New Books in Technology

A recent editorial in the Moscow Times declared that in Moscow “the car is king.” Indeed, one word Muscovites constantly mutter is probka (traffic jam). The boom in car ownership is transforming Russian life itself, and for some not necessarily for the better. “The joy of personal mobility — that is, automobile ownership — has completely eclipsed the value of community life. But the joy of car own...

If technology is the site of digital culture, then robots are the future platforms of our social projections and interactions. In fact, that future is already here in small but fascinating ways. Mark Stephen Meadows is one of a handful of curious authors who have begun to explore the social ramifications of robotic engineering and his book We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutb...

In their new book Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google (Telescope Books, 2011), Scott Cleland, President of Precursor LLC, and Ira Brodsky, founder of Datacomm Research, aim to expose the unethical internet behemoth they believe to be hiding behind the motto “Don’t be Evil.” Cleland and Brodsky believe that Google has a hidden political agenda, and is attempting to shape the world to mat...

In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor official in southern China, Song has earned a major reputation...

Can computers think? That was the question which provoked English mathematician Alan Turing to come up with what we call the Turing Test, in which a computer engages a human in conversation while a judge, unaware of who is who, looks on and tries to ascertain which participant is made of flesh and blood, and which of bits and bytes. Such a test is held every year in Brighton, England, where the mo...

This week New Books in Public Policy interviews Bob Goldberg about his new book Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit (Simon & Schuster, 2010). The book is a look at the way medical science is discussed and played out over the Internet. As Goldberg says on his website, tabloid medicine is “medical reporting or information based on or consist...

Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off European empires; both struggled with slavery and its legacy; both are profoundly multiethnic and multiracial; both have spent much of their respective histories settling a vast “wild” frontier (though,...