Thomas Rid is a professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and the author of Cyber War Will Not Take Place and War and Media Operations. He lives in London.
"Rid’s fascinating survey of the oscillating hopes and fears
expressed by the cybernetic mythos offers an implicit lesson."
*Michael Saler - Wall Street Journal*
"[E]very chapter opens up as smoothly as an automated glass
door…[A] thoughtful, enlightening book…a melange of history, media
studies, political science, military engineering, and, yes,
etymology…In Rise of the Machines, Rid has created a meticulous yet
startling alternate history of computation."
*Bruce Sterling - New Scientist*
"Rid, a professor in security studies at King’s College London, is
a fine chronicler of the debate, deftly recounting the hope, hype,
and fears that have accompanied our thinking on
automation…Fascinating…Dazzling."
*Financial Times*
"Rid’s book offers a useful history as well as a chance to
re-examine our current technological crossroads."
*Zeynep Tufekci - New York Times Book Review*
"Cybernetics came about in the late 1940s as a way to understand
the technology of feedback systems as a form of near-life. Thomas
Rid's book is a solid, highly readable history on the subject."
*Mark Frauenfelder - Boing Boing*
"A common theme connects war machines, computer networks, social
media, ubiquitous surveillance, and virtual reality. For fifty
years or more the same people and the same ideas weave through
these innovations united by the term ‘cyber,’ as in cyberspace and
cybernetics. Read this amazing history and you’ll go: ‘Aha!’"
*Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, author of What Technology
Wants and The Inevitable*
"Rise of The Machines isn't just an insightful history of
cybernetics but also a fascinating journey with the
twentieth-century thinkers—from tech giants and eccentric
mathematicians to science fiction writers and counterculture
gurus—who have shaped how we understand machines and
ourselves."
*P. W. Singer, author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone
Needs to Know and Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War*
"Sometimes the most important things are hiding in plain sight. At
least that’s what I concluded from Rise of the Machines, Thomas
Rid’s masterful blending of the art of a storyteller, the
discipline of an historian, and the sensitivity of a philosopher.
Machines unmasks how really disruptive this “cyber thing” has been
and will continue to be to nearly all aspects of human experience.
It’s more than food for thought. It’s a banquet."
*General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the
CIA*
"Rise of the Machines is a fascinating history of cybernetics, and
of the visionaries like Norbert Wiener who first imagined the
potential—and peril—of machines that would begin to replicate the
capabilities of the human mind."
*Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots*
"Everyone I know should read this book. It will be a classic."
*Robert Lee, former U.S. Air Force Cyber Warfare Operations officer
and SANS instructor*
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