Bitwise: A Life in Code

Amazon.com Price: $27.95 (as of 05/05/2019 14:26 PST- Details)

Description

An exhilarating crossover between memoir and argument demonstrating how computers and algorithms shape our working out of the arena and who we are.

As we engineer ever-more intricate algorithms to translate our experiences and narrow the distance that divides us from the machine, we willingly rub out our nuances and our idiosyncrasies—precisely that which makes us human. Bitwise is David Auerbach’s thoughtful ode to the pc codes and languages that captured his imagination as a child, and a reflection of how he is both experienced and written the algorithms that experience come to taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior—and compel us to do the similar. With a philosopher’s sense of inquiry and an engineer’s eye, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the programming language Logo at the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his schooling as an engineer, and his contributions to instant messaging technology developed for Microsoft after which to software built to sift through Google’s data shops. His unsettling conclusion—that algorithms are standardizing and coarsening our own lives—is inescapable.

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