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The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a "Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series.

Computer Science --- Engineering & Applied Sciences --- Computers --- Military art and science --- History. --- Data processing --- SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY/General --- Fighting --- Military power --- Military science --- Warfare --- Warfare, Primitive --- Naval art and science --- War --- Data processing. --- Military applications

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Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, "sound science." In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these doubters: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations--even from satellites, which can "see" the whole planet with a single instrument--becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world's climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere--to measure it, trace its past, and model its future. Edwards argues that all our knowledge about climate change comes from three kinds of computer models: simulation models of weather and climate; reanalysis models, which recreate climate history from historical weather data; and data models, used to combine and adjust measurements from many different sources. Meteorology creates knowledge through an infrastructure (weather stations and other data platforms) that covers the whole world, making global data. This infrastructure generates information so vast in quantity and so diverse in quality and form that it can be understood only by computer analysis--making data global. Edwards describes the science behind the scientific consensus on climate change, arguing that over the years data and models have converged to create a stable, reliable, and trustworthy basis for the reality of global warming.

Weather forecasting. --- Climatology --- Meteorology --- Global temperature changes. --- History. --- Technological innovations. --- Temperature changes, Global --- World temperature changes --- Climate --- Climate science --- Science of climate --- Forecasting, Weather --- Short range weather forecasting --- Weather --- Weather prediction --- Forecasting --- Climatic changes --- Global environmental change --- Atmospheric temperature --- Geophysical prediction --- Climate sciences --- Atmospheric science --- Weather forecasting --- Global temperature changes --- History --- Temps (Météorologie) --- Climatologie --- Météorologie --- Température atmosphérique --- Prévision --- Histoire --- Modification à l'échelle planétaire --- Meteorology. Climatology --- Environmental protection. Environmental technology --- Artificial intelligence. Robotics. Simulation. Graphics --- Technological innovations --- Climatology - History --- Meteorology - History --- Climatology - Technological innovations

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Drawn from disciplines within science and technology studies and from geography, ecology, and developmental biology, the contributors offer a close look at how the mutable forms and concepts of life link the processes of science to those of information, finance, and commodities.

Life sciences --- Life sciences --- Political aspects --- Social aspects

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A comprehensive history and examination of global infrastructures and the outsized role they play in our lives.Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society, Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures--focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years--that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalize infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism's individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfillment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today's infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure's potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.

Infrastructure (Economics) --- Sociology, Urban. --- History. --- BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Infrastructure --- TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / History --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban --- Sociology, Urban --- History