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An exhilarating, elegant memoir and a significant polemic on how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and of who we are Bitwise is a wondrous ode to the computer languages and codes that captured technologist David Auerbach’s imagination. With a philosopher’s sense of inquiry, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the programming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his education as an engineer, and his contributions to instant messaging technology developed for Microsoft and the servers powering Google’s data stores. A lifelong student of the systems that shape our lives—from the psychiatric taxonomy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to how Facebook tracks and profiles its users—Auerbach reflects on how he has experienced the algorithms that taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior and that compel us to do the same.
Into this exquisitely crafted, wide-ranging memoir of a life spent with code, Auerbach has woven an eye-opening and searing examination of the inescapable ways in which algorithms have both standardized and coarsened our lives. As we engineer ever more intricate technology to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the machine, Auerbach argues, we willingly erase our nuances and our idiosyncrasies—precisely the things that make us human.
An exhilarating, elegant memoir and a significant polemic on how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and of who we are Bitwise is a wondrous ode to the computer languages and codes that captured technologist David Auerbach’s imagination. With a philosopher’s sense of inquiry, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the programming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his education as an engineer, and his contributions to instant messaging technology developed for Microsoft and the servers powering Google’s data stores. A lifelong student of the systems that shape our lives—from the psychiatric taxonomy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to how Facebook tracks and profiles its users—Auerbach reflects on how he has experienced the algorithms that taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior and that compel us to do the same.
Into this exquisitely crafted, wide-ranging memoir of a life spent with code, Auerbach has woven an eye-opening and searing examination of the inescapable ways in which algorithms have both standardized and coarsened our lives. As we engineer ever more intricate technology to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the machine, Auerbach argues, we willingly erase our nuances and our idiosyncrasies—precisely the things that make us human.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book INTRODUCTION
Thoughtfulness means: not everything is as obvious as it used to be. —Hans Blumenberg
Computers always offered me a world that made sense. As a child, I sought refuge in computers as a safe, contemplative realm far from the world. People confused me. Computers were precise and comprehensible. On the one hand, the underspecified and elusive world of human beings; on the other, the regimented world of code.
I had tried to make sense of the real world, but couldn’t. Many programmers can. They navigate relationships, research politics, and engage with works of art as analytically and surgically as they do code. But I could not determine the algorithms that ran the human world. Programming computers from a young age taught me to organize thoughts, break down problems, and build systems. But I couldn’t find any algorithms sufficient to capture the complexities of human psychology and sociology.
Computer algorithms are sets of exact instructions. Imagine describing how to perform a task precisely, whether it’s cooking or dancing or assembling furniture, and you’ll quickly realize how much is left implicit and how many details we all take for granted without giving it a second thought. Computers don’t possess that knowledge, yet computer systems today have evolved imperfect pictures of ourselves and our world. There is a gap between those pictures and reality. The smaller the gap, the more useful computers become to us. A self-driving car that can only distinguish between empty space and solid objects operates using a primitive image of the world. A car that can distinguish between human and nonhuman objects possesses a more sophisticated picture, which makes it better able to avoid deadly errors. As the gap closes, we can better trust computers to know our world. Computers can even trick us into thinking the gap is smaller than it really is. This book is about that gap, how it is closing, and how we are changing as it closes. Computers mark the latest stage of the industrial revolution, the next relocation of our experience from the natural world to an artificial and man-made one. This computed world is as different from the “real” world as the factory town is from the rural landscape.
Above all, this book is the story of my own attempt to close that gap. I was born into a world where the personal computer did not yet exist. By the time I was old enough to program, it did, and I embraced technology. In college, I gained access to the internet and the nascent “World Wide Web,” back in the days when AOL was better known than the internet itself. I studied literature, philosophy, and computer science, but only the latter field offered a secure future. So after college I took a job as a software engineer at Microsoft before moving to Google’s then-tiny New York office. I took graduate classes in literature and philosophy on the side, and I continued to write, even as the internet ballooned and our lives gradually transitioned to being online all the time. As a coder and a writer, I always kept a foot in each world. For years, I did not understand how they could possibly converge. But neither made sense in isolation. I studied the humanities to understand logic and programming, and I studied the sciences to understand language and literature.
A “bitwise operator” is a computer instruction that operates on a sequence of bits (a sequence of 1s and 0s, “bit” being short for “binary digit”), manipulating the individual...
About the Author-
DAVID AUERBACH is a writer and software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft. His writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, MIT Technology Review, The Nation, The Daily Beast, n+1, and Bookforum, among many other publications. He has lectured around the world on technology, literature, philosophy, and stupidity. He lives in New York City.
Reviews-
June 15, 2018 "We don't think right for our world today," writes programmer and technology writer Auerbach--and putting computers to work solving that fundamental problem is not a panacea.Computers are tools, and while they may one day outthink us, inaugurating what futurists call the singularity, they're still tools that can reinforce our human limitations even as they help us to work around them: "if we feed them our prejudices, computers will happily recite those prejudices back to us in quantitative and seemingly objective form," even making our prejudices seem rational. An early employee at both Microsoft and Google, Auerbach is the rare engineer who is also conversant with literature and philosophy, both of which he brings to bear on interpreting his experiences as a builder of these thinking machines and the heuristics and languages that guide them. In that work, design is everything. One of the author's asides, which fuels a central theme, concerns the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which, several editions on, has mutated from its initial goal of standardizing how psychiatrists diagnose disorders to a complex reference for "physician diagnosis, actuarial insurance practices, longitudinal research studies, drug regulation, and more." Just so, our machines are deficient in many ways, as with Google's effort to scan millions of books into a Library of Babel that is, in fact, a mess, so that the "heaps of code" thus amassed are best used as approximations rather than trustworthy models. In this matter, he adds, "Google is a dumb god." Interestingly, Auerbach brings his discussion to a close by counseling that we not worry too much about what, say, big technology companies are planning to do with our data. "At companies like Google or Facebook," writes the author, "programmers engage with people's personal information in such a way that they are indifferent to its implications." That should make the techno-anxious feel a little better--until the machines think better and take over.An eye-opening look at computer technology and its discontents and limitations.
COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
July 1, 2018
Auerbach's first book offers both a fascinating insider view of the early days of Microsoft and Google and a warning of big tech's desire to hoover any and all data we allow them to consume. As a programmer for Microsoft and Google, the author recounts firsthand experiences of the inner workings of two of today's tech giants. He argues against the computational use of encoding and labeling of data, predicting the taxonomic labels used to classify personal aspects of information leads to assignments we cannot change. The seemingly innocuous data we share with online platforms we believe to be benevolent may in fact behave in ways hazardous to the world as we know it. Auerbach argues convincingly that systems that record and analyze our data have the potential to shape our online and offline experiences, yet he writes too many tangents offering perspectives on gaming, nerd culture, and parenting. VERDICT A critical warning from a programming expert on computation's ability to shape our lives. Readers of first-person accounts of tech's coming of age will appreciate this insider point of view.--Nancy Marksbury, Keuka Coll., Keuka Park, NY
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
August 20, 2018 With wit and technical insight, former Microsoft and Google engineer Auerbach explains how his knowledge of coding helped form him as a person, at the same time showing how coding has influenced aspects of culture such as personality tests and child-rearing. Auerbach is a natural teacher, translating complex computing concepts into understandable layman’s terms. The anecdotes from the engineering front lines are some of the most entertaining sections, especially when he recounts the rivalry between MSN Messenger Service (which he worked on) and AOL Instant Messenger, and considers Google’s evolution (“Everything was bigger at Google than it had been at Microsoft”). Connections to specific literary and philosophical works stretch a reader’s patience, and lengthy asides into coding parallels in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and early text-based video games will entertain gamers but require too much explanation for the uninitiated. That said, his observations on child-raising are written with such charm that they’ll resonate with readers (he would play “Flight of the Valkyries” when his daughter tried walking because “her struggle and determination reminded me of the triumph I felt on getting a particularly thorny piece of code to work correctly”). The coding details aside, this book is an enjoyable look inside the point where computers and human life join.
The New Republic
"A valuable resource for readers seeking to understand themselves in this new universe of algorithms, as data points and as human beings."
Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong
"A profound memoir, a manifesto, and a warning about the digital world. Auerbach spins out the secret history of the computational universe we all live in now, filtering insider technical know-how through a profoundly humanistic point of view like no book since Gödel, Escher, Bach."
Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots
"Auerbach artfully combines a personal and professional narrative with a philosophical examination of the way the real and digital worlds contrast and intertwine. It is a subject that will take on ever more importance as algorithms continue to gain dramatically more power and influence throughout our world."
John Crowley, author of Little, Big
"Very attractive (in all senses). The sentences resemble something both plain and clear, like a Shaker desk--a kind of generous transparency, and about things that are not transparent at all."
Scott Aaronson, David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin
"A delightful journey through the history of personal computing. It succeeds brilliantly at conveying what it's like to be a coder and at exploding common stereotypes. I couldn't stop reading."
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