Edmund C. Berkeley: Giant Brains, or Machines That Think (1949/1961)

Giant Brains is one of the first books on electronic computers for a general audience.

In it, the co-founder Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Edmund Berkeley described the principles behind computing machines (called then “mechanical brains”, “sequence-controlled calculators”, or various other terms), and then gave a technical but accessible survey of the most prominent examples of the time, including machines from MIT, Harvard, the Moore School, Bell Laboratories, and elsewhere.

Originally published by Wiley & Sons, 1949
Publisher Science Editions, New York, 1961
292 pages

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Catherine Liu: Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton (2000)

Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the human against the machine since the Enlightenment—one that continues in the wake of technological and conceptual progress today.

A sustained examination of the automaton as early modern machine and as a curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, Copying Machines offers extended readings of mechanistic images in the eighteenth century through the prism of twentieth-century commentary. In readings of texts by Lafayette, Molière, Laclos, and La Bruyère—and in a chapter on the eighteenth-century inventor of automatons, Jacques Vaucanson—Catherine Liu provides a fascinating account of ways in which the automaton and the preindustrial machine haunt the imagination of ancien régime France and structure key moments of the canonical literature and criticism of the period.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2000
ISBN 0816635021, 9780816635023
224 pages

publisher
google books

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Cybernetic, 1-2 (1985-1986)

Editors: Gordon Pask, Humberto Maturana, Heinz von Foerster, Terry Winograd, Paul Trachtman, Larry Richards
Publisher The American Society for Cybernetics
ISSN 0883-4202

PDF (Vol 1, No 1, Summer-Fall 1985, 148 pp)
PDF (Vol 2, No 1: “Social Violence”, 1986, 82 pp)