Artificial intelligence (AI) is often discussed as something extraordinary, a dream--or a nightmare--that awakens metaphysical questions on human life. Yet far from a distant technology of the future, the true power of AI lies in its subtle revolution of ordinary life. From voice assistants like Siri to natural language processors, AI technologies use cultural biases and modern psychology to fit specific characteristics of how users perceive and navigate the external world, thereby project...

Museums and the History of Computing examines the critical role that cultural organizations, such as museums and galleries, play in shaping ‘digital heritage’: the cultural heritage surrounding computer technology.Focusing on digital technologies as objects and practices that museums collect, exhibit, and preserve for the future, this book highlights how and why museums play a crucial role in preserving the rich heritage of the digital world, constructing powerful narrativ...

Believing in Bits advances the idea that religious beliefs and practices have become inextricably linked to the functioning of digital media. How did we come to associate things such as mindreading and spirit communications with the functioning of digital technologies? How does the internetâs capacity to facilitate the proliferation of beliefs blur the boundaries between what is considered fiction and fact? Addressing these and similar questions, the volume challenges and redefine...

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale fo...

In this volume, leading scholars of photography and media examine photography’s vital role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century.In the first half of the nineteenth century, the introduction of telegraphy, the development of a cheaper and more reliable postal service, the rise of the mass-circulation press, and the emergence of the railway dramatically changed the way people communicated and experienced time and space. Concurrently, photography devel...

**“After reading Mitchell’s guide, you’ll know what you don’t know and what other people don’t know, even though they claim to know it. And that’s invaluable.” —The New York TimesA leading computer scientist brings human sense to the AI bubble.**No recent scientific enterprise has proved as alluring, terrifying, and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. The award-winning author Melanie Mitchell, a leading computer scie...

**“Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it.” —John Horgan“If you want to know about AI, read this book…It shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence.” —Peter Thiel**Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence....

Professor Hans Holzer carefully examines historic photographic evidence of ghosts and paranormal activity, explaining which images contain convincing proof and which may be trickeryFor more than a century, psychic researchers have amassed a body of photographic evidence of the afterlife. Indeed, according to professor Hans Holzer, photography gives us one of the greatest tools in documenting souls that continue to exist among us after death. Here Holzer looks at the...

Here are over 40 scary, hair-raising, and frightening stories of the supernatural and the paranormal. These are first-person narratives that are unexplained and possibly inexplicable. All of them have been reported to John Robert Colombo, Canada's Master Gatherer of the Arcane, by men and women from various parts of the country, and they're published here in the words of the informants themselves, the witnesses to these wonders.Here, you will have the opportunity to read about:...

The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek.We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman's curse—do not merely describe the worl...

New Media: A Critical Introduction is a comprehensive introduction to the culture, history, technologies and theories of new media. Written especially for students, the book considers the ways in which 'new media' really are new, assesses the claims that a media and technological revolution has taken place and formulates new ways for media studies to respond to new technologies.The authors introduce a wide variety of topics including: how to define the characteristics of n...

Professor Hans Holzer, an expert in paranormal activity and parapsychology, explains the distinction between true ghosts and spirit visits, with examples from some of the most famous cases of "ghosts that aren't"According to Hans Holzer, only perhaps ten percent of all ghostly manifestations are true ghosts. The rest maybe impressions left behind by an emotional event in the past, which can be felt or seen by a sensitive person in the living world. Here Holzer expl...