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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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The story of the rise of modern navigation technology, from radio location to GPS—and the consequent decline of privacy. What does it mean to never get lost? You Are Here examines the rise of our technologically aided era of navigational omniscience—or how we came to know exactly where we are at all times. Filled with tales of scientists and astronauts, inventors and entrepreneurs, You Are Here tells the story of how humankind ingeniously solved one of its oldest and toughest problems—only to herald a new era in which it’s impossible to hide.
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I'm here - do you care
- By Nicholas E. Ertz on 04-13-14
By: Hiawatha Bray
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Phenomena
- The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis
- By: Annie Jacobsen
- Narrated by: Annie Jacobsen
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than 40 years, the US government has researched extrasensory perception, using it in attempts to locate hostages, fugitives, secret bases, and downed fighter jets, to divine other nations' secrets, and even to predict future threats to national security. The intelligence agencies and military services involved include CIA, DIA, NSA, DEA, the navy, air force, and army - and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, for the first time, New York Times best-selling author Annie Jacobsen tells the story of these radical, controversial programs.
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Phenomenally mediocre narration of a good book
- By philip on 05-18-17
By: Annie Jacobsen
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Our Robots, Ourselves
- Robotics and the Myth of Autonomy
- By: David A. Mindell
- Narrated by: David Chandler
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In Our Robots, Ourselves, David Mindell offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the cutting edge of robotics today, debunking commonly held myths and exploring the rapidly changing relationships between humans and machines. Drawing on firsthand experience, extensive interviews, and the latest research from MIT and elsewhere, Mindell takes us to extreme environments-high atmosphere, deep ocean, and outer space - to reveal where the most advanced robotics already exist.
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MUST READ
- By ryan salcido on 10-01-16
By: David A. Mindell
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The Idea Factory
- Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
- By: Jon Gertner
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Idea Factory, New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner reveals how Bell Labs served as an incubator for scientific innovation from the 1920s through the1980s. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted nearly 15,000 employees, 1200 of whom held PhDs and 13 of whom won Nobel Prizes. Thriving in a work environment that embraced new ideas, Bell Labs scientists introduced concepts that still propel many of today’s most exciting technologies.
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Great story -- horrible pauses
- By Rodney on 01-29-13
By: Jon Gertner
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Team of Teams
- New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
- By: General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and others
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The retired four-star general and and best-selling author of My Share of the Task shares a powerful new leadership model. Former General Stanley McChrystal held a key position for much of the War on Terror, as head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In Iraq, he found that despite the vastly superior resources, manpower, and training of the US Military, Al Qaeda had an advantage because of its structure as a loose network of small, independent cells. To defeat such an agile enemy, JSOC had to change its focus from efficiency to adaptability.
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excellent book, very informative.
- By J.J. Gardona on 08-24-15
By: General Stanley McChrystal, and others
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A Mind at Play
- How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
- By: Rob Goodman, Jimmy Soni
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
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I wanted more information about Information Theory
- By Bonny on 05-08-18
By: Rob Goodman, and others
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The Friendly Orange Glow
- The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
- By: Brian Dear
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 21 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even born, a group of visionary engineers and designers - some of them only high school students - in the late 1960s and 1970s created a computer system called PLATO, which was not only years but light-years ahead in experimenting with how people would learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected computers.
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Memory lane for the cyberist.
- By Robert C. Hickcox on 08-08-18
By: Brian Dear
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Broad Band
- The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
- By: Claire L. Evans
- Narrated by: Claire L. Evans
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Women are not ancillary to the history of technology; they turn up at the very beginning of every important wave. But they've often been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize. Vice reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the Internet what it is today. Evans shows us how these women built and colored the technologies we can't imagine life without.
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Inspiring
- By Jean on 03-29-18
By: Claire L. Evans
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Shortcut
- How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Analogies are far more complex than their SAT stereotype and lie at the very core of human cognition and creativity. Once we become aware of this, we start seeing them everywhere - in ads, apps, political debates, legal arguments, logos, and euphemisms, to name just a few. At their very best, analogies inspire new ways of thinking, enable invention, and motivate people to action. Unfortunately, not every analogy that rings true is true. That's why, at their worst, analogies can deceive, manipulate, or mislead us into disaster.
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Analogies???
- By Frederick on 08-16-15
By: John Pollack
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The Filter Bubble
- What the Internet Is Hiding from You
- By: Eli Pariser
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.
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Now in the top 3 best books I've ever read
- By Brian Esserlieu on 05-26-11
By: Eli Pariser
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Countdown to Zero Day
- Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
- By: Kim Zetter
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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The virus now known as Stuxnet was unlike any other piece of malware built before: Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it proved that a piece of code could escape the digital realm and wreak actual, physical destruction—in this case, on an Iranian nuclear facility.
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Amazingly detailed, sober and above all, damning
- By Greg on 11-22-14
By: Kim Zetter
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Applied Minds
- How Engineers Think
- By: Guru Madhavan
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Through narratives and case studies spanning the brilliant history of engineering, Madhavan shows how the concepts of prototyping, efficiency, reliability, standards, optimization, and feedback are put to use in fields as diverse as transportation, retail, health care, and entertainment. Equal parts personal, practical, and profound, Applied Minds charts a path to a future where we apply strategies borrowed from engineering to create useful and inspired solutions to our most pressing challenges.
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excellent edifying book; great narrator too.
- By Phillip on 01-16-22
By: Guru Madhavan
What listeners say about Rise of the Machines
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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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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4 people 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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- 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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- 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