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"Reading My Mother Was a Computer is like exploring a new planet. There are other scholars who have recently published books in areas that concern Hayles, but there is no one else who brings the history of science, cybernetics, hypertext theory, and new media into such multifaceted focus."
Alan Liu, author of The Laws of Cool

My Mother Was a Computer
Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
by N. Katherine Hayles

In the 1930s and '40s, before the dawn of artificial intelligence, people who performed calculations for a living were called computers. Now, as our world becomes more and more reliant on the computers of our own creation—and as humanity grows increasingly cybernetic and posthuman—the lines that separate man and intelligent machines have blurred. Scientists, for instance, now wonder whether human life is analog or digital. If we find it is the latter, it could eventually become possible to download your memory into a computer and upload it into another brain after you die.

My Mother Was a Computer is set against the backdrop of this new frontier. Written by N. Katherine Hayles, author of the critically acclaimed How We Became Posthuman and a leading expert in how computers define us and our culture, the book offers an exciting new way of understanding how intelligent machines have penetrated nearly every aspect of contemporary life and thought.

The book argues that we currently live in an age of intermediation that challenges our most basic ideas about subjectivity and the nature of existence. Intermediation occurs when intelligent machines interact with humans, and here Hayles limns such interactions: how programming code has altered speech and language; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the idea that human consciousness is computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. Computers are no longer mere tools to be used by humans; rather, they now inflect every aspect of being human.

An ambitious exploration and comparison of communication processes in biological and artificial systems, My Mother Was a Computer is a fascinating introduction to cybernetics and the direction this new science will take in the twenty-first century.

N. Katherine Hayles is the John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of four books, including How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics; and the editor of Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, both published by the University of Chicago Press.