieth century that investigate the relationship between architecture and cultural memory. Using a broadly forensic approach to connect details in otherwise disparate cases, Things That Move is a breathtakingly capacious architectural account that will change the way readers understand buildings, their becoming, and their significance.

An impassioned philosophical celebration of the multiple dimensions of contemporary cuteness.Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realize that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realize that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil’ textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.

"Based on his decades of experience working with newborn chicks and other species, Vallortigara gives us a clear and accessible account of behaviors that are considered to be innate or instinctive"--

"Chun investigates the centrality of race, gender, class, and sexuality to "Big Data" and network analytics"--

A portrait of trailblazing astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and an illustrated exploration of the power of attention in scientific observation, artistic creation, and the making of meaning.Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of about 100,000 light years—a figure we can calculate because of the work of Henrietta Leavitt (1868–1921), who spent decades studying glass plate photographs of the night sky. Visual artist and researcher Anna Von Mertens’s Attention Is Discovery is a fascinating portrait of this remarkable woman who laid the foundation for modern cosmology, as well as an exploration of the power of looking and its revelatory role at the center of scientific discovery. Ushering us into the scientific community of women who worked alongside Leavitt, now known as the Harvard Computers, Von Mertens describes the inventive methodologies Leavitt devised to negotiate the era’s emerging photographic technology. Interspersed with Von Mertens’s meticulously researched and lyrically written essays are collaborations with art historian Jennifer Roberts, cosmologist Wendy Freedman, astrophysicist João Alves, and novelist Rebecca Dinerstein Knight. Alongside Leavitt’s process, evident in her astronomical logbooks and ink notations on the glass plates, Von Mertens includes details of the hand-stitched quilts and graphite drawings that she made in response to Leavitt’s legacy. This interweaving of text and image engages and rewards the reader’s own close attention. Highlighting ways that subtle, repeated actions build meaning—whether skilled, technical observation, the crafting of an object, or the mundane tasks that construct our exquisite lives—Von Mertens’s pairing of close looking with close reading creates a layered portrait of Henrietta Leavitt that acknowledges the significance of her discovery and the richness of its inheritance.

"Through photography and creative nonfiction, we see Brooklyn, NY and Oakland, CA through new eyes-alongside the critical importance of everyday places"--

How Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI is making it worse, and how we can create a thriving, AI-positive world.On balance, will AI help humanity or harm it? AI could revolutionize science, medicine, and technology, and deliver us a world of abundance and better health. Or it could be a disaster, leading to the downfall of democracy, or even our extinction. In Taming Silicon Valley, Gary Marcus, one of the most trusted voices in AI, explains that we still have a choice. And that the decisions we make now about AI will shape our next century. In this short but powerful manifesto, Marcus explains how Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI could make things much worse, and, most importantly, what we can do to safeguard our democracy, our society, and our future.Marcus explains the potential—and potential risks—of AI in the clearest possible terms and how Big Tech has effectively captured policymakers. He begins by laying out what is lacking in current AI, what the greatest risks of AI are, and how Big Tech has been playing both the public and the government, before digging into why the US government has thus far been ineffective at reining in Big Tech. He then offers real tools for readers, including eight suggestions for what a coherent AI policy should like—from data rights to layered AI oversight to meaningful tax reform—and closes with how ordinary citizens can push for what is so desperately needed.Taming Silicon Valley is both a primer on how AI has gotten to its problematic present state and a book of activism in the tradition of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. It is a deeply important book for our perilous historical moment that every concerned citizen must read.

"Establishes the cultural power of hair in the 19th century through critical interpretation of the significant space and time devoted to it as an important sociocultural symbol"--

"In this book, digital anthropologist Payal Arora proposes ways in which we can envision new design systems and thinking to include the world. Drawing from fieldwork on young people's digital usage in Brazil, India, Bangladesh and Nigeria, Arora reveals how their understandings of algorithmic systems shape their creativity, trust, identity, and political action"--

From the bestselling author of Quantum Computing for Everyone, a concise, accessible, and elegant approach to mathematics that not only illustrates concepts but also conveys the surprising nature of the digital information age.Most of us know something about the grand theories of physics that transformed our views of the universe at the start of the twentieth century: quantum mechanics and general relativity. But we are much less familiar with the brilliant theories that make up the backbone of the digital revolution. In Beautiful Math, Chris Bernhardt explores the mathematics at the very heart of the information age. He asks questions such as: What is information? What advantages does digital information have over analog? How do we convert analog signals into digital ones? What is an algorithm? What is a universal computer? And how can a machine learn?The four major themes of Beautiful Math are information, communication, computation, and learning. Bernhardt typically starts with a simple mathematical model of an important concept, then reveals a deep underlying structure connecting concepts from what, at first, appear to be unrelated areas. His goal is to present the concepts using the least amount of mathematics, but nothing is oversimplified. Along the way, Bernhardt also discusses alphabets, the telegraph, and the analog revolution; information theory; redundancy and compression; errors and noise; encryption; how analog information is converted into digital information; algorithms; and finally, neural networks. Historical anecdotes are included to give a sense of the technology at that time, its impact, and the problems that needed to be solved. Taking its readers by the hand, regardless of their math background, Beautiful Math is a fascinating journey through the mathematical ideas that undergird our everyday digital interactions.

"In science, it frequently happens that researchers look for something and find something else: understanding why leads us to the heart of how scientific method works and to the root of its wonder"--

"This book is Todd Stern's eyewitness account of the full, charged, seven-year story of how the Paris Agreement came to be, following an arc from Copenhagen, to Durban, to the secret U.S.-China climate deal in 2014, to Paris itself. It illuminates the strategy and tactics, policy, politics and diplomacy that made Paris possible, and it also depicts the pitfalls and challenges overcome, the struggle between different groups of countries, the sometimes shifting alliances, the last-minmute maneuvering and the ultimate historic success"--

"Blockchain Governance offers an accessible, critical overview of legal and political issues related to blockchain technology. It moves beyond the hype, showing how blockchain offers a fertile ground for experimentation with radically new ways to govern people and institutions"--

An electroacoustic, olfactory, and textual project by artist Florian Hecker.Florian Hecker is an artist whose work is realized through the technical manipulation of sensory data. By utilizing machinic scales and registers, Hecker creates environments marked at once by overwhelming complexity and vexing subtlety, where audience members are led to dwell on the outer limits of their own perceptual capacities.Resynthesizers took place in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, in the Fitzpatrick-Leland House, a tri-level residence designed by Rudolf Schindler and built in 1936. Centered around a trio of compositions produced using a novel algorithm for texture synthesis, the exhibition also featured three olfactory accords selected by Marc vom Ende and Philip Kraft of Symrise, and three electrophoretic displays transmitting a libretto by Robin Mackay.The molecular construction of sensory experience enabled by the technical manipulation and synthesis of materials emerges as a central theme of Resynthesizers. The regime of these ‘immaterials’ disjoins sensation from inherited conceptual models, and in the encounter with its resyntheses we are challenged to reintegrate sense and formulate new concepts.Designed by NORM, Zurich, this meticulously assembled document features exhibition documentation by Fredrik Nilsen Studio and data visualizations by Axel Roebel alongside essays by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Alex H. Barnett, Marc Vom Ende and Philip Kraft, Robin Mackay, and Luciana Parisi.

A young woman discovers that dancers at a local discotheque are being driven to acts of insane violence.“The place was full of swarming, pugnacious, dangerous missellneous reptile’s… Teenager’s everywhere pounded their way on top of each other crazily strangling, biting and slashing each other’s with broken glass, smashed records or sharpened blades… ” 
16-year-old Jennifer Gibbons (1963–1993) wrote Discomania in 1980, alongside her twin sister June-Alison, who was also writing her own novel, The Pepsi Cola Addict, in the bedroom that they shared. Jennifer offered Discomania to the same English vanity press who would publish June-Alison’s book, but Discomania was turned down for being “too violent, too sexual, and too futuristic.”Long thought to have been lost or destroyed, June-Alison had in fact preserved the typescript of this unique, furious, funny, and strange novel, which we present with her blessing, alongside additional texts from June-Alison, and editors David Tibet and Ania Goszczyńska.

The affects, aesthetics, and ethics of voice in the new materialist turn, explored through encounters with creative works in media and the arts.

In this book, Michael Madary examines visual experience, drawing on both phenomenological and empirical methods of investigation. He finds that these two approaches -- careful, philosophical description of experience and the science of vision -- independently converge on the same result: Visual perception is an ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. Madary first makes the case for the descriptive premise, arguing that the phenomenology of vision is best described as on ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. He discusses visual experience as being perspectival, temporal, and indeterminate; considers the possibility of surprise when appearances do not change as we expect; and considers the content of visual anticipation. Madary then makes the case for the empirical premise, showing that there are strong empirical reasons to model vision using the general form of anticipation and fulfillment. He presents a range of evidence from perceptual psychology and neuroscience, and reinterprets evidence for the two-visual-systems hypothesis. Finally, he considers the relationship between visual perception and social cognition. An appendix discusses Husserlian phenomenology as it relates to the argument of the book.Madary argues that the fact that there is a convergence of historically distinct methodologies itself is an argument that supports his findings. With Visual Phenomenology, he creates an exchange between the humanities and the sciences that takes both methods of investigation seriously.

A description of perturbation-based methods developed in machine learning to augment novel optimization methods with strong statistical guarantees.In nearly all machine learning, decisions must be made given current knowledge. Surprisingly, making what is believed to be the best decision is not always the best strategy, even when learning in a supervised learning setting. An emerging body of work on learning under different rules applies perturbations to decision and learning procedures. These methods provide simple and highly efficient learning rules with improved theoretical guarantees. This book describes perturbation-based methods developed in machine learning to augment novel optimization methods with strong statistical guarantees, offering readers a state-of-the-art overview.Chapters address recent modeling ideas that have arisen within the perturbations framework, including Perturb & MAP, herding, and the use of neural networks to map generic noise to distribution over highly structured data. They describe new learning procedures for perturbation models, including an improved EM algorithm and a learning algorithm that aims to match moments of model samples to moments of data. They discuss understanding the relation of perturbation models to their traditional counterparts, with one chapter showing that the perturbations viewpoint can lead to new algorithms in the traditional setting. And they consider perturbation-based regularization in neural networks, offering a more complete understanding of dropout and studying perturbations in the context of deep neural networks.