Machine History

Uncover everything you need to know about "deepfakes" and what could become the biggest information and communications meltdown in world history.

When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history. Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon.

American Dream Machine is the story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty. It’s a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life.

Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking listeners on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories, and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for recent developments in AI, which holds important lessons for the future of humans living with smart technology.

Descubre cómo transformar tu productividad y eficiencia en solo 7 días con nuestro audiolibro, incluso si eres nuevo en ChatGPT y la inteligencia artificial. ¿Agobiado por tareas pendientes y herramientas obsoletas que alargan tu jornada laboral? Este audiolibro es tu solución. Descubre cómo la Inteligencia Artificial y ChatGPT pueden ser tus aliados, independientemente de tu edad, industria o conocimiento tecnológico.

Big Tech has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions that labour under often appalling conditions to make AI possible. Feeding the Machine presents an urgent, riveting investigation of the intricate network of organisations that maintain this exploitative system, revealing the untold truth of AI.

Flipping TVs is a business model that is often overlooked, but those who are getting involved and know what to look out for can make impressive additional incomes–with very little effort.

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.

What if the greatest equation ever written was not one that explained the universe, but one that questioned existence itself? Elias Voltaire was a man who believed that everything could be calculated—every force, every motion, even human thought itself. But in his final moments, as he crossed the threshold of life and death, he found himself in a realm that defied all mathematical logic. Instead of nothingness, he encountered an infinite field of information, a vast and ever-changing ocean where knowledge flowed endlessly—yet he himself was dissolving into it. With no body, no form, and...

Why is humanity unable to put the brakes on its self-destruction? While much of the world still debates the credibility of such a question, just as the planet's climate and biosphere enter the worst-case scenario of accelerated and irreversible decline, this book takes a no-time-to-waste, unforgiving and brutally pragmatic view. In order to do this, one must achieve escape velocity from the narcissism and speciesism that form the foundation of the "human supremacy bubble" which tints much of human thought. If the author has done anything right, then hopefully much, if not all, of the ...

¿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.

More than twenty years ago, 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan set into motion a hugely consequential shift in America's foreign policy: a perpetual state of war that is almost entirely invisible to the American public. War Made Invisible, by the journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon, exposes how this happened, and what its consequences are, from military and civilian casualties to drained resources at home.

Every prime minister of independent India has guided, if not personally overseen, one prized portfolio: technology. If, in the early years, Nehru and his scientist advisors retained an iron grip on it, subsequent governments created a bureaucracy that managed everything from the country's crown jewels - its nuclear and space programs - to solar stoves and mechanized bullock carts. But a lesser-known political project began on August 15, 1947: the Indian state's undertaking to influence what the citizens thought about technology and its place in society.

Dozens of times per day, we all interact with intelligent machines that are constantly learning from the wealth of data now available to them. These machines are remaking the world of the 21st century in the same way that the Industrial Revolution remade the world of the 19th century. AIQ is based on a simple premise: If you want to understand the modern world, then you have to know a little bit of the mathematical language spoken by intelligent machines. AIQ will teach listeners that language - but in an unconventional way, anchored in stories rather than mathematics.

In the year 1600, a monk is burned at the stake for claiming to have built a device that will allow him to know all things. 350 years later, having witnessed 'Trinity' — the first test of the atomic bomb — America's leading scientist outlines a memory machine that will help end war on earth. 25 years in the making, an ex-soldier finally unveils this 'machine for augmenting human intellect', dazzling as he stands 'Zeus-like, dealing lightning with both hands'.

From the simple to the intricate and the audacious to the absurd, Adam Kucharski reveals the long and tangled history between betting and science and explains why gambling continues to generate insights into luck and decision making today. Covering exploits and ideas from across the globe, he meets the teams behind hedge funds that capitalize on inaccurate sports betting odds and explains how PhD-level pundits are using methods originally developed for the US nuclear program to predict sports results.

In "God Machine II," the enigmatic physicist Delphine is abducted from her bed by shadowy beings, setting off a chain of events that blur the lines between reality and hidden truths. As two mysterious agents, Sarah and Tony, delve into the disappearance, they uncover a web of secrets that lead them to a parallel universe where a woman named Rebecca, Delphine's doppelgänger, resides in a lighthouse on Solaria with her dog Atlas and grandmother Nana. Naomi, Delphine's daughter, recounts strange dreams involving Rebecca and the mysterious God Machine, a device of immense power and mystery. As...

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union - a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today. The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill. In the last half of the 20th century the two superpowers had perfected the science of mass destruction and possessed nuclear weapons with the combined power of a million Hiroshimas.

This book provides young listeners with exciting information on the most modern U.S. military ships.

In less than six hours in August 1942, nearly 1,000 British, Canadian, and American commandos died in the French port of Dieppe in an operation that, for decades, seemed to have no real purpose. Canadian historian David O’Keefe uses hitherto classified intelligence archives to prove that this catastrophic and apparently futile raid was, in fact, a mission set up by Ian Fleming of British Naval Intelligence as part of a “pinch” policy designed to capture material relating to the four-rotor Enigma Machine.