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How to Speak Machine

Laws of Design for a Digital Age

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How to Speak Machine

Written by: John Maeda
Narrated by: Dani Martineck
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

John Maeda is one of the world's preeminent thinkers on technology and design, and in How to Speak Machine, he offers a set of simple laws that govern not only the computers of today, but the unimaginable machines of the future.

Machines are already more powerful than we can comprehend, and getting more powerful at an exponential pace. Once set in motion, algorithms never tire. And when a program's size, speed and endlessness combine with its ability to learn and transform itself, the outcome can be unpredictable and dangerous. Take the seemingly instant transformation of Microsoft's chatbot into a hate-spewing racist, or how crime-predicting algorithms reinforce racial bias.

How To Speak Machine provides a coherent framework for today's product designers, business leaders and policymakers to grasp this brave new world. Drawing on his wide-ranging experience from engineering to computer science to design, Maeda shows how businesses and individuals can identify opportunities afforded by technology to make world-changing and inclusive products while avoiding the pitfalls inherent to the medium.

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I was expecting a technical book. What I got was an opinion piece. I wish I'd be able to return this book. It was extremely useless.

It's not a technical book. it's an opinion piece.

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In one of his television interviews, Dr. Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer and scientist said “We have made a civilisation based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things in such a way that almost nobody understands science and technology. That is a clear prescription for disaster… We have to make science palatable.” Today we can say that same thing about computation. We have made a civilisation based on it, and outside the gated community of computer scientists and engineers, not many people know how to speak machine. Came across this book which makes computation palatable. I highly recommend it. If you always felt like an outsider to computer science or computational thinking, here’s your chance to catch up.

A must read for the computationally challenged!

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