Rise of the Machines reclaims the spectacular story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine. In a history that unpacks one of the twentieth century's pivotal ideas, Thomas Rid delivers a thought-provoking portrait of our technology-enraptured era.

Explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics' impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende.

A sociotechnical investigation of ubiquitous computing as a research enterprise and as a lived reality.

W. Ross Ashby was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. His books introduced exact and logical thinking into the nascent discipline and were highly influential.

Norbert Wiener coined the term 'cybernetics'. In God & Golem, Inc., he concerns himself with major points in cybernetics which are relevant to religious issues. It is based on lectures given at Yale, at the Société Philosophique de Royaumont, and elsewhere.

In this work living systems are described in terms of what lies outside the domain of descriptions. Professor Humberto Maturana, with his colleague Francisco Varela, have undertaken the construction of a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as they are objects of observation and description, nor even as in­teracting systems, but as self-contained unities.

A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological.

This book was one of the first to propose the "embodied cognition" approach in cognitive science. It pioneered the connections between phenomenology and science and between Buddhist practices and science--claims that have since become highly influential. Through this cross-fertilization of disparate fields of study, The Embodied Mind introduced a new form of cognitive science called "enaction," in which both the environment and first person experience are aspects of embodiment.