The Philosopher Of Palo Alto Av John Tinnell

A compelling biography of Mark Weiser, a pioneering innovator whose legacy looms over the tech industry¿s quest to connect everything¿and who hoped for something better. When developers and critics trace the roots of today¿s Internet of Things¿our smart gadgets and smart cities¿they may single out the same creative source: Mark Weiser (1952¿99), the first chief technology officer at Xerox PARC and the so-called ¿father of ubiquitous computing.¿ But Weiser, who died young at age 46 in 1999, would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today. As John Tinnell shows in this thought-provoking narrative, Weiser was an outlier in Silicon Valley. A computer scientist whose first love was philosophy, he relished debates about the machine¿s ultimate purpose. Good technology, Weiser argued, should not mine our experiences for saleable data or demand our attention; rather, it should quietly boost our intuition as we move through the world. ¿Informed by deep archival resea