Computer History

The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.

In Rust journalist Jonathan Waldman travels from Key West, Florida, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to meet the colorful and often reclusive people concerned with corrosion. He sneaks into an abandoned steelworks with a brave artist and nearly gets kicked out of Can School. Across the Arctic he follows a massive high-tech robot, hunting for rust in the Alaska pipeline.

In August 1968 NASA made a bold decision: In just 16 weeks, the United States would launch humankind's first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken.

Penguin Audio presents Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, read by Rob Shapiro. We stand at the beginning of a new era. What was once science fiction is fast becoming reality, as AI transforms war, crime, justice, jobs and society - and even our very sense of what it means to be human. More than any other technology, AI has the potential to revolutionise our collective future - and there's nobody better situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, whose work has helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

Audible editor Sam Danis delves into spatial audio with Dolby Atmos: what it is, what makes it so immersive, and what the future holds for audio entertainment. Featuring conversations with experts in sound design and production, as well as samples from some of the most unique Audible productions available in Dolby Atmos. Listen in to discover the storytelling magic this innovative technology can offer.

Nikola Tesla was a major contributor to the electrical revolution that transformed daily life at the turn of the 20th century. His inventions, patents, and theoretical work formed the basis of modern AC electricity, and contributed to the development of radio and television. Like his competitor Thomas Edison, Tesla was one of America's first celebrity scientists, enjoying the company of New York high society and dazzling the likes of Mark Twain with his electrical demonstrations. An astute self-promoter and gifted showman, he cultivated a public image of the eccentric genius.

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations, or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times; an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.

We are entering a new technological age in which artificial intelligence and immersive media will transform society at all levels, mediating our lives by altering what we see, hear, and experience. If managed well, this could unleash a new age of abundance. If managed poorly, this technological revolution could easily go astray, compromising our privacy, autonomy, agency, and humanity. Two industry veterans provide a data-driven debate on whether the new world we're creating will be a technological utopia or an AI-powered dystopia and give guidance on how to aim for the best future we can.

We've all heard the mind-boggling statistics about technology and social media use. The numbers don't lie; our obsession with smartphones and social media is slowly eroding the very essence of our homes and families. We see it. We feel it. We know it. So what do we do about it? Spoiler alert: Forget parental control apps, time limits, or reward charts. This revolutionary path takes us into the heart of the beast itself: the social media algorithm.

Digital Darwinism takes a closer look at disruptive thinking to inspire those who want to be the best at digital transformation. Change across business is accelerating, but the lifespan of companies is decreasing as leaders face a growing abundance of decisions to make, data to process and technology that threatens even the most established business models. These forces could destroy your company or, with the right strategy in place, help you transform it into a market leader.

Artificial intelligence is transforming human society fundamentally and profoundly. Not since the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason have we changed how we approach knowledge, politics, economics, even warfare. Three of our most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore artificial intelligence (AI) and the way it is transforming human society - and what it means for us all.

Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn't found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple's founders, or the way it set the stage for the company's multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software.

In Millennium, best-selling historian Ian Mortimer takes the listener on a whirlwind tour of the last 10 centuries of Western history. It is a journey into a past vividly brought to life and bursting with ideas, that pits one century against another in his quest to measure which century saw the greatest change. We journey from a time when there was a fair chance of your village being burned to the ground by invaders - and dried human dung was a recommended cure for cancer - to a world in which explorers sailed into the unknown and civilizations came into conflict.

For many, the moon landing was the defining event of the twentieth century. So it seems only fitting that Norman Mailer - the literary provocateur who altered the landscape of American nonfiction - wrote the most wide-ranging, far-seeing chronicle of the Apollo 11 mission. A classic chronicle of America's reach for greatness in the midst of the Cold War, Of a Fire on the Moon compiles the reportage Mailer published between 1969 and 1970 in Life magazine

The riveting story of the legendary Xerox PARC, a collection of eccentric young inventors brought together by Xerox Corporation at a facility in Palo Alto, California, during the mind-blowing intellectual ferment of the '70s and '80s.

Artificial intelligence surrounds us. More and more of the systems and services you interact with every day are based on AI technology. Most AI is narrowly specific; that is, it can only do a single thing, in a single context. Human intelligence is different. We can solve a variety of tasks, including those we have not seen before. In Artificial General Intelligence, Julian Togelius explores technical approaches to developing more general artificial intelligence and asks what general AI would mean for human civilization.

In a world of self-driving cars and big data, smart algorithms and Siri, we know that artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. Though all these nifty devices and programs might make our lives easier, they're also well on their way to making "good" jobs obsolete. A computer winning Jeopardy might seem like a trivial, if impressive, feat, but the same technology is making paralegals redundant as it undertakes electronic discovery, and is soon to do the same for radiologists.

The New York Times best seller about a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who wakes up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society—and sets out to try to stop it.

The building of the Panama Canal was one of the greatest engineering feats in human history. A tale of exploration, conquest, money, politics, and medicine, Panama Fever charts the challenges that marked the long, labyrinthine road to the building of the canal. Drawing on a wealth of new materials and sources, Matthew Parker brings to life the men who recognized the impact a canal would have on global politics and economics.