Car accidents don’t happen. The last one was fifty-some years ago, somewhere around 2050. Which makes Jordan Bishop’s fatal crash in a self-driving vehicle unusual. Maybe even a murder. Araci Belo doesn't know cars, but he suspects it wasn’t a simple malfunction. Jupyter works with appliances—rice cookers, ovens, whatever calls for help—coaching them back to proper operation. She’s being hounded by a refrigerator with an impossible question. It’s unfortunate Belo doesn’t know Jupyter. It’s unfortunate that Jupyter doesn’t know about the murder. It’s unfortunate a refrigerator only cares about orange juice when it knows who killed jordan. Can a refrigerator solve a murder?

In his fourth book, A.J. Schmitz eviscerates "The Stupid Machine" aka: the human being. Besides shining a blinding spotlight on the human race's terrible habits, awful decision-making, and horrible prejudices, he documents his own misadventures - a solo trip to Europe, his multiple summer school imprisonments, as well as his first visit to the proctologist. It's an inward anthropological study on work, war and physical attraction. All of it told with a humorous bent, guaranteed to make you wish you were reincarnated as a dog.

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena. "The Restless Clock" examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals--dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency. "The Restless Clock "reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology.

Design theorist Louise Schouwenberg examines the meaning and agency of things as mediators between people and world, both within everyday life and the museum context.Moreover, she questions the market's obsession with novelty in design, and searches for answers how to distinguish novelty for the sake of novelty from true cultural innovation in design, of which a museum archive testifies.The themes, examples and images are chosen in close consultation with designer Hella Jongerius.Graphic design by Irma Boom.Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Die Neue Sammlung/Beyond The New at The Design Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (10 November 2017 - 16 September 2018).

From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—”a sharply intelligent novel of ideas” (The New York Times) that asks whether a machine can understand the human heart, or whether we are the ones who lack understanding. Set in an uncanny alternative 1982 London—where Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence—Machines Like Me powerfully portrays two lovers who will be tested beyond their understanding. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first generation of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he codesigns Adam's personality. The near-perfect human that emerges is beautiful, strong, and smart—and a love triangle soon forms. Ian McEwan's subversive, gripping novel poses fundamental questions: What makes us human—our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, coming in September!

Rachel is a 17-year-old student who falls in love with a VW Beetle. To raise the money to buy it, she starts work in a factory where she befriends a young man, P.T. She soon shares his fascination for electricity, then she begins to suspects his real intentions, but it may already be too late.