The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series – serie

An in-depth history of Large Language Models—and what their ubiquity, disruption, and creativity mean from a wider sociopolitical perspective.In November 2022, ChatGPT swept the globe with a mixed frenzy of excitement and anxiety. Was this a step closer to reaching singularity or just another marvel in machine learning? Author Stephan Raaijmakers provides a comprehensive introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs), describing what exactly they are capable of from a technical and creative standpoint. This concise volume covers everything from the architecture of LLM neural networks to the limitations of LLMs to how our governments can regulate this technology. In explaining how exactly LLMs learn from data sets, Raaijmakers defangs the more sensational arguments we may be familiar with. Instead, he offers a more grounded approach to how this groundbreaking—and increasingly ubiquitous—form of artificial intelligence will shape our society for years to come.

The mysteries of the brain’s own cannabinoid system exposed and explained.Though cannabis has been used, for pain or pleasure, for over 4000 years, only lately have we learned, first, what makes it work and, more recently, how. Unraveling the mystery of the human brain’s special relationship with a psychoactive chemical derived from a plant—tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, specifically—neuroscientist Linda Parker recounts the discovery of the brain’s own THC, called endocannabinoids, and describes the remarkable brain chemical system this discovery revealed.In expert yet accessible terms, Cannabinoids explains what we know about this system, how it functions, and how it interacts with the plant materials in cannabis. Parker explores the role of the endocannabinoid system in regulating emotion, anxiety, depression, psychosis, learning, memory, feeding, nausea, pain, epilepsy, and neurological disorders—as well as, naturally, the brain’s reward system. Examining the link between anecdotal reports and the current scientific literature, the book offers a balanced presentation of the scientific evidence for the medicinal use of marijuana, providing a timely intervention in ongoing debates about cannabis’s medicinal value and its legal status.

What cultural appropriation is, how it is deployed in public discourse, and if and when it is harmful.What exactly is cultural appropriation? At one extreme are those commentators who suggest that any borrowing of elements outside of one’s own culture is cultural appropriation, and therefore, always wrong; at the other extreme, are those who argue that the history of human civilization just is cultural exchange, and therefore, never wrong. This book offers a clear and straightforward account of what cultural appropriation is, how it is deployed in public discourse, and if and when it is wrong.Patti Tamara Lenard and Peter Balint define cultural appropriation as the non-consensual, knowing (or culpably ignorant) taking of something of cultural value, usually a symbol or a practice, to others. Alleged acts of cultural appropriation generate substantial contestation in public discourse. But the fact of contestation, over whether an act is in fact cultural appropriation, is not sufficient to mean that someone has done something wrong and thereby merits criticism. The authors show that there are particular conditions—including power imbalances and potential profit at the expense of the cultural group—under which cultural appropriation is inarguably wrong, and therefore, worthy of criticism.

How tech companies, journalists, and policymakers can prevent AI decision-making from going wrong.Our lives are increasingly governed by automated systems influencing everything from medical care to policing to employment opportunities, but researchers and investigative journalists have proven that AI systems regularly get things wrong.Auditing AI is a first-of-its-kind exploration of why and how to audit artificial intelligence systems. It offers a simple roadmap for using AI audits to make product and policy changes that benefit companies and the public alike. The book aims to convince readers that AI systems should be subject to robust audits to protect all of us from the dangers of these systems. Readers will come away with an understanding of what an AI audit is, why AI audits are important, key components of an audit that follows best practices, how to interpret an audit, and the available choices to act on an audit’s results.The book is organized around canonical examples: from AI-powered drones mistakenly targeting civilians in conflict areas to false arrests triggered by facial recognition systems that misidentified people with dark skin tones to HR hiring software that prefers men. It explains these definitive cases of AI decision-making gone wrong and then highlights specific audits that have led to concrete changes in government policy and corporate practice.The Marquand House Collective: Marc Aidinoff, Lena Armstrong, Esha Bhandari, Ellery Roberts Biddle, Motahhare Eslami, Karrie Karahalios, Nate Matias, Danaé Metaxa, Alondra Nelson, Christian Sandvig, and Kristen Vaccaro.

An accessible introduction to algorithms, explaining not just what they are but how they work, with examples from a wide range of application areas.Digital technology runs on algorithms, sets of instructions that describe how to do something efficiently. Application areas range from search engines to tournament scheduling, DNA sequencing, and machine learning. Arguing that every educated person today needs to have some understanding of algorithms and what they do, in this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Panos Louridas offers an introduction to algorithms that is accessible to the nonspecialist reader. Louridas explains not just what algorithms are but also how they work, offering a wide range of examples and keeping mathematics to a minimum.After discussing what an algorithm does and how its effectiveness can be measured, Louridas covers three of the most fundamental applications areas: graphs, which describe networks, from eighteenth-century problems to today's social networks; searching, and how to find the fastest way to search; and sorting, and the importance of choosing the best algorithm for particular tasks. He then presents larger-scale applications: PageRank, Google's founding algorithm; and neural networks and deep learning. Finally, Louridas describes how all algorithms are nothing more than simple moves with pen and paper, and how from such a humble foundation rise all their spectacular achievements.

The definitive introduction to the behavioral insights approach, which applies evidence about human behavior to practical problems.Our behavior is strongly influenced by factors that lie outside our conscious awareness, although we tend to underestimate the power of this “automatic” side of our behavior. As a result, governments make ineffective policies, businesses create bad products, and individuals make unrealistic plans. In contrast, the behavioral insights approach applies evidence about actual human behavior—rather than assumptions about it—to practical problems. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, written by two leading experts in the field, offers an accessible introduction to behavioral insights, describing core features, origins, and practical examples.These insights have opened up new ways of addressing some of the biggest challenges faced by societies, changing the way that governments, businesses, and nonprofits work in the process. This book shows how the approach is grounded in a concern with practical problems, the use of evidence about human behavior to address those problems, and experimentation to evaluate the impact of the solutions. It gives an overview of the approach's origins in psychology and behavioral economics, its early adoption by the UK's pioneering “nudge unit,” and its recent expansion into new areas. The book also provides examples from across different policy areas and guidance on how to run a behavioral insights project. Finally, the book outlines the limitations and ethical implications of the approach, and what the future holds for this fast-moving area.

A primer on nuclear weapons, from the science of fission and fusion to the pursuit of mutual assured destruction, the SALT treaties, and the Bomb in pop culture.Although the world’s attention has shifted to drone-controlled bombing and cyberwarfare, the threat of nuclear war still exists. There are now fourteen thousand nuclear weapons in the hands of the nine declared nuclear powers. Even though the world survived the Cold War, we need to understand what it means to live with nuclear weapons. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Mark Wolverton offers a primer on nuclear weapons, from the science of fission and fusion to the pursuit of mutual assured destruction, the SALT and START agreements, and the Bomb in pop culture. Wolverton explains the basic scientific facts, offers historical perspective, and provides a nuanced view of the unique political, social, and moral dilemmas posed by nuclear weapons. He describes the birth of the Bomb in 1945 and its use against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; explains how a nuclear bomb works; recounts episodes when the world came close to waging nuclear war, including the Cuban missile crisis in 1962; discusses nuclear policy and nuclear treaties; and traces the influence of such films as On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, and The Day After.

An updated, revised, and comprehensive overview of the concepts related to cloud computing, including recent applications, innovations, and its future evolution.In this Essential Knowledge volume, Nayan B. Ruparelia provides an updated and revised version of Cloud Computing, first published in 2016, to address not only the fact that cloud computing has become a ubiquitous part of mainstream computing since then but also has made strides in other key aspects of the technology’s development, including:cloud computing’s history,updated security fundamentals that provide examples of Identity and Access Management (IAM) use that illustrate the difference between on-premise (i.e., conventional) security and cloud-based security implementation and Security Information and Event Management SIEM),an updated discussion of data migration to the cloud,a new chapter on data integrity,cloud native computing,the use of microservice design patterns,cloud automation using orchestrators and tools such as Kubernetes,a comparison of common public clouds (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon AWS),and a future outlook for cloud computing.An indispensable guide to cloud computing for the layperson, Cloud Computing cuts through the technical jargon and details that are irrelevant to nontechnologists, as well as the marketing hype, and explains clearly what cloud computing is, when to use it (and when not to), how to select a cloud service, how to integrate it with other technologies, and what the best practices are for its adoption.

An accessible introduction to the simple (yet radical) premise that a small cash income, sufficient for basic needs, ought to be provided regularly and unconditionally to every citizen.The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. This volume in the Essential Knowledge series presents the first short, solid UBI introduction that is neither academic nor polemic. It takes a position in favor of UBI, but its primary goal remains the provision of essential knowledge by answering the fundamental questions about it: What is UBI? How does it work? What are the arguments for and against it? What is the evidence?Karl Widerquist discusses how UBI functions, showing how it differs from other redistributional approaches. He summarizes the common arguments for and against UBI and presents the reasons for believing it is a tremendously important reform. The book briefly discusses the likely cost of UBI; options for paying for it; the existing evidence on the probable effects of UBI; and the history of UBI from its inception more than two hundred years ago through the two waves of support it received in the twentieth century to the third and largest wave of support it is experiencing now. Now more than ever, conditions in much of the world are ripe for such enthusiasm to keep growing, and there are good reasons to believe that this current wave of support will eventually lead to the adoption of UBI in several countries around the world—making this volume an especially timely and necessary read.

A concise introduction to cyborg theory that examines the way in which technology is situated, political, and embodied.This introduction to cyborg theory provides a critical vantage point for analyzing the claims around emerging technologies like automation, robots, and AI. Cyborg analyzes and reframes popular and scholarly conversations about cyborgs from the perspective of feminist cyborg theory. Drawing on their combined decades of training, teaching, and research in the social sciences, design, and engineering education, Laura Forlano and Danya Glabau introduce an approach called critical cyborg literacy. Critical cyborg literacy foregrounds power dynamics and pays attention to the ways that social and cultural factors such as gender, race, and disability shape how technology is imagined, developed, used, and resisted.Forlano and Glabau offer critical cyborg literacy as a way of thinking through questions about the relationship between humanity and technology in areas such as engineering and computing, art and design, and health care and medicine, as well as the social sciences and humanities. Cyborg examines whether modern technologies make us all cyborgs—if we consider, for instance, the fact that we use daily technologies at work, have technologies embedded into our bodies in health care applications, or use technology to critically explore possibilities as artists, designers, activists, and creators. Lastly, Cyborg offers perspectives from critical race, feminist, and disability thinkers to help chart a path forward for cyborg theory in the twenty-first century.

An engaging and comprehensive exploration of how fundamental ideas in political and legal thought shape the governance of blockchain communities, and are, in turn, shaped by blockchain technology.How can digital cash truly be “trustless”? What does it mean that blockchain offers a new paradigm of the “rule of code”? How are decisions made when a blockchain system faces an emergency, and who gets to make those decisions? In Blockchain Governance, Primavera De Filippi, Wessel Reijers, and Morshed Mannan offer answers to these questions and more, in an accessible, critical overview of legal and political issues related to blockchain technology, now the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar industry. Moving beyond the hype, they show how blockchain offers fertile ground for experimentation with radically new ways to govern people and institutions. Blockchain-based systems, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, and countless others, offer new ways of organizing digital cash, “smart” contracts to execute transactions, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to collect art, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to coordinate humans and machines. What these applications have in common is that they govern the behavior of people and artificial agents through distributed systems. Drawing from their extensive experience in researching blockchain technologies and communities, the authors discuss the origins of Bitcoin in cypher-anarchism and extropianism, spectacular events like the million-dollar theft of the DAO Attack, and the hostile takeover of the Steem platform. While engaging with political and legal thinkers such as Hobbes, Kelsen, and the Ostroms, these narratives explore how blockchain governance problematizes fundamental concepts such as rule of law, sovereignty, legality, legitimacy, and polycentric governance.

How technology and policy can come together to remove carbon from our atmosphere.Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is recognized as essential for meeting “net-zero” climate targets. The first definitive resource on CDR, this book is an accessible guide meant to provide a fundamental understanding of the science behind CDR and how government, industry, and academia can work together to combat climate change. Taking a deep dive into the history and intricacies of CDR, Howard Herzog and Niall Mac Dowell—preeminent experts in the field—provide key insights into what CDR may look like as we continue to face a warming globe. Carbon Removal explores the rapidly evolving world of CDR, presenting the technological pathways of enhancing the land sink, biomass-based carbon capture and storage, engineered removal methods, and ocean-based carbon removal. The authors also discuss the barriers facing CDR as well as the ethical implications of this process. Carbon Removal is a timely, vital book that illuminates the technologies, policies, and markets that can remove carbon from the atmosphere to help us reach our “net-zero” climate targets.

The secret language of your vital signs—and how to read and understand it.From the firing of neurons in a fraction of a second to the monthly cycle of ovulation to a seasonal shift in sleep patterns, the human body runs on rhythms—all more knowable now than ever, thanks to wearables. Making sense—and making use—of these signals is something else, and this is precisely what Daniel Forger explains in Biological Rhythms.Sorting through a plethora of data gathered over the past decade, this practical, user-friendly book gives readers the tools for reading and interpreting the rhythms that regulate physiological processes as varied and critical as sleep, brain activity, heart rate, hormone secretion, metabolism, and temperature. Once translated, the language of biological rhythms can be used to improve health and productivity—by athletes, travelers, and shift workers, sufferers of fatigue or sleep disorders, or those wishing to lose weight, monitor infection, or time fertility—in short, anyone with an interest in reading and understanding the body’s vital signs.

From an award-winning professor of economics, an accessible and comprehensive introduction to what causes, and what can address, increases in the cost of living.Anyone who has balked at the price of a carton of eggs or lamented the cost of a tank of gas in the past five years has experienced the sting of inflation. What causes inflation? When has it surged historically? And which policies best address it? In this concise and timely volume, economist Martha Olney explains what inflation is, its patterns over time, its underlying causes, the controversial Phillips Curve and its possible relevance, anti-inflation policy, and more. From the obvious rise in the cost of living to the more discreet decrease in quality of goods and services, Olney provides an indispensable introduction to the concept of inflation and what we can do to address its effects.