An Ever-Growing List of Great Reads
Featuring Technology, Equality, Feminism, and Science
If, Then by Jill Lepore
"The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, unearthed from the archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm."
Power On, Graphic Novel by MIT Press
Power On! (MIT Press, April 2022) is an original graphic novel inspired by young people whose views deserve to be heard – yet who too often find that the technology they use each and every day promotes practices that keep them marginalized without a seat at the table.
This book follows the lives and experiences of four high school students from diverse backgrounds as they confront the harm technology has done in their own community. We follow them as they awaken to how technology can perpetuate racism and inequality and gradually understand that those who run the Big Tech companies of Silicon Valley create technologies that do not reflect the voices and perspectives of themselves: women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and immigrant communities. In response, the four friends seek out computing experiences that are both personally and politically empowering, and decide to use what they’ve learned to take a stand for all students to learn computer science.
Informed by decades of educational research and young reader feedback about learning computing, Power On! brings to life the ethical complexities of technology and why young readers need the knowledge to be critical creators of technology, not merely users who are shaped and controlled by it.
A Facilitator's Guide is available to help with discussion.
12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson
How AI Will Change the Way We Live and Love
From the New York Times-bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson, comes an original and entertaining new collection drawing on her years of thinking and reading about artificial intelligence in its bewildering manifestations. She looks to history, religion, myth, literature, the politics of race and gender, and computer science to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now.
When we create non-biological life forms, will we do so in our own image? Or will we accept the once-in-a-species opportunity to remake ourselves in their image? What do love, caring, sex, and attachment look like when humans form connections with non-human helpers, teachers, sex workers, and companions? And what will happen to our deep-rooted assumptions about gender? Will the physical body that is our home soon be enhanced by biological and neural implants, keeping us fitter, younger, and connected? Is it time to join Elon Musk and leave Planet Earth?
With wit, compassion, and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI’s most interesting talking points, from the algorithms that data-dossier your whole life, to the weirdness of backing up your brain.
If, Then by Jill Lepore
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Power On, Graphic Novel by MIT Press
A great resource for anyone, but geared for teens, about how tech
To help with discussion, a Facilitator's Guide
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1914 translation by H. Rackham
But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful.
Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it?
1914 translation by H. Rackham
But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful.
