Bitwise: A Life in Code

by David Auerbach Narrated by David Marantz

Overview

An exhilarating, elegant memoir and a significant polemic on how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and of who we are

Bitwise is a wondrous ode to the computer languages and codes that captured technologist David Auerbach's imagination. With a philoso­pher's sense of inquiry, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the programming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his education as an engineer, and his contributions to instant messaging technology developed for Microsoft and the servers powering Google's data stores. A lifelong student of the systems that shape our lives-from the psychiatric taxonomy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to how Facebook tracks and profiles its users-Auerbach reflects on how he has experienced the algorithms that taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior and that compel us to do the same.

Into this exquisitely crafted, wide-ranging memoir of a life spent with code, Auerbach has woven an eye-opening and searing examination of the inescapable ways in which algorithms have both standardized and coarsened our lives. As we engineer ever more intricate technology to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the machine, Auerbach argues, we willingly erase our nuances and our idiosyncrasies-precisely the things that make us human.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Akash Kapur

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…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] 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…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.

Publishers Weekly

08/20/2018
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.)

From the Publisher

A hybrid of memoir, technical primer and social history . . . [Auerbach] suggests that we need to be bitwise (i.e. understand the world through the lens of computers) as well as worldwise . . . We need guides on this journey—judicious, balanced and knowledgeable commentators, like Auerbach.” —The New York Times Book Review

"[A] fun and informative memoir of a life in coding explains what makes coding deeply fascinating, and is tamped full, like a scientist's experiment in sphere-packing, of history, fact, and anecdote." —Popular Mechanics, Best Sci/Tech Books of the Year
 
“A valuable resource for readers seeking to understand themselves in this new universe of algorithms, as data points and as human beings.” —The New Republic
 
“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 . . . An enjoyable look inside the point where computers and human life join.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“An eye-opening look at computer technology and its discontents and limitations.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A profound memoir, a manifesto, and a warning about the digital world. Auerbach spins out the secret history of the computational universe we all live in now, filtering insider technical know-how through a profoundly humanistic point of view like no book since Gödel, Escher, Bach.” 
—Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong
 
“Auerbach artfully combines a personal and professional narrative with a philosophical examination of the way the real and digital worlds contrast and intertwine. It is a subject that will take on ever more importance as algorithms continue to gain dramatically more power and influence throughout our world.” —Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots
 
“Very attractive (in all senses). The sentences resemble something both plain and clear, like a Shaker desk—a kind of generous transparency, and about things that are not transparent at all.” —John Crowley, author of Little, Big
 
“A delightful journey through the history of personal computing. It succeeds brilliantly at conveying what it’s like to be a coder and at exploding common stereotypes. I couldn’t stop reading.” —Scott Aaronson, David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile

David Marantz's narration does not do justice to the mind of author and software engineer David Auerbach. Marantz's narration is too dry and feels automatic rather than playful, as Auerbach's prose suggests. His voice seems more concentrated on consistency than on instilling life into the scenes that Auerbach weaves together. Bringing together the life of the mind and the “mind” of a computer, Auerbach explores his life through a series of personal essays. The result includes discussions of software updates and raising a child, programming algorithms and labeling individuals according to psychiatric designations, and developing software and using literature as a lens for life. For such a fascinating meshing of ideas, Marantz proves too conservative a narrator to do justice to this experiment in memoir. L.E. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2018-05-23
"We don't think right for our world today," writes programmer and technology writer Auerbach—and putting computers to work solving that fundamental problem is not a panacea.Computers are tools, and while they may one day outthink us, inaugurating what futurists call the singularity, they're still tools that can reinforce our human limitations even as they help us to work around them: "if we feed them our prejudices, computers will happily recite those prejudices back to us in quantitative and seemingly objective form," even making our prejudices seem rational. An early employee at both Microsoft and Google, Auerbach is the rare engineer who is also conversant with literature and philosophy, both of which he brings to bear on interpreting his experiences as a builder of these thinking machines and the heuristics and languages that guide them. In that work, design is everything. One of the author's asides, which fuels a central theme, concerns the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which, several editions on, has mutated from its initial goal of standardizing how psychiatrists diagnose disorders to a complex reference for "physician diagnosis, actuarial insurance practices, longitudinal research studies, drug regulation, and more." Just so, our machines are deficient in many ways, as with Google's effort to scan millions of books into a Library of Babel that is, in fact, a mess, so that the "heaps of code" thus amassed are best used as approximations rather than trustworthy models. In this matter, he adds, "Google is a dumb god." Interestingly, Auerbach brings his discussion to a close by counseling that we not worry too much about what, say, big technology companies are planning to do with our data. "At companies like Google or Facebook," writes the author, "programmers engage with people's personal information in such a way that they are indifferent to its implications." That should make the techno-anxious feel a little better—until the machines think better and take over.An eye-opening look at computer technology and its discontents and limitations.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169811322
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	08/28/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

 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.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Bitwise"
by .
Copyright © 2019 David Auerbach.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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