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PODCAST

New Books in Technology

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

69:21

Guru Madhavan on Wicked Problems and Engineering a...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/04/02

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Guru Madhavan, Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, about his recent book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). In Wicked Problems, Madhavan draws on a rich body of literature from the humanities and social sciences to think through how engineers can do a better job working on problems that include complex social and technical realities. The

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69:08

Max Bennett, "A Brief History of Intelligence:...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/04/01

A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (Mariner Books, 2023) tells two fascinating stories. One is the evolution of nervous systems. It started 600 million years ago, when the first brains evolved in tiny worms. The other one is humans' quest to create more and more intelligent systems. This story begins in 1951 with the first reinforcement learning algorithm trying to mimic neural networks. Max Bennett is an AI entrepreneur and neuroscience

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36:30

Matthew H. Hersch, "Dark Star: A New History of the...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/30

In Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant human space program of the last 50 years, NASA's space shuttle. He begins with the origins of the space shuttle: a century-long effort to develop a low-cost, reusable, rocket-powered airplane to militarize and commercialize space travel, which Hersch explains was built the wrong way, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. Describing the unique

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39:46

Robert Willim, "Mundania: How and Where Technologies...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/30

Robert Willim's new book Mundania: How and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary (Bristol University Press, 2024), takes the reader on a journey through the realm of Mundania, a realm that is both familiar and incomprehensible, banal and uncanny. Mundania is the realm in which technology, which seemed unspeakable before its arrival in our world, becomes an everyday fixture of life, and, more specifically, mundane.Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network! Learn

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103:19

Thomas S. Mullaney, "The Chinese Computer: A Global...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/29

The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing. A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device? In The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024), Thomas Mullaney sets out to resolve this paradox, and in doing so, discovers that the key to this seemingly impossible riddle has

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27:20

Ignacio Cofone, "The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/28

Our privacy is besieged by tech companies. Companies can do this because our laws are built on outdated ideas that trap lawmakers, regulators, and courts into wrong assumptions about privacy, resulting in ineffective legal remedies to one of the most pressing concerns of our generation. Drawing on behavioral science, sociology, and economics, Ignacio Cofone challenges existing laws and reform proposals and dispels enduring misconceptions about data-driven interactions. This exploration offers

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34:50

Anita R. Gohdes, "Repression in the Digital Age:...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/26

Global adoption of the Internet has exploded, yet we are only beginning to understand the Internet's profound political consequences. Authoritarian states are digitally catching up with their democratic counterparts, and both are showing a growing interest in the use of cyber controls--online censorship and surveillance technologies--that allow governments to exercise control over the Internet. Under what conditions does a digitally connected society actually help states target their enemies? Why do

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86:22

John Warner on Teaching Writing in the Age of...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/25

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with writer and editor John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for more than twenty years. Warner is the author of at least three - or four depending on whether you count a work of parody - books on writing and higher education, and today he is perhaps best known for his Substack, The Biblioracle Recommends. Vinsel and Warner talk about how teaching writing will need to shift after the arrival of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, but only

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38:27

On Bloomsbury's "Object Lessons" Series: A Discussion...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/25

Object Lessons is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Each book starts from a specific inspiration: an historical event, a literary passage, a personal narrative, a technological innovation—and from that starting point explores the object of the title, gleaning a singular lesson or multiple lessons along the way. This interview discusses the series with one of the two editors of the series, Dr. Christopher Schaberg. Featuring

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43:13

How Can We Reach International Consensus on AI...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/25

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Gabriele Mazzini, a lawyer and officer of the European Commission and expert in AI regulation. Mazzini discusses the means through which European countries have found agreement on the definition of AI and how to regulate it. Moreover, Mazzini stresses that the fears of an apocalyptic AI revolution taking over humankind are not well-grounded. He also comments on the United States case and how it differs from Europe when it

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68:00

George S. Takach, "Cold War 2.0: Artificial...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/24

A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War. So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s more, we

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58:58

Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/22

The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death. In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (U California Press, 2023), Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them—from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of

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60:55

Once More--What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to be...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/16

Listen to Episode No.9 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois; and joining us, as well, is James Gee, Regents Professor and Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the generativity of machines.James Gee : "I fundamentally

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69:44

Lisa Messeri, "In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/16

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was

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60:34

Nick Jones, "Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/15

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nick Jones examines this residue and its consequences, revealing

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22:06

Peter D. McDonald, "Run and Jump: The Meaning of the...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/15

How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players. Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer (MIT Press, 2024), Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games

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91:13

Zachary Loeb on the History of the End of the World

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/11

Are you into the end of the world? Well, have we got the guest for you. In this episode, Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel interviews Zachary Loeb, assistant professor of history at Purdue University, about his work. On his faculty page, Loeb describes himself as “interested in the idea that humanity’s romance with technology has the species (and the planet) on a course that may lead to catastrophe.” Vinsel and Loeb talk about this idea and its history before turning to a discussion of Loeb’s

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91:13

Zachary Loeb on the History of the End of the World

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/11

Are you into the end of the world? Well, have we got the guest for you. In this episode, Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel interviews Zachary Loeb, assistant professor of history at Purdue University, about his work. On his faculty page, Loeb describes himself as “interested in the idea that humanity’s romance with technology has the species (and the planet) on a course that may lead to catastrophe.” Vinsel and Loeb talk about this idea and its history before turning to a discussion of Loeb’s

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102:35

Brian Merchant, "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of...

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/10

"Luddite" has become an insult and Brain Merchant wants to change that. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (Little, Brown, 2023) tells the story of when machines starting taking human jobs, when an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the industrialists that were automating their work--and how it explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech today. Two hundred years ago in rural England, working men and women rose up en

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44:14

Hsuan L. Hsu, "Air Conditioning" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

New Books in Technology ·

2024/03/08

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoception-or

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242 results

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