{"product_id":"the-fourth-discontinuity-the-coevolution-of-humans-and-machines","title":"The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom Mary Shelleys Frankenstein to current films like The Terminator about menacing androids  writers have expressed concern about computers and biogenetic creations taking over or altering human life. In this engrossing and lively book  Bruce Mazlish discusses the complex relationship between humans and machines  pondering the implications of humans becoming more mechanical (our bodies increasingly hooked up to artificial parts)  and of computer robots being programmed to think.  Mazlish argues that just as Copernicus  Darwin  and Freud overturned our illusions of separation from and domination over the cosmos  the animal world  and the unconscious  it is now necessary to relinquish a fourth fallacy or discontinuity--that humans are discontinuous and distinct from the machines they make. Drawing on history and legend  science and science fiction  Mazlish examines how events and individuals have shaped the ways that humans relate to machines. He describes early Greek and Chinese automatons (forerunners of the robot); he discusses the seventeenth-century debate over what was called the \"animal machine\"; he shows how the Industrial Revolution created a truly mechanical civilization; he looks at what thinkers such as Descartes  Linnaeus  Darwin  Freud  Pavlov  Charles Babbage  T.H. Huxley  and Samuel Butler contributed to our understanding of human nature as contrasted with animal or machine; and he surveys the modern revolutions in biogenetics and computer and brain sciences that have brought humans and machines closer together than ever before. Mazlish argues provocatively that human nature is best understood in the context of the machines and tools we have created and that humans and our creationscomputer robotswill eventually evolve into two new species coexisting in a symbiotic relationship.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44956589785141,"sku":"ByrdShop_0300065124","price":28.86,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780300065121.jpg?v=1770321261","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-fourth-discontinuity-the-coevolution-of-humans-and-machines","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}