Name: Machines of loving grace
ISBN: 9780062266682

Machines of loving grace

"As robots are increasingly integrated into modern society--on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health--Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff searches for an answer to one of the most important questions of our age: will these machines help us, or will they replace us? In the past decade alone, Google introduced us to driverless cars, Apple debuted a personal assistant that we keep in our pockets, and an Internet of Things connected the smaller tasks of everyday life to the farthest reaches of the internet. There is little doubt that robots are now an integral part of society, and cheap sensors and powerful computers will ensure that, in the coming years, these robots will soon act on their own. This new era offers the promise of immense computing power, but it also reframes a question first raised more than half a century ago, at the birth of the intelligent machine: Will we control these systems, or will they control us? In Machines of Loving Grace, New York Times reporter John Markoff, the first reporter to cover the World Wide Web, offers a sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers. Over the recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, reintroducing this difficult ethical quandary with newer and far weightier consequences.

What Hacker News says

okareamanJul 2021

Solarpunk is a continuation and rediscovery of the Techno hippie movement that began in the Bay Area in the late 70's and early 80's. Apple Computer was part of it (while IBM was not.) This era is described fairly accurately in Adam Curtis's "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" (a reference to the Richard Brautigan poem) and John Markoff's excellent "What The Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" Highly recommend them, even if Curtis does go a little off the deep end at times.

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drallisonAug 2017

John Markoff's Machines of Loving Grace is another touchpoint to the Brautigan poem. The NY Times book review is worth looking at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/books/review/machines-of-.... John's book is worth reading. Fred Turner's book, likewise, captures some of the ethos of the times and is, for me, filled with memories.

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guiambrosSep 2016

Here's the best books I've read in the last year or so:

>> Computer History & biographies:

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, Michael Lewis

The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, by Alan Deutschman

Machines of Loving Grace, by John Markoff

The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson

Ghost in the Wires, by Kevin Mitnick

Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft, by Paul Allen

Creativity, Inc, by Ed Catmull (reading)

>> Startups:

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz

The Founder's Dilemmas, Noam Wasserman

The Launch Pad, by Randall Stross

>> Other books:

Trilogy: Off to Be the Wizard (series), by Scott Meyer

Search Inside Yourself, Chade-Meng Tan

Joy on Demand, Chade-Meng Tan (reading)

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yang140Oct 2015

John Markoff's new book "Machines of Loving Grace" is a great one about this AI vs IA topic. http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between/d...

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drallisonSep 2015

John Markoff's book, *Machines of Loving Grace", is a must read for anyone interested in the future (and who isn't).

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randcrawSep 2015

The coevolution of AI and IA (intelligence augmentation) is the very topic of John Markoff's new book "Machines of Loving Grace". He doesn't delve into the complexities of how human wetware may co evolve with AI (as Hsu does) so much as how AI-based software and hardware may augment and shape human activity of all kinds. A worthwhile read.

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