Showing titles in History & Culture

We’re running out of time. Fossil fuels are choking the planet and renewable energy isn’t cutting it. The solution has been hiding in plain sight all along. Nuclear. When most people hear that word, they go to a very bad place: bombs, Chernobyl, hazmat suits, radioactive fallout… the stuff...

David K. Stumpf demystifies the intercontinental ballistic missile program that was conceived at the end of the Eisenhower administration as a key component of the US nuclear strategy of massive retaliation. Although its nuclear warhead may have lacked power relative to that of the Titan II, the Minuteman more than made up for this in terms of numbers and readiness to launch - making it the ultimate ICBM.

In How Progress Ends, Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies—the United States and China—have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change

The most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a different kind of visionary. Born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Berners-Lee famously distributed his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward. Its widespread adoption changed everything...

Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail - human-level intelligence.

Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before.

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.

“We’ve all been desperate to learn what heavy use of social media does to adolescents. Now, thanks to Twenge’s careful analysis, we know: It is making them lonely, anxious, and fragile—especially our girls. If you are a parent, teacher, or employer, you must read this fascinating book...

From Adam Steltzner, who led the Entry, Descent, and Landing team in landing the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars, comes a profound book about breakthrough innovation in the face of the impossible The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is home to some of history’s most jaw-dropping feats...

From gunpowder to generative AI, the forces of disruption are repeatedly rewriting the rules of business, society, and human possibility. But what drives these revolutionary changes? In Epic Disruptions, innovation expert Scott Anthony weaves together the stories behind history's most transformative disruptions.

Today we take it for granted that Japan is a forge of the world's fantasies: the birthplace of Transformers and Pokémon, of food trends like ramen and artisanal whisky and cutting-edge manga and anime. But it wasn't always this way. The first Japanese products that trickled into the global marketplace after the Second World War inspired derision, not admiration. The three words Made in Japan were a punchline, a synonym for cheap trinkets from a defeated nation.

In The Glass Cage, bestselling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, these programs are stealing something essential from us.

This is the first reference book on intelligent automation (IA). Also called hyperautomation, it is one of the most recent trends in the field of artificial intelligence. IA is a cutting-edge combination of methods and technologies involving people, organizations, machine learning, low-code platforms, robotic process automation (RPA), and more. This book is for everyone - whether you are an experienced practitioner, new to the topic, or simply interested in what the future holds for enterprises, work, life, and society as a whole.

From coffee shops to city grids to TikTok feeds and Netflix homepages the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences. This network of mathematically determined choices - the 'filterworld' - has taken over, almost unnoticed, as we've grown accustomed to an insipid new normal. But to have our tastes, behaviours, and emotions governed by computers calls the very notion of free will into question. Internationally recognized journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka journeys through this ever-tightening web woven by algorithms.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Bold futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, offers a framework for envisioning the future of machine intelligence—“a book for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next” (The New York Times Book Review). “Kurzweil offers a...

Bitcoin was promised to be a liberating technology, a free market alternative to state-controlled money. But that promise was broken after a small group of insiders took over the project and fundamentally changed Bitcoin's design.

When Sleepers, Wake! was released in Australia, it immediately became influential around the world. Now its author, the polymath and former politician Barry Jones, turns his attention to what has happened since - especially to politics, health, and our climate in the digital age - and to the challenges faced by increasingly fragile democracies and public institutions.

An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen. How did we build large language models? How do they think, if they think? What will the world look like if we have billions of AIs that are as smart as humans, or even smarter?

The author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self Our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of...

Professor Damon Centola is the world expert in the new science of networks. His ground-breaking research across areas as disparate as voting, health, technology and finance has highlighted powerful and highly effective new ways to ensure lasting change. In this book, Centola distils more than a decade of deep experience into a fascinating new theory that challenges previous assumptions that new ideas are either contagious or not.