Readers learn how daring companies have gone beyond the computerization of now mundane manufacturing and clerical tasks and introduced expert systems that automate human reasoning, judgment, expertise and knowledge in pursuit of greater efficiency and profit.

The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a " Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series

The management consulting industry is a leading component of the world’s knowledge economy permeating every segment of industry, commerce and government service. A multi-billion dollar phenomenon, it has yielded its own body of knowledge and set of practices. Exponents do make a lot of money for the consulting businesses they serve. What is not always understood, or transparent, is the value clients receive. This book seeks to make good that deficiency in our perception of the profession. Learning on his deep and wide-ranging experience, Dr John Louth seeks to lift the lid on the management consulting profession in a critically reflective and accessible manner. With vignettes and examples drawn from his own experience and practice, he dissects the rational explanations usually provided by practitioners. He calls for restraint and self-awareness from both client and consultant, and advocates the reform of a profession that seems increasingly powerful and unregulated. Dr Louth explores the management consulting profession on its own terrain, through its own language and discourses. He disentangles the management consultant’s notions of “strategy,” “risk management,” “change” and “project management” so that these become meaningful to the layperson. Given the complexity that dominates the global geopolitical system and international economy, he asks how management consulting diagnoses can be effective in an uncertain and highly contingent world. With a foreword by Professor Rebecca Boden of the University of Roehampton Business School in London, this book is an accessible and scholarly monograph that is essential reading for those seeking to understand management consultancy and its role in the modern world.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field within computer science that is attempting to build enhanced intelligence into computer systems. This book traces the history of the subject, from the early dreams of eighteenth-century (and earlier) pioneers to the more successful work of today's AI engineers. AI is becoming more and more a part of everyone's life. The technology is already embedded in face-recognizing cameras, speech-recognition software, Internet search engines, and health-care robots, among other applications. The book's many diagrams and easy-to-understand descriptions of AI programs will help the casual reader gain an understanding of how these and other AI systems actually work. Its thorough (but unobtrusive) end-of-chapter notes containing citations to important source materials will be of great use to AI scholars and researchers. This book promises to be the definitive history of a field that has captivated the imaginations of scientists, philosophers, and writers for centuries.