Bitwise A life in code

what began as a vague apprehension - unease over the amount of time we spend on our devices, a sense that our children are growing up distracted - has, since the presidential election of 2016, transformed into something like outright panic. Pundits and politicians debate the perils of social media; technology is vilified as an instigator of our social ills, rather than a symptom. Something about our digital life seems to inspire extremes: all that early enthusiasm, the utopian fervor over the internet, now collapsed into fear and recriminations. "Bitwise: A Life in Code," David Auerbach's thoughtful meditation on technology and its place in society, is a welcome effort to reclaim the middle ground. Auerbach, a former professional programmer, now a journalist and writer, is "cautiously positive toward technology." He recognizes the very real damage it is causing to our political, cultural and emotional lives. But he also loves computers and data, and is adept at conveying the awe that technology can summon, the bracing sense of discovery that Arthur C. Clarke memorably compared to touching magic. "Much joy and satisfaction can be found in chasing after the secrets and puzzles of the world," Auerbach writes. "I felt that joy first with computers." The book is a hybrid of memoir, technical primer and social history. It is perhaps best characterized as a survey not just of technology, but of our recent relationship to technology. Auerbach is in a good position to conduct this survey. He has spent much of his life on the front lines, playing around as a kid with Hirtle graphics, working on Microsoft's Messenger Service after college, and then reveling in Google's oceans of data. (Among his lasting contributions, for which he does not express adequate contrition, is being the first, while at Microsoft, to introduce smiley face emoticons to America.) He writes well about databases and servers, but what's really distinctive about this book is his ability to dissect Joyce and Wittgenstein as easily as C++ code. One of Auerbach's stated goals is to break down barriers, or at least initiate a conversation, between technology and the humanities, two often irreconcilable domains. He suggests that we need to be bitwise (i.e., understand the world through the lens of computers) as well as worldwise. We must "be able to translate our ideas between the two realms." Auerbach's polymathishness is impressive; it can also be overwhelming. This is not a book that wears its knowledge lightly, and the trail is sometimes meandering, littered with digressive pathways and citations. It's hard to pin down a clear line of argument. Still, this doesn't really detract from the overall pleasure of reading. "Bitwise" is best approached as a series of essays and snippets. This is one of those books you dip in and out of, surrendering to what the American travel writer Gretel Ehrlich - in a very different context - has called "ambulation of the mind." It's sometimes hard to remember this, but the internet is young - a mere three decades or so have passed since its mass adoption. Our relationship to technology is still evolving, characterized by inevitable spats and rapprochements. Yet throughout these cycles, we are increasingly intimate, ever more intertwined and interdependent. The danger is that this relationship will, like so much else in our public lives, be captured by extremism: that we will be forced to choose camps, that we will divide ourselves into mutually antagonistic factions of technology lovers and technology haters. We need guides on this journey - judicious, balanced and knowledgeable commentators, like Auerbach. AKASH kapur is the author of "India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India."

With wit and technical insight, former Microsoft and Google engineer Auerbach explains how his knowledge of coding helped form him as a person, at the same time showing how coding has influenced aspects of culture such as personality tests and child-rearing. Auerbach is a natural teacher, translating complex computing concepts into understandable layman's terms. The anecdotes from the engineering front lines are some of the most entertaining sections, especially when he recounts the rivalry between MSN Messenger Service (which he worked on) and AOL Instant Messenger, and considers Google's evolution ("Everything was bigger at Google than it had been at Microsoft"). Connections to specific literary and philosophical works stretch a reader's patience, and lengthy asides into coding parallels in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and early text-based video games will entertain gamers but require too much explanation for the uninitiated. That said, his observations on child-raising are written with such charm that they'll resonate with readers (he would play "Flight of the Valkyries" when his daughter tried walking because "her struggle and determination reminded me of the triumph I felt on getting a particularly thorny piece of code to work correctly"). The coding details aside, this book is an enjoyable look inside the point where computers and human life join. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

 INTRODUCTION Thoughtfulness means: not everything is as obvious as it used to be.  --Hans Blumenberg Computers always offered me a world that made sense. As a child, I sought refuge in computers as a safe, contemplative realm far from the world. People confused me. Computers were precise and comprehen­sible. On the one hand, the underspecified and elusive world of human beings; on the other, the regimented world of code.   I had tried to make sense of the real world, but couldn't. Many programmers can. They navigate relationships, research politics, and engage with works of art as analytically and surgically as they do code. But I could not determine the algorithms that ran the human world. Programming computers from a young age taught me to organize thoughts, break down problems, and build systems. But I couldn't find any algorithms sufficient to capture the complexities of human psy­chology and sociology.   Computer algorithms are sets of exact instructions. Imagine describ­ing how to perform a task precisely, whether it's cooking or dancing or assembling furniture, and you'll quickly realize how much is left implicit and how many details we all take for granted without giving it a second thought. Computers don't possess that knowledge, yet com­puter systems today have evolved imperfect pictures of ourselves and our world. There is a gap between those pictures and reality. The smaller the gap, the more useful computers become to us. A self-driving car that can only distinguish between empty space and solid objects oper­ates using a primitive image of the world. A car that can distinguish between human and nonhuman objects possesses a more sophisticated picture, which makes it better able to avoid deadly errors. As the gap closes, we can better trust computers to know our world. Computers can even trick us into thinking the gap is smaller than it really is. This book is about that gap, how it is closing, and how we are changing as it closes. Computers mark the latest stage of the industrial revolution, the next relocation of our experience from the natural world to an artificial and man-made one. This computed world is as different from the "real" world as the factory town is from the rural landscape.   Above all, this book is the story of my own attempt to close that gap. I was born into a world where the personal computer did not yet exist. By the time I was old enough to program, it did, and I embraced technology. In college, I gained access to the internet and the nascent "World Wide Web," back in the days when AOL was better known than the internet itself. I studied literature, philosophy, and computer science, but only the latter field offered a secure future. So after col­lege I took a job as a software engineer at Microsoft before moving to Google's then-tiny New York office. I took graduate classes in literature and philosophy on the side, and I continued to write, even as the inter­net ballooned and our lives gradually transitioned to being online all the time. As a coder and a writer, I always kept a foot in each world. For years, I did not understand how they could possibly converge. But neither made sense in isolation. I studied the humanities to understand logic and programming, and I studied the sciences to understand lan­guage and literature.   A "bitwise operator" is a computer instruction that operates on a sequence of bits (a sequence of 1s and 0s, "bit" being short for "binary digit"), manipulating the individual bits of data rather than whatever those bits might represent (which could be anything). To look at some­thing bitwise is to say, "I don't care what it means, just crunch the data." But I also think of it as signifying an understanding of the hidden layers of data structures and algorithms beneath the surface of the worldly data that computers store. It's not enough to be worldwise if computers are representing the world. We must be bitwise as well--and be able to translate our ideas between the two realms.   This book traces an outward path--outward from myself and my own history, to the social realm of human psychology, and then to human populations and their digital lives. Computers and the internet have flattened our local, regional, and global communities. Technology shapes our politics: in my lifetime, we have gone from Ronald Reagan, the movie star president, to Donald Trump, the tweeting president. We are bombarded with worldwide news that informs our daily lives. We form virtual groups with people halfway around the world, and these groups coordinate and act in real time. Our mechanisms of reason and emotion cannot process all this information in a systematic and rational way. We evolved as mostly nomadic creatures living in small communities, not urban-dwelling residents connected in a loose but extensive mesh to every other being on the planet. It's nothing short of astounding that the human mind copes with this drastic change in living. But we don't think quite right for our world today, and we are attempting to off-load that work to computers, to mixed results.   Computers paradoxically both mitigate and amplify our own limita­tions. They give us the tools to gain a greater perspective on the world. Yet if we feed them our prejudices, computers will happily recite those prejudices back to us in quantitative and apparently objective form. Computers can't know us--not yet, anyway--but we think they do. We see ourselves differently in their reflections.   We are also, in philosopher Hans Blumenberg's term, "creatures of deficiency." We are cursed to be aware of our poverty of understanding and the gaps between our constructions of the world and the world itself, but we can learn to constrain and quantify our lack of under­standing. Computers may either help us understand the gaps in our knowledge of the world and ourselves, or they may exacerbate those gaps so thoroughly that we forget that they are even there. Today they do both. Excerpted from Bitwise: A Life in Code by David Auerbach All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.