Computer History

In this riveting account of an area of Appalachia known as the Quiet Zone where cell phones and Wi-Fi are banned, journalist Stephen Kurczy explores the pervasive role of technology in our lives and the innate human need for quiet.

It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills - and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These "bots" started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected.

Over the last 50 years, humanity has developed an extraordinary shared utility: the global positioning system. Omnipresent, free, and available to all, GPS powers everything from your phone to the Internet to the Mars Rover. Greg Milner tells the sweeping story of GPS, from its conceptual origins as a bomb guidance system to its present ubiquity.

In the Shadow of the Moon tells the story of the most exciting and challenging years in spaceflight, with two superpowers engaged in a titanic struggle to land one of their own people on the moon. Drawing on interviews with astronauts, cosmonauts, their families, technicians, and scientists, as well as rarely seen Soviet and American government documents, the authors craft a remarkable story of the golden age of spaceflight as both an intimate human experience and a rollicking global adventure.

In 2021, when news outlets feasted on “the Facebook Files,” Frances Haugen went public as the former employee who blew the whistle on the company by copying tens of thousands of pages of documents. She testified to Congress and spoke to the media. She was hailed at President Biden’s first State of the Union Address. She made sure everyone understood exactly what the documents revealed.

Rivers in the Desert follows the remarkable career of William Mulholland, the visionary who engineered the rise of Los Angeles as the greatest American city west of the Mississippi. He sought to transform the sparse and barren desert into an inhabitable environment by designing the longest aqueduct in the Western Hemisphere, bringing water from the mountains to support a large city. This "fascinating history" chronicles Mulholland's dramatic ascension to wealth and fame - followed by his tragic downfall after the sudden collapse of the dam he had constructed.

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 New York Times best-selling author heralds the future of business in Free. In his revolutionary best seller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that, in many instances, businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them.

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.

We are used to thinking of computers as being a step up from calculators - very good at storing information, and maybe even at playing a logical game like chess. But up to now they haven't been able to think in ways that are intuitive, or respond to questions as a human might. All that has changed, dramatically, in the past few years. Our search engines are becoming answer engines. Artificial intelligence is already revolutionising sectors from education to healthcare to the creative arts. But how does an AI understand sentiment or context?

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.

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 Overcomplicated, complexity scientist Samuel Arbesman offers a fresh, insightful field guide to living with complex technologies that defy human comprehension. As technology grows more complex, Arbesman argues, its behavior mimics the vagaries of the natural world more than it conforms to a mathematical model. If we are to survive and thrive in this new age, we must abandon our need for governing principles and rules and accept the chaos.

Bruce Sterling delves into the world of high-tech crime and punishment in one of the first books to explore the cyberspace breaches that threaten national security. From the crash of AT&T’s long-distance switching system to corporate cyberattacks, he investigates government and law enforcement efforts to break the back of America’s electronic underground in the 1990s.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

Once the unrivaled titan of social media, Facebook held a singular place in culture and politics. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world. Inside and outside the company, Facebook extolled its products as bringing people closer together and giving them voice. But in the wake of the 2016 election, even some of the company’s own senior executives came to consider those claims pollyannaish and simplistic.

This is an audiobook about AI and AI risk. But it's also more importantly about a community of people who are trying to think rationally about intelligence, and the places that these thoughts are taking them, and what insight they can and can't give us about the future of the human race over the next few years. It explains why these people are worried, why they might be right and why they might be wrong.

This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people - specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism) - and invites listeners to "build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability".

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of platform capitalism. This book critically examines these new business forms.

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.