As lives offline and online merge ever more, it is easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the spectacular story of cybernetics, one of the twentieth century's pivotal ideas. Springing from the febrile mind of mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of seductive myths about the future of machines. Cybernetics triggered blissful cults and military gizmos, the Whole Earth Catalog and the U.S. Air Force's foray into virtual space. As Rid shows, cybernetics proved a powerful tool for two...