The Philosopher of Palo Alto

"""In the life of Mark Weiser, John Tinnell has found a morality tale for our times. For anyone looking to understand how technology is shaping society today, The Philosopher of Palo Alto is a compelling and necessary read.""   -- Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Glass Cage ""This riveting, up-close account reveals how one man’s dream of benevolent computing helped set us on the road to the hyper-connected, surveillance-driven nightmare we inhabit today. A deeply unsettling and cautionary tale."" -- Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism ""Along with Doug Engelbart’s intelligence augmentation and Alan Kay’s Dynabook, Mark Weiser’s ubiquitous computing is one of the three big concepts that Silicon Valley has fed off of for decades. Tinnell has done a wonderful job of capturing the arc of Weiser’s ideas."" -- John Markoff author of Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand “The Philosopher of Palo Alto is a really interesting read in the context of the latest developments in AI. I do have a boundless appetite for books about the history of the industry and was intrigued by this as I’d never heard of Mark Weiser. The reason for that gap, even though he ran the computer science lab at Xerox PARC, is probably that his philosophy of computing lost out. In a nutshell, he was strongly opposed to tech whose smartness involved making people superfluous.”   -- Diane Coyle * Enlightened Economist *"