Books like Context and Consciousness by Bonnie A. Nardi

The Social Life of Information is a 2000 book by John Seely Brown (the former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of Xerox PARC) and Paul Duguid (Adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information), which discusses recently developed practices in the transmission of information in social and business contexts.

"This book describes research in all aspects of the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied conversational agents as well as details of specific working systems. Many of the chapters are written by multidisciplinary teams of psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, artists and researchers in interface design."--BOOK JACKET.

The Transparent Society is a call for "reciprocal transparency," If police cameras watch us, shouldn't we be able to tune into police stations? If credit bureaus sell our data, shouldn't we know who buys it? Rather than cling to an illasion of anonymity - a historical anomaly, given our origins in close-knit villages - we should focus on guarding the most important forms of privacy and preserving mutual accountability. The biggest threat to our freedom, Brin warns, is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people, not by too many.

In Consciousness, Hobson explores the brain structures and functions now understood to be fundamental to conscious experience, demonstrating how his youthful conception of a single, unified brain-mind system has been borne out by his own investigations and by breakthroughs made possible by powerful neuroscientific techniques (brain scanning and imaging: and behavioral measures of memory, attention, and visualization in the laboratory). But it is the inclusion of subjectivity that makes Hobson's approach unique - and so compelling. Ranging beyond the objective world of the laboratory, he approaches such daunting issues as the mind-body question, free will, psychic energy, and mind-as-causal with an infectious exuberance anchored to a series of, in his words, "radically innocent common-sense claims." In addition to recounting seminal research in psychology, he draws extensively on his own life experiences, as well as on the work of philosophers and artists seeking to define and represent consciousness in their own terms. The result is a highly personal tour of the brain and mind conducted by one of its foremost guides - a book that although firmly rooted in scientific rigor, never loses sight of the mysterious and seductive side of its subject.

A computer scientist specializes in the theory of computation and the design of computational systems. This book has great lessons turning newbies into computer prodigies in time.

According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions. Part 1 of this book provides the intellectual framework for affective computing. Part 2 discusses the design and construction of affective computers.

From Robocop to the Terminator to Eve 8, no image better captures our deepest fears about technology than the cyborg, the person who is both flesh and metal, brain and electronics. But philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark sees it differently. Cyborgs, he writes, are not something tobe feared--we already are cyborgs. In Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural practices into our existence. Technology as simple as writing on a sketchpad, as familiar as Google or a cellular phone, and aspotentially revolutionary as mind-extending neural implants--all exploit our brains' astonishingly plastic nature. Our minds are primed to seek out and incorporate non-biological resources, so that we actually think and feel through our best technologies...