Bitwise : a life in code / David Auerbach.
By: Auerbach, David (David B.) [author.].
Publisher: New York : Pantheon Books, ©2018Edition: First edition.Description: ix, 290 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.Content type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeISBN: 9781101871294 (hard cover : alk. paper).Subject(s): Auerbach, David (David B.) -- Philosophy | Computer science -- Philosophy | Computer science -- Social aspects | Computer scientists -- United States -- BiographyGenre/Form: Print books.Current location | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
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On Shelf | QA76.167 .A84 2018 (Browse shelf) | Available | AU00000000015617 |
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QA76 .K428 2021 Understanding the digital world : what you need to know about computers, the Internet, privacy, and security / | QA76 .L576 2002c Computers : information technology in perspective / | QA76 .S2164 2019 The software arts / | QA76.167 .A84 2018 Bitwise : a life in code / | QA76.167 .L44 2019 The coevolution : the entwined futures of humans and machines / | QA76.17 .D36 2014 It began with Babbage : the genesis of computer science / | QA76.17 .D363 2018 The second age of computer science : from ALGOL genes to neural nets / |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-278) and index.
Logo and love -- Chat wars -- Binaries -- Interlude: Foreign tongues -- Naming of parts -- Self-approximations -- Games computers play -- Interlude: Adventures with text -- Big data -- Programming my child -- Big human -- Epilogue: The reduction of language, the flattening of life.
An exhilarating crossover between memoir and argument demonstrating how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and who we are. As we engineer ever-more intricate algorithms to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the machine, we willingly rub out our nuances and our idiosyncrasies--precisely that which makes us human. Bitwise is David Auerbach's thoughtful ode to the computer codes and languages that captured his imagination as a child, and a reflection of how he's both experienced and written the algorithms that have come to taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior--and compel us to do the same. With a philosopher's sense of inquiry and an engineer's eye, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the programming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his schooling as an engineer, and his contributions to instant messaging technology developed for Microsoft and then to software built to sift through Google's data stores. His unsettling conclusion--that algorithms are standardizing and coarsening our own lives--is inescapable."--