Robots Won't Save Japan addresses the Japanese government's efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented...

From the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence comes a fascinating look at the remarkable capacity for intelligence exhibited by groups of people and computers working together.If you're like most people, you probably believe that humans are the most intelligent animals on our planet. But there's another kind of entity that can be far smarter: groups of people. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Malone, the founding director of the MIT Ce...

**Walkley Award-winning journalist Tracey Spicer exposes the next frontier of feminism through the lens of artificial intelligence. Man-Made aims to open readers’ eyes to a transformative technological shift in society and give them the tools to make positive change.Winner,** 2023 Australian Business Book Awards, Social ResponsibilityLonglisted for the 2023 Walkley Book Award'Mum, I want a robot slave.'Broadcaster Tr...

Prominent experts from science and the humanities explore issues in robot ethics that range from sex to war.Robots today serve in many roles, from entertainer to educator to executioner. As robotics technology advances, ethical concerns become more pressing: Should robots be programmed to follow a code of ethics, if this is even possible? Are there risks in forming emotional bonds with robots? How might society—and ethics—change with robotics? This volume is the fi...

**AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF 2022At a time when AI and digital platforms are under fire, Orly Lobel, a renowned tech policy scholar, defends technology as a powerful tool we can harness to achieve equality and a better future.**Much has been written about the challenges tech presents to equality and democracy. But we can either criticize big data and automation or steer it to do better. Lobel makes a compelling argument that while we cannot stop technological develo...

The robot population is rising on Earth and other planets. (Mars is inhabited entirely by robots.) As robots slip into more domains of human life--from the operating room to the bedroom--they take on our morally important tasks and decisions, as well as create new risks from psychological to physical. This makes it all the more urgent to study their ethical, legal, and policy impacts. To help the robotics industry and broader society, we need to not only press ahead on a wide range of issu...

A roboticist imagines life with robots that sell us products, drive our cars, even allow us to assume new physical form, and more.With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embe...

The odyssey of a group of “refugees” from a closed-down online game and an exploration of emergent fan cultures in virtual worlds.Play communities existed long before massively multiplayer online games; they have ranged from bridge clubs to sports leagues, from tabletop role-playing games to Civil War reenactments. With the emergence of digital networks, however, new varieties of adult play communities have appeared, most notably within online games and virtual wor...

As we program machines to be more like humans, how will they know what we value, if we don't know ourselves?The notion of robots gaining consciousness is beginning to become a reality, but the future of human happiness is dependent on our ability to teach machines what we value the most today. Featuring pragmatic solutions drawing on economics, emerging technologies, and positive psychology, Heartificial Intelligence provides a road map to help readers emb...

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment.In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such vide...

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the...

Memes have been part of computer-assisted communication almost since the development of the first consumer browser (the "WorldWideWeb") in 1990. The Internet's ability to provide a public sphere for people to discuss the issues of the day and other topics of interest means that people can use the language of the Internet to express themselves in ways that would not be feasible in the real world. Those bits of content are native to the Internet that it feels obvious to want to understand wh...