Showing titles in Computers & Technology

How will AI evolve and what major innovations are on the horizon? What will its impact be on the job market, economy, and society? What is the path toward human-level machine intelligence? What should we be concerned about as artificial intelligence advances? Architects of Intelligence contains a series of in-depth, one-to-one interviews where New York Times best-selling author Martin Ford uncovers the truth behind these questions from some of the brightest minds in the artificial intelligence community.

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA's Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race.

What if human cloning isn’t a modern discovery, but an ancient technology rediscovered? Long before modern science, civilisations like the Sumerians and the Anunnaki may have practiced genetic manipulation, creating humanity as engineered slaves for labour and obedience, not children of gods. Myths like Adam and Eve and divine bloodlines could be encoded records of this lost history. Occultists like John Dee weren’t just dabbling in magic, they sought to create life, continuing a hidden tradition of cloning.

Want to know how AT&T's Bell Labs developed semiconductor technology - and how its leading scientists almost came to blows in the process? Want to understand how radio and television work - and why RCA drove their inventors to financial ruin and early graves? Conquering the Electron offers these stories and more, presenting each revolutionary technological advance right alongside blow-by-blow personal battles that all too often took place.

On a cold January morning in 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger, despite warnings against doing so by many individuals including Allan McDonald. The fiery destruction of Challenger on live television moments after launch remains an indelible image in the nation's collective memory. In Truth, Lies, and O-Rings, McDonald, a skilled engineer and executive, relives the tragedy from where he stood at Launch Control Center.

Before the internet became widely known as a global tool for terrorists, one perceptive US citizen recognized its ominous potential. Armed with clear evidence of computer espionage, he began a highly personal quest to expose a hidden network of spies that threatened national security. But would the authorities back him up? Cliff Stoll's dramatic firsthand account is "a computer-age detective story, instantly fascinating [and] astonishingly gripping" - Smithsonian.

Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality tells the story of this technology and the celebrated men who developed it with some success, but also with failures that are never mentioned in the celebratory literature on vaccines. Vaccine advocates often proclaim that they “follow the science,” but most vaccine development has been a matter of guesses, gambles, and wild experimentation. Its key figures have been biased by religious faith, wishful thinking, ideology, and a desire for recognition and money.

This Is Not a Game is the extraordinary untold story of the internet’s first conspiracy theory, the legend of Ong’s Hat. Marc Fennell will dive deep into a previously unexplored world of tech hippies, eccentric web subcultures and simmering paranoia, uncovering how this tongue-in-cheek artistic experiment backfired on its creator and went on to influence much of what’s wrong with the internet today.

Sunday Times best-selling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, teams up with The Science Museum to celebrate the ideas and inventions of the incurably curious.

Technology promises to save humanity. How's that working out? In this comedy-science podcast, comedy legends Richard Ayoade (determinedly pessimistic) and Warwick Davis (inexplicably cheerful) venture beneath Audible HQ to the Future Tense lab, fully equipped to interrogate the future we're all being told to look forward to.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

Derral Eves has generated over 60 billion views on YouTube and helped channels grow to one million subscribers from zero. In The YouTube Formula: How Anyone Can Unlock the Algorithm to Drive Views, Build an Audience, and Grow Revenue, the owner of the largest YouTube how-to channel provides the secrets to getting the results that every YouTube creator and strategist wants. Eves will reveal what listeners can't get anywhere else: the inner workings of the YouTube algorithm that's responsible for determining success on the platform, and how creators can use it to their advantage.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, and the space race was born. Desperate to beat the Russians into space, NASA put together a crew of the nation's most daring test pilots: the seven men who were to lead America to the moon. The first into space was Alan Shepard; the last was Deke Slayton, whose irregular heartbeat kept him grounded until 1975. They spent the 1960s at the forefront of NASA's effort to conquer space, and Moon Shot is their inside account of what many call the 20th century's greatest feat - landing humans on another world.

In this audiobook, you'll get a clear overview of artificial intelligence technology, the common misconceptions surrounding it, and a fascinating look at its applications in everything from self-driving cars and drones to its contributions in the medical field.

Audie Award, History/Biography, 2016. On the night of July 20, 1969, our world changed forever when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Based on in-depth interviews with 23 of the 24 moon voyagers, as well as those who struggled to get the program moving, A Man on the Moon conveys every aspect of the Apollo missions with breathtaking immediacy and stunning detail.

For close to a decade, Dan Wang has been observing China's tumultuous and astounding growth. China has grown so quickly in part by beating America at its own game: capitalism and harnessing the restless energy of a vast population. Whereas China is an engineering state, relentlessly building big, the United States has transformed into a lawyerly society, stalling every attempt to make change, both good and bad.

When longtime AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely market forces. In exhilarating prose and with unparalleled access to those closest to Sam Altman, Hao recounts the meteoric rise of OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.

Curious about AI but unsure where to begin? The AI Workshop: The Complete Beginner’s Guide to AI helps you confidently start using AI in daily life—no tech skills required. Author Milo Foster keeps it simple with real-world stories, beginner-friendly tools, and zero jargon. You’ll learn how to use ChatGPT, Claude, and no-code apps for writing, productivity, creativity, and more.

From the Sunday Times top ten best-selling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame. "It's about the terror, isn't it?" "The terror of what?" I said. "The terror of being found out." For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world, meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made jokes on social media that came out badly or made mistakes at work.

The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction – but it's not too late to change course. Companies and countries are in a race to build machines that will be smarter than any person, and the world is devastatingly unprepared for what will come next. How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Will it want to? Will it want anything at all?