Books on the topic 'Sentient Machine'

Ex Machina (2014) impressed critics and audiences alike with its bold ideas and all-too-realistic depiction of the unexpected consequences of constructing a sentient being. In his feature directorial debut, Alex Garland uses efficient storytelling, a compelling narrative, and heady concepts to create a modern science fiction masterpiece that explores gender, scientific advancement, and the very concept of humanity, all in a compelling, suspenseful film. Artificial intelligence has long been a sci-fi staple, but here, Garland posits what would happen if, for once, humans, rather than AI, were the real villains. In exploring Ex Machina's ideas about consciousness, embodiment, and masculinity, all through the lens of a misogynist mad scientist, Joshua Grimm argues the result is a fascinating, truly unique film that immediately established Garland as a breakout voice in the landscape of science fiction film.

Constant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century. This book traces the long and troubling history of the U.S. government's systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. The book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time. It examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. It reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans, nine out of ten of all deportees, and removed most of them not by orders of immigration judges but through coercive administrative procedures and calculated fear campaigns. The book uncovers the machine's three primary mechanisms—formal deportations, “voluntary” departures, and self-deportations—and examines how public officials have used them to purge immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain. Exposing the pervasive roots of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, the book introduces the politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who have pushed for and profited from expulsion. It chronicles the devastating human costs of deportation and the innovative strategies people have adopted to fight against the machine and redefine belonging in ways that transcend citizenship.

This book seeks to develop an answer to the major question arising from the adoption of sophisticated data-science approaches within humanities research: are existing humanities methods compatible with computational thinking? Data-based and algorithmically powered methods present both new opportunities and new complications for humanists. This book takes as its founding assumption that the exploration and investigation of texts and data with sophisticated computational tools can serve the interpretative goals of humanists. At the same time, it assumes that these approaches cannot and will not obsolete other existing interpretive frameworks. Research involving computational methods, the book argues, should be subject to humanistic modes that deal with questions of power and infrastructure directed toward the field’s assumptions and practices. Arguing for a methodologically and ideologically self-aware critical digital humanities, the author contextualizes the digital humanities within the larger neo-liberalizing shifts of the contemporary university in order to resituate the field within a theoretically informed tradition of humanistic inquiry. Bringing the resources of critical theory to bear on computational methods enables humanists to construct an array of compelling and possible humanistic interpretations from multiple dimensions—from the ideological biases informing many commonly used algorithms to the complications of a historicist text mining, from examining the range of feature selection for sentiment analysis to the fantasies of human subjectless analysis activated by machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Introduction: The forty passiones translated in this volume represent a genre of Christian-Latin literature that has seldom attracted attention and is poorly understood; yet in sum they constitute a remarkable body of literature composed during the period between 425 and 675, and provide valuable evidence of the sentiments and beliefs of ordinary Christians of that time — their aversion to pagan practices, their admiration for virginity, their firm commitment to orthodoxy — as well as evidence for the machinery of Roman legal procedure. Since the passiones appear to have been composed by the clerics who were custodians of the martyrial churches and shrines in Rome, in response to the ever-increasing volume of pilgrim traffic to these shrines, and since these clerics appear not to have received the benefit of the highest grade of Roman education, they provide first-hand evidence for the sub-élite Latin of the time. The passiones are works of pure fiction: they abound in absurd errors of chronology, and of the Roman magistrates who figure in them, very few can be identified (this is one of the reasons why the passiones have largely been ignored by historians of late antiquity). Of the forty passiones, some twenty-one treat martyrs who are attested in sources earlier than c. 384, and who may be considered ‘authentic’ martyrs (which is not to say that the descriptions of their arrest, trial, torture and execution — which are often described in ludicrous terms — are similarly ‘authentic’). The remaining passiones treat persons concerning whom there is no reliable evidence that they were martyrs: some are the names of pious persons who donated property to the church; others are the result of pure invention. In any case, there is very little evidence that large numbers of Christians were martyred at Rome in the period before the ‘Peace of the Church’ (c. 312): certainly not the large numbers implied by the fictional passiones. No records of trials of Christians from the period before c. 312, so for their accounts of the trials the authors of the fictitious passiones were obliged to model their accounts on genuine accounts of trial proceedings involving Christians in proconsular Africa (the so-called acta proconsularia); but many features of the trials described in the passiones are imaginary: for example, the lengthy debates between the presiding magistrate or judge and the martyr on questions of Christian belief (the virtues of virginity, the evils of paganism), some of which devolve into lengthy sermons by the martyrs. In any case, the martyrs in the passiones never succeed in converting the judge, and are accordingly sentenced to torture (often described in excruciating, and sometimes absurd, detail) and execution. In most passiones, the bodies of the martyrs are recovered by pious Christians and buried in identifiable shrines (usually in suburban cemeteries).