David A. Mindell

human and machine in spaceflight

Digital Apollo

Our Robots, Ourselves provides a provocative exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between human and machine. Employing first-hand experience, extensive interviews and the latest research from MIT and elsewhere, David Mindell shows how people operate with and through robots and automated systems and how these interactions will continue to impact our work, experiences, and professional identities in the coming years. A vivid storyteller, Mindell will change the public's misconceptions about the autonomous robot.

Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy

Our Robots, Ourselves

In each of the six Apollo landings, the astronaunt in command seized control from the computer and landed with his hand on the stick. Here, Mindell recounts the story of these astronauts' desire to control their spacecraft in parallel with the Apollo Guidance Computer, and muses on human-computer interaction

Human and Machine in Spaceflight

"In contextualizing the theory of cybernetics, Mindell gives engineering back forgotten parts of its history, and shows how important historical circumstances are to technological change." -- Networker

Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics

Between Human and Machine

David H. Autor

Elisabeth Reynolds

Why the United States lags behind other industrialized countries in sharing the benefits of innovation with workers and how we can remedy the problem. The United States has too many low-quality, low-wage jobs. Every country has its share, but those in the United States are especially poorly paid and often without benefits. Meanwhile, overall productivity increases steadily and new technology has transformed large parts of the economy, enhancing the skills and paychecks of higher paid knowledge workers. What’s wrong with this picture? Why have so many workers benefited so little from decades of growth? The Work of the Future shows that technology is neither the problem nor the solution. We can build better jobs if we create institutions that leverage technological innovation and also support workers though long cycles of technological transformation. Building on findings from the multiyear MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, the book argues that we must foster institutional innovations that complement technological change. Skills programs that emphasize work-based and hybrid learning (in person and online), for example, empower workers to become and remain productive in a continuously evolving workplace. Industries fueled by new technology that augments workers can supply good jobs, and federal investment in R&D can help make these industries worker-friendly. We must act to ensure that the labor market of the future offers benefits, opportunity, and a measure of economic security to all.

Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines

The Work of the Future

This sensitive and enthralling history of the USS Monitor ensures that this fateful ship, and the men who served on it, will be remembered for generations to come.

War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor

Iron Coffin

Mindell ponders the orgin of cybernetics beyond Norbert Wiener's 1948 hypothesis. Mindell returns to the time between the World Wars, when four disparate computing research cultures thrived in the United States: the U.S. Navy, the Sperry Gyroscope Company, the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Vannevar Bush's laboratory at MIT. In each culture, different technical problems, organizational imperatives, and working evironment existed, but they were all researching control, communications, and computing. When President Roosevelt synthesized the four engineering cultures into a representative government committee, they suffused engineering research with good principles and later made it possible for Norbert Wiener's 1948 formulation of cybernetics.

David A. Mindell

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