Author: Justus Hartnack File Type: pdf First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. **

Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford File Type: pdf Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen major advances in recent years. While machines were always central to the Marxist analysis of capitalism, AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Contemporary machine-learning AI allows machines to increasingly approach human capacities for perception and reasoning in narrow domains.This book explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through the lenses of different theoretical concepts, including surplus-value, labour, the general conditions of production, class composition and surplus population. It argues against left accelerationism and post-Operaismo thinkers, asserting that a deeper analysis of AI produces a more complex and disturbing picture of capitalisms future than has previously been identified.Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI represents an ultimate weapon for capital. It will render humanity obsolete or turn it into a species of transhumans working for a wage until the heat death of the universe a fate that is only avoidable by communist revolution.

Author: Carl Smith File Type: pdf A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this concept through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s. By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, Smith illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization.But City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization.It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essentialand centralpart of how we define our civilization. **Review City Water, City Life is a gem of a book, a tightly focused meditation on the antebellum citys infrastructure of ideas. By masterfully compressing myriad period sources, Carl Smith makes major contributions to our understanding of American society and culture. (Harold Platt, Loyola University Chicago) A fascinating history of the ideas about nature, health, citizenship, and time that informed the construction of some of Americas earliest and greatest water systems. By demonstrating that our urban aqueducts are built out of ideas as much as bricks and mortar, Carl Smith ensures that a simple glass of water will never seem so simple again. (Michael Rawson, author of Eden on the Charles The Making of Boston) A crucially important new chapter in US urban history. With impeccable research, Carl Smith seamlessly synthesizes nineteenth-century issues of politics, engineering, finance, aesthetics, law, and medicineall focused on the creation of water systems in three major cities and all coalescing around the idea of the greater good of the public at large. City Water, City Life speaks from history to this contemporary moment when the United States confronts, yet again, the debate over public versus private control of its water. (Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University) A wonderfully perceptive book that provides new insights into the development and implications of water supply in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Readers will find especially valuable Carl Smiths use of cultural, environmental, and health-related frames to construct an infrastructure of ideas relating to water. (Joel A. Tarr, Carnegie Mellon University) What a nuanced treatment of water! In City Water, City Life,Carl Smith breathes new life into our understanding of the impact of water supply through his study of Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. While we know a great deal about the systems themselves and how they were developed, Smith focuses on transcendent qualities of water befitting its central role in our lives. As such, he has expanded the audience who will derive a great deal of satisfaction from this study. (Martin V. Melosi, author of The Sanitary City) A well-researched, engaging read. . . . Recommended. (Choice) This collective examination of three cities allows for a broader understanding of the meanings that American city-dwellers attached to their aqueducts, pipes, pumps, and faucets, and the water that these public works delivered. (Journal of Interdisciplinary History) Smith has made an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century urban America by uncovering the cultural foundations of one of our most vital infrastructure networks. (American Historical Review) Elegant and concise. (Journal of American History) About the Author Carl Smith is the Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English and American Studies and professor of history at Northwestern University. His books include three prize-winning volumes Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880-1920 Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman and The Plan of Chicago Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City.

Author: Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom File Type: pdf This lavishly illustrated volume explores the history of China during a period of dramatic shifts and surprising transformations, from the founding of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) through to the present day. The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China promises to be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this rising superpower on the verge of what promises to be the Chinese century, introducing readers to important but often overlooked events in Chinas past, such as the bloody Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), which had a death toll far higher than the roughly contemporaneous American Civil War. It also helps readers see more familiar landmarks in Chinese history in new ways, such as the Opium War (1839-1842), the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and the Tiananmen protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989. This is one of the first major efforts - and in many ways the most ambitious to date - to come to terms with the broad sweep of modern Chinese history, taking readers from the origins of modern China right up through the dramatic events of the last few years (the Beijing Games, the financial crisis, and Chinas rise to global economic pre-eminence) which have so fundamentally altered Western views of China and Chinas place in the world. **