Computer History

Gobiernos y cientos de empresas nos espían: a ti y a todos tus conocidos. Quieren predecir nuestro comportamiento e influir en él. Tienen demasiado poder. Su poder proviene de nosotros, de ti, de tus datos. Recuperar la privacidad es la única manera de que podamos asumir de nuevo el mando de nuestras vidas y de nuestras sociedades. Carissa Véliz explica cómo nuestros datos personales están cediendo demasiado poder a las grandes empresas tecnológicas y a los gobiernos, por qué esto es importante y qué podemos hacer al respecto.

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.

In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues that the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message. Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman describes how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and how they have interpreted those times' meanings. And in a rebuttal to the demand for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can come to those who wait.

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.

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.

Seemingly granted ‘classic album’ status within days of its release in 1997, OK Computer transformed Radiohead from a highly promising rock act into The Most Important Band in the World – a label the band has been burdened by (and has fooled around with) ever since. Through close musical analysis of each song, Dai Griffiths explores the themes and ideas that have made this album resonate so deeply with its audience, and argues that OK Computer is one of the most successfully realized CD albums so far created.

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.

¿Está usted confundido acerca del furor que existe detrás de la inteligencia artificial y le gustaría aprender más? Este audiolibro lo abarca todo, desde el aprendizaje automático hasta la robótica y el Internet de las cosas. Usted puede usarlo como una guía útil cuando se encuentre con titulares de noticias que hablan de un nuevo avance en la inteligencia artificial por parte de Google o Facebook. Será consciente de lo que son las redes neuronales artificiales, cómo funcionan el descenso de gradiente y la propagación hacia atrás, y qué es el aprendizaje profundo.

The Real Case for Driverless Mobility: Putting Driverless Vehicles to Use for Those Who Really Need a Ride explores solutions for providing mobility for the unserved/underserved, including those who cannot drive themselves, afford transport alternatives, or who live in areas where neither public nor private transport is offered. The book synthesizes the career-long activities of the authors and the Princeton SmartDrivingCars Summits and assesses whether cars without drivers can deliver an affordable and more effective alternative to mass transit and taxis.

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

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto.

The digital age is in the business of commodifying our attention. The technologies of our day are determined to keep us scrolling and swiping at all costs, plugged into a feedback loop of impatience, comparison, outrage, and contempt. Blind to the dangers, we enjoy its temporary pleasures, unaware of the damage to our souls. Jay Kim's Analog Church explored the ways the digital age and its values affect the life of the church. In Analog Christian, he asks the same question of Christian discipleship.

Philosophe passionné par les grandes questions de notre temps, Luc Ferry décrypte les nouveaux enjeux de l’intelligence artificielle en convoquant les plus grands esprits, de Spinoza à Hegel en passant par Kant et Heidegger. Une révolution est en marche, et peu de gens s’en aperçoivent : l’IA est en train de profondément changer le monde. Avec clarté et profondeur, Luc Ferry explore les promesses et les limites de cette technologie fascinante, qui imite la pensée à la perfection.

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.

In an unparalleled collaboration, two leading global thinkers in technology and foreign affairs give us their widely anticipated, transformational vision of the future: a world where everyone is connected - a world full of challenges and benefits that are ours to meet and to harness. Eric Schmidt is one of Silicon Valley’s great leaders, having taken Google from a small startup to one of the world’s most influential companies. Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas and a former adviser to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Today, not only is everything digital getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, we also have the Internet. When these two revolutions - one in technology and the other in communications - joined, an explosive force was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation. And with any change, we have seen many strategic blunders and extraordinary learning curves along the way.

After the end of World War II, the race for technological supremacy sped on. Top-secret research into ballistics and computing, begun during the war to aid those on the front lines, continued across the United States as engineers and programmers rushed to complete their confidential assignments. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world's first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer—better known as the ENIAC. Proving Ground restores these women to their rightful place as technological revolutionaries.

Long before books were mass produced, those made of reeds from along the Nile were worth fighting and dying for. Journeying along the battlefields of Alexander the Great, beneath the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, at Cleopatra's palaces and the scene of Hypatia's murder, award-winning author Irene Vallejo chronicles the excitement of literary culture in the ancient world, and the heroic efforts that ensured this impressive tradition would continue.

“A fascinating, provocative case that the metaverse will not merely transform our virtual experience—it may actually enrich the quality of our lives” (Adam Grant)—from the visionary co-founder of one of today’s most innovative technology companies.

In the course of our enduring quest for knowledge about ourselves and our universe, we haven't found answers to one of our most fundamental questions: Does life exist anywhere else in the universe? Ten years and billions of dollars in the making, the Mars rover Curiosity is poised toanswer this all-important question.