Showing titles in Technology & Society

Taiwan achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth, overcame the pandemic without lockdowns and the infodemic without takedowns, entrusted its people to tackle shared challenges like environmental protection while capitalizing on a culture of innovation to hack the government. Here, the architects of Taiwan's internationally acclaimed digital democracy share the secret of their success. Plurality harnesses digital tools not to replace humans or trust, but to channel the potential energy in social diversity that can erupt in conflict instead for progress, growth and beauty.

Run a Google search for “black girls” - what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls”, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.

You shouldn't have to be a privacy expert to understand what happens to your data. April Falcon Doss, a privacy expert and former NSA and Senate lawyer, has seen this imbalance in action. In Cyber Privacy, Doss demystifies the digital footprints we leave in our daily lives and reveals how our data is being used - sometimes against us - by the private sector, the government, and even our employers and schools.

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the anthropocene - the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies - is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age - the novacene - has already begun.

By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change - what was happening, why it was happening and how to stop it. Over the next 10 years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Obviously, we failed. Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking account of that failure - and how tantalisingly close we came to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all before the fossil fuels industry and politicians committed to anti-scientific denialism - is already a journalistic blockbuster.

From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how we arrived at our contemporary understanding of what a mother is and how understandings of "bad" mothering formed our contemporary panics about "bad" media.

Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever "speak for themselves."

Over the last decade, Azeem Azhar - writer, technologist and creator of the Exponential View platform - has become our leading thinker on how technology is transforming business, politics and society. Now, Azhar offers a holistic way to think about the effects of new tech. Our society, Azhar argues, is afflicted by an 'exponential gap' - the gulf between the growing pace of technological change, and our institutions' struggle to keep up.

Many theories that form the bedrock of good parenting were created decades before devices even existed - they don't consider the significant impact on a child's psychological and physical development. The landscape of the early years has changed so quickly, yet parents and caregivers do not have access to the evidence-based, practical advice they need to manage this invasion of screens. They can see their children become addicted to devices, but don't know what to do. Generation Zombie will fill this knowledge gap.

As the epidemic of male violence towards women and young girls reaches terrifying new heights through new and expanding technologies, women's rights campaigner Jess Davies will help listeners to question society's understanding - or lack of - when it comes to consent. With a toolkit to understand and tackle online misogyny, No One Wants to See Your D*ck will arm a new wave of internet sleuths to take down the manosphere, one unsolicited pic at a time.

The term metaverse is suddenly everywhere, from debates over Fortnite to the pages of the New York Times to the speeches of Mark Zuckerberg, who proclaimed in June 2021 that “the overarching goal” of Facebook is to “bring the metaverse to life”. But what, exactly, is the metaverse? As pioneering theorist and venture capitalist Matthew Ball explains, it is the successor to the mobile internet that has defined the last two decades.

When Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. In vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community.

This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.

What will the world of tomorrow be like? How does progress happen? And why don't we have a lunar colony already? In this witty and entertaining audiobook, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith give us a snapshot of the transformative technologies that are coming next - from robot swarms to nuclear fusion powered toasters - and explain how they will change our world in astonishing ways. By weaving together their own research and interviews with pioneering scientists, the Weinersmiths investigate why these innovations are needed and how they would work.

The New Digital Age is the product of an unparalleled collaboration: full of the brilliant insights of one of Silicon Valley's great innovators - what Bill Gates was to Microsoft and Steve Jobs was to Apple, Schmidt (along with Larry Page and Sergey Brin) was to Google - and the Director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, formerly an advisor to both Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Never before has the future been so vividly and transparently imagined. From

What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather than making things, they simply connect people. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last 10 years.

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and number one international best-selling author of The World Is Flat, an essential and entertaining field guide to thriving in the 21st century. We all sense it - something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your children. You can't miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are speeding up - and it is dizzying.

Most of us spend a significant part of the day in front of a screen. Our work and social lives play out through our computers, tablets and phones: on email, social media, video conference calls and gaming servers. But what is all this screen time doing to our health, our sleep, and our relationships? Professor Pete Etchells studies the way we use screens, and how they can affect us. In UNLOCKED, he delves into the real science behind the panic about our alleged device addiction and withering attention spans.

The digital age we live in is as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, and Joshua Cooper Ramo explains how to survive. If you find yourself longing for a disconnected world where information is not always at your fingertips, you may eventually be as useful as the carriage maker post-Henry Ford. It's practically impossible to know where the marriage of imagination and technology will take us (sorry, Betamax and Kodak), and the only certainty is that in the networked world we will only become more intertwined.

Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion.