Alone Together

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle, 305 pages

In 1950, computer pioneer Alan Turing famously proposed a test to identify artificial intelligence - when a human can't tell a machine from another human, artificial intelligence has been attained.  Sherry Turkle's book shows two sides of progress towards this goal - increasingly manlike machines and increasingly mechanical men.  On the one hand, robot pets and toys are better and better at feigning emotions, while online bots are better and better at simulating communication.  On the other hand, new communications technologies, while greatly increasing opportunities for connection, have greatly reduced the depth of those connections.

Turkle, a professor at MIT, is certainly no Luddite.  She is, however, keenly aware of how technologies contain their own invisible ideologies, and how a culture of innovation is often blind to unintended consequences.  Much of the book is composed of material culled from years of research on the interactions between humans - especially children - and machines.  If her vision extends to a possible dystopia similar to Asimov's Solaria, where each person is isolated from every other by a cocoon of predictable, reliable robotics, it also encompasses the possibility that we might learn to control our technology instead of being controlled by it.

Distracted

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson, 266 pages

In the twenty-first century, Americans (and others) have nearly instant access to an amount of information and entertainment undreamed of even a few decades ago.  The average person is bombarded with messages on all sides, surrounded by insistent claimants for attention.  The result is that real attention, care, is vanishingly rare.  Deep understanding, the product of slow study and quiet contemplation, has been replaced by shallow acquisition of facts, which is, in turn, rapidly being replaced by the mere knowledge of where to find data.  Worse, the constant clamor of the external world results in the withering of any kind of interior life.

This is an interesting subject, and Jackson presents a great deal of information on recent brain research and technological developments.  Ultimately, however, Distracted suffers from the very same disease it diagnoses in society.  Coming from a journalism background, the author has packed her book with so many human interest stories and mini-profiles designed to hold our interest that the result is diffuse and confused.  In the end Jackson is reduced to the absurd promise that science will invent a pill that will restore our ability to care.

Readers would be better off exchanging Jackson's cutting edge science for Neil Postman's decades old works Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death.

The knowledge : how to rebuild our world from scratch

The knowledge : how to rebuild our world from scratch / Lewis Dartnell.
340 Pages

This book supposedly is to serve as a manual to restore civilization should something happen to cause the downfall of our current society.  While parts of it are interesting I think the author oversteps or misses steps that would be necessary to use the book as a survivalist manual.  I think it more a discussion of how society could quickly rebuild from the ashes of civilization.