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Summary
Summary
An exhilarating, elegant memoir and a significant polemic on how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and of who we are
Bitwise is a wondrous ode to the computer languages and codes that captured technologist David Auerbach's imagination. With a philosopher's sense of inquiry, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the programming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his education as an engineer, and his contributions to instant messaging technology developed for Microsoft and the servers powering Google's data stores. A lifelong student of the systems that shape our lives--from the psychiatric taxonomy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to how Facebook tracks and profiles its users--Auerbach reflects on how he has experienced the algorithms that taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior and that compel us to do the same.
Into this exquisitely crafted, wide-ranging memoir of a life spent with code, Auerbach has woven an eye-opening and searing examination of the inescapable ways in which algorithms have both standardized and coarsened our lives. As we engineer ever more intricate technology to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the machine, Auerbach argues, we willingly erase our nuances and our idiosyncrasies--precisely the things that make us human.
Author Notes
DAVID AUERBACH is a writer and software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft. His writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, MIT Technology Review, The Nation, The Daily Beast, n+1, and Bookforum , among many other publications. He has lectured around the world on technology, literature, philosophy, and stupidity. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With wit and technical insight, former Microsoft and Google engineer Auerbach explains how his knowledge of coding helped form him as a person, at the same time showing how coding has influenced aspects of culture such as personality tests and child-rearing. Auerbach is a natural teacher, translating complex computing concepts into understandable layman's terms. The anecdotes from the engineering front lines are some of the most entertaining sections, especially when he recounts the rivalry between MSN Messenger Service (which he worked on) and AOL Instant Messenger, and considers Google's evolution ("Everything was bigger at Google than it had been at Microsoft"). Connections to specific literary and philosophical works stretch a reader's patience, and lengthy asides into coding parallels in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and early text-based video games will entertain gamers but require too much explanation for the uninitiated. That said, his observations on child-raising are written with such charm that they'll resonate with readers (he would play "Flight of the Valkyries" when his daughter tried walking because "her struggle and determination reminded me of the triumph I felt on getting a particularly thorny piece of code to work correctly"). The coding details aside, this book is an enjoyable look inside the point where computers and human life join. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
"We don't think right for our world today," writes programmer and technology writer Auerbachand putting computers to work solving that fundamental problem is not a panacea.Computers are tools, and while they may one day outthink us, inaugurating what futurists call the singularity, they're still tools that can reinforce our human limitations even as they help us to work around them: "if we feed them our prejudices, computers will happily recite those prejudices back to us in quantitative and seemingly objective form," even making our prejudices seem rational. An early employee at both Microsoft and Google, Auerbach is the rare engineer who is also conversant with literature and philosophy, both of which he brings to bear on interpreting his experiences as a builder of these thinking machines and the heuristics and languages that guide them. In that work, design is everything. One of the author's asides, which fuels a central theme, concerns the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which, several editions on, has mutated from its initial goal of standardizing how psychiatrists diagnose disorders to a complex reference for "physician diagnosis, actuarial insurance practices, longitudinal research studies, drug regulation, and more." Just so, our machines are deficient in many ways, as with Google's effort to scan millions of books into a Library of Babel that is, in fact, a mess, so that the "heaps of code" thus amassed are best used as approximations rather than trustworthy models. In this matter, he adds, "Google is a dumb god." Interestingly, Auerbach brings his discussion to a close by counseling that we not worry too much about what, say, big technology companies are planning to do with our data. "At companies like Google or Facebook," writes the author, "programmers engage with people's personal information in such a way that they are indifferent to its implications." That should make the techno-anxious feel a little betteruntil the machines think better and take over.An eye-opening look at computer technology and its discontents and limitations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
what began as a vague apprehension - unease over the amount of time we spend on our devices, a sense that our children are growing up distracted - has, since the presidential election of 2016, transformed into something like outright panic. Pundits and politicians debate the perils of social media; technology is vilified as an instigator of our social ills, rather than a symptom. Something about our digital life seems to inspire extremes: all that early enthusiasm, the utopian fervor over the internet, now collapsed into fear and recriminations. "Bitwise: A Life in Code," David Auerbach's thoughtful meditation on technology and its place in society, is a welcome effort to reclaim the middle ground. Auerbach, a former professional programmer, now a journalist and writer, is "cautiously positive toward technology." He recognizes the very real damage it is causing to our political, cultural and emotional lives. But he also loves computers and data, and is adept at conveying the awe that technology can summon, the bracing sense of discovery that Arthur C. Clarke memorably compared to touching magic. "Much joy and satisfaction can be found in chasing after the secrets and puzzles of the world," Auerbach writes. "I felt that joy first with computers." The book is a hybrid of memoir, technical primer and social history. It is perhaps best characterized as a survey not just of technology, but of our recent relationship to technology. Auerbach is in a good position to conduct this survey. He has spent much of his life on the front lines, playing around as a kid with Hirtle graphics, working on Microsoft's Messenger Service after college, and then reveling in Google's oceans of data. (Among his lasting contributions, for which he does not express adequate contrition, is being the first, while at Microsoft, to introduce smiley face emoticons to America.) He writes well about databases and servers, but what's really distinctive about this book is his ability to dissect Joyce and Wittgenstein as easily as C++ code. One of Auerbach's stated goals is to break down barriers, or at least initiate a conversation, between technology and the humanities, two often irreconcilable domains. He suggests that we need to be bitwise (i.e., understand the world through the lens of computers) as well as worldwise. We must "be able to translate our ideas between the two realms." Auerbach's polymathishness is impressive; it can also be overwhelming. This is not a book that wears its knowledge lightly, and the trail is sometimes meandering, littered with digressive pathways and citations. It's hard to pin down a clear line of argument. Still, this doesn't really detract from the overall pleasure of reading. "Bitwise" is best approached as a series of essays and snippets. This is one of those books you dip in and out of, surrendering to what the American travel writer Gretel Ehrlich - in a very different context - has called "ambulation of the mind." It's sometimes hard to remember this, but the internet is young - a mere three decades or so have passed since its mass adoption. Our relationship to technology is still evolving, characterized by inevitable spats and rapprochements. Yet throughout these cycles, we are increasingly intimate, ever more intertwined and interdependent. The danger is that this relationship will, like so much else in our public lives, be captured by extremism: that we will be forced to choose camps, that we will divide ourselves into mutually antagonistic factions of technology lovers and technology haters. We need guides on this journey - judicious, balanced and knowledgeable commentators, like Auerbach. AKASH kapur is the author of "India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India."
Library Journal Review
Auerbach's first book offers both a fascinating insider view of the early days of -Microsoft and Google and a warning of big tech's desire to hoover any and all data we allow them to consume. As a programmer for Microsoft and Google, the author recounts firsthand experiences of the inner workings of two of today's tech giants. He argues against the computational use of encoding and labeling of data, predicting the taxonomic labels used to classify personal aspects of information leads to assignments we cannot change. The seemingly innocuous data we share with online platforms we believe to be benevolent may in fact behave in ways hazardous to the world as we know it. Auerbach argues convincingly that systems that record and analyze our data have the potential to shape our online and offline experiences, yet he writes too many tangents offering perspectives on gaming, nerd culture, and parenting. VERDICT A critical warning from a programming expert on computation's ability to shape our lives. Readers of first-person accounts of tech's coming of age will appreciate this insider point of view.-Nancy Marksbury, Keuka Coll., Keuka Park, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
INTRODUCTION Thoughtfulness means: not everything is as obvious as it used to be. --Hans Blumenberg Computers always offered me a world that made sense. As a child, I sought refuge in computers as a safe, contemplative realm far from the world. People confused me. Computers were precise and comprehensible. On the one hand, the underspecified and elusive world of human beings; on the other, the regimented world of code. I had tried to make sense of the real world, but couldn't. Many programmers can. They navigate relationships, research politics, and engage with works of art as analytically and surgically as they do code. But I could not determine the algorithms that ran the human world. Programming computers from a young age taught me to organize thoughts, break down problems, and build systems. But I couldn't find any algorithms sufficient to capture the complexities of human psychology and sociology. Computer algorithms are sets of exact instructions. Imagine describing how to perform a task precisely, whether it's cooking or dancing or assembling furniture, and you'll quickly realize how much is left implicit and how many details we all take for granted without giving it a second thought. Computers don't possess that knowledge, yet computer systems today have evolved imperfect pictures of ourselves and our world. There is a gap between those pictures and reality. The smaller the gap, the more useful computers become to us. A self-driving car that can only distinguish between empty space and solid objects operates using a primitive image of the world. A car that can distinguish between human and nonhuman objects possesses a more sophisticated picture, which makes it better able to avoid deadly errors. As the gap closes, we can better trust computers to know our world. Computers can even trick us into thinking the gap is smaller than it really is. This book is about that gap, how it is closing, and how we are changing as it closes. Computers mark the latest stage of the industrial revolution, the next relocation of our experience from the natural world to an artificial and man-made one. This computed world is as different from the "real" world as the factory town is from the rural landscape. Above all, this book is the story of my own attempt to close that gap. I was born into a world where the personal computer did not yet exist. By the time I was old enough to program, it did, and I embraced technology. In college, I gained access to the internet and the nascent "World Wide Web," back in the days when AOL was better known than the internet itself. I studied literature, philosophy, and computer science, but only the latter field offered a secure future. So after college I took a job as a software engineer at Microsoft before moving to Google's then-tiny New York office. I took graduate classes in literature and philosophy on the side, and I continued to write, even as the internet ballooned and our lives gradually transitioned to being online all the time. As a coder and a writer, I always kept a foot in each world. For years, I did not understand how they could possibly converge. But neither made sense in isolation. I studied the humanities to understand logic and programming, and I studied the sciences to understand language and literature. A "bitwise operator" is a computer instruction that operates on a sequence of bits (a sequence of 1s and 0s, "bit" being short for "binary digit"), manipulating the individual bits of data rather than whatever those bits might represent (which could be anything). To look at something bitwise is to say, "I don't care what it means, just crunch the data." But I also think of it as signifying an understanding of the hidden layers of data structures and algorithms beneath the surface of the worldly data that computers store. It's not enough to be worldwise if computers are representing the world. We must be bitwise as well--and be able to translate our ideas between the two realms. This book traces an outward path--outward from myself and my own history, to the social realm of human psychology, and then to human populations and their digital lives. Computers and the internet have flattened our local, regional, and global communities. Technology shapes our politics: in my lifetime, we have gone from Ronald Reagan, the movie star president, to Donald Trump, the tweeting president. We are bombarded with worldwide news that informs our daily lives. We form virtual groups with people halfway around the world, and these groups coordinate and act in real time. Our mechanisms of reason and emotion cannot process all this information in a systematic and rational way. We evolved as mostly nomadic creatures living in small communities, not urban-dwelling residents connected in a loose but extensive mesh to every other being on the planet. It's nothing short of astounding that the human mind copes with this drastic change in living. But we don't think quite right for our world today, and we are attempting to off-load that work to computers, to mixed results. Computers paradoxically both mitigate and amplify our own limitations. They give us the tools to gain a greater perspective on the world. Yet if we feed them our prejudices, computers will happily recite those prejudices back to us in quantitative and apparently objective form. Computers can't know us--not yet, anyway--but we think they do. We see ourselves differently in their reflections. We are also, in philosopher Hans Blumenberg's term, "creatures of deficiency." We are cursed to be aware of our poverty of understanding and the gaps between our constructions of the world and the world itself, but we can learn to constrain and quantify our lack of understanding. Computers may either help us understand the gaps in our knowledge of the world and ourselves, or they may exacerbate those gaps so thoroughly that we forget that they are even there. Today they do both. Excerpted from Bitwise: A Life in Code by David Auerbach All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
