Computer History

A particular form of AI is now embedded in our tech, our infrastructure, and our lives. How did it get there? Where and why should we be concerned? And what should we do now? The Shortcut: Why Intelligent Machines Do Not Think Like Us provides an accessible yet probing exposure of AI in its prevalent form today, proposing a new narrative to connect and make sense of events that have happened in the recent tumultuous past, and enabling us to think soberly about the road ahead.

Technology - at least in theory - is improving our productivity, efficiency, and communication. The one thing it's not doing is making us happier. We are experiencing historically high levels of depression and dissatisfaction. But it doesn't have to be that way. Technology can drive - not diminish - human happiness.

The Economic Singularity is the time when most people cannot find employment, because machines can do everything that humans can do for money cheaper, faster, and better than they can. Some people say this will never happen, but most AI professionals think it will, although they disagree about when.

En esta monumental historia, Vaclav Smil ofrece una impresionante panorámica de cómo la energía ha impulsado el progreso cultural y económico de las sociedades humanas durante los últimos diez mil años, desde los primeros grupos de cazadores-recolectores hasta la civilización fósil, pasando por las sociedades agrícolas tradicionales y la "gran transición" que lo cambió todo.

What robot and AI systems are being built and imagined right now? What do they say about us, their creators? Will they usher in a fantastic new future, or destroy us? What do some of our greatest thinkers, from physicist Brian Greene and futurist Kevin Kelly to inventor Dean Kamen, geneticist George Church, and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, anticipate about our human-robot future? For even as robots and AI intrigue us and make us anxious about the future, our fascination with robots has always been about more than the potential of the technology.

Motivated by the idea of turning Flushing Meadows, literally a land of refuse, into his greatest public park, Robert Moses—New York's "master builder"—brought the World's Fair to the Big Apple for 1964 and '65. Though considered a financial failure, the 1964/65 World's Fair was a sixties flash point in areas from politics to pop culture, technology to urban planning, and civil rights to violent crime. In an epic narrative, Tomorrow-Land shows the astonishing pivots taken by New York City, America, and the world during the fair.

In an era of seemingly instant change, it's easy to think that today's revolutions - in communications, business, and many areas of daily life - are unprecedented. Today's changes may be new and may be happening faster than ever before. But our ancestors at times were just as bewildered by rapid upheavals in what we now call “networks” - the physical links that bind any society together.

For a special breed of individual, the call of space is worth the risk it entails: men such as US astronauts Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox, and Russian flight engineer Nikolai Budarin, who in November 2002 left on what was to be a routine 14-week mission maintaining the International Space Station. But then, on February 1, 2003, the Columbia exploded beneath them. With the launch program suspended indefinitely, these astronauts had suddenly lost their ride home.

The future is now. Artificial "machine" intelligence is playing an ever-greater role in our society. We are already using cruise control in our cars and automatic checkout at the drugstore and are unable to live without our smartphones. The discussion around AI is largely polarized; people think either machines will solve all problems for everyone or they will lead us down a dark, dystopian path into total human irrelevance. Regardless of what you believe, the idea that we might bring forth intelligent creation can be intrinsically frightening.

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put it on the shelf, lend it to a friend, or sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the eBooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don't own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your eBook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation - as Amazon deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers.

If you want to learn about the internet of things, then pay attention.... You were just woken up in the middle of the night by smart light bulbs in your house blasting at full power for no reason. Your bleary-eyed investigation shows they tried to download a firmware update and failed. At that moment, Alexa starts quietly whispering sweet nonsense to herself in the corner and Roomba starts slamming into the nearest wall. What do you do? Is your house haunted or have the machines finally started an uprising? Neither - it’s just another day in the IoT wonderland.

Much has been written about the arrival of artificial intelligence, but according to political philosopher David Runciman, we've been living with AI for 300 years—because states and corporations are robots, too. In this mind-bending work, Runciman explains the modern world through the history of the "artificial agents" we created to rescue us from our all-too-human limitations. The Handover will forever change how we understand the history of the modern world as well as the immense challenges on the horizon.

If you've replaced a computer lately - or a cell phone, a camera, a television - chances are, the old one still worked. And chances are even greater that the latest model won't last as long as the one it replaced. Welcome to the world of planned obsolescence - a business model, a way of life, and a uniquely American invention that this eye-opening book explores from its beginnings to its perilous implications for the very near future.

We are surrounded by emoji. They appear in politics, movies, drug deals, our sex lives, and more. But emoji's impact has never been explored in full. In this rollicking tech and pop culture history, Keith Houston follows emoji from its birth in 1990s Japan, traces its Western explosion in the 2000s, and considers emoji's ever-expanding lexicon. Named for the world's most popular pictogram, Face with Tears of Joy tells the whole story of emoji for the first time.

Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century.

Humanity has reached a critical moment. Our world is unsettled and rapidly changing, and we face existential risks over the next century. Various outcomes - good and bad - are possible. Yet our approach to the future is characterized by short-term thinking, polarizing debates, alarmist rhetoric, and pessimism. In this short, exhilarating book, renowned scientist and best-selling author Martin Rees argues that humanity’s prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow.

A possible genius, a smidgen of madness, a twist of science, and an invention that very nearly changed the world - all collide in a giddy, unbelievably true mystery set in turn-of-the-century Paris.

Many people today are so dazzled by the long-term potential for artificial intelligence that they overlook the much clearer and more immediate potential for a new form of "collective intelligence": the intelligence of groups of people and computers working together. In Superminds, Thomas Malone explains what we need to do to take advantage of this potential. Groundbreaking and utterly fascinating, Superminds will change the way you work - both with others and with computers - for the better.

Smartphone Nation will transform the way you–and your children–understand your devices and how they affect you. In this practical, agenda-setting audiobook, Kaitlyn Regehr–a celebrated researcher and professor of digital literacy–proposes a new, food-pyramid like framework for understanding and improving our digital consumption. She lays out how you can keep the advantages of the internet while identifying often hidden dangers and stepping away when you’re over-reliant.

Much of the world's landmass is already known. Deep sea and outer space are beyond most people's reach. It feels like there are fewer places left to discover. Psychedelics, on the other hand, reveal worlds that remain largely obscure. Altered states offer modern, 21st-century audiences boundless opportunities to explore what a human being can experience. In this book, I show you how to become a capable discovery-maker, sample-collecting naturalist, and rational thinker of visionary phenomena.