Machine Politics

This reissue of Willeford's 1963 pulp classic is a timely reminder that madness is truly the dark heart of politics. Written at a time when people still had faith in their elected leaders, Willeford's book laid bare the American dream. There is an almost Chekhovian wistfulness in the treatment of his stories, which belies their considerable - and still relevant - impact.

No longer an uncertain technology of the distant future, artificial intelligence is starting to shape every aspect of our daily lives, from how we think to who we love. In this urgent polemic, leading barrister Susie Alegre explores the ways in which artificial intelligence threatens our fundamental human rights—including the rights to life, liberty and fair trial; the right to private and family life; and the right to free expression—and how we protect those rights.

Someone wanted to overthrow the government of San Sebastian, a country whose tiny army, nonaligned status, and location on the deadly curve of Central America made it ripe for subversion. The first try was an attempted hit on its president on a crowded street in Washington. The second was an invasion from the sea. Both times the Black Berets were there to keep the worst from happening. But how long could five men and one boy hold out against an army of the world’s most skilled assassins? An army with limitless resources—and the patience to keep on killing?

We are entering a new technological age in which artificial intelligence and immersive media will transform society at all levels. If managed well, this could unleash a new age of abundance. If managed poorly, this technological revolution could easily go astray, deeply compromising our privacy, autonomy, agency, and even our humanity. In Our Next Reality, 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 gives guidance on how to aim for the best future we can.

Twelve bytes. Twelve eye-opening, mind-expanding, funny and provocative essays on the implications of artificial intelligence for the way we live and the way we love - from Sunday Times best-selling author Jeanette Winterson. In this original, deeply researched and lively new book, Jeanette Winterson traces the history of the AI revolution. She talks to some of the boldest and most imaginative thinkers in the field and looks to religion, myth and literature to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are just around the corner.

As AI and robotics eliminate jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels - underfunded or nonexistent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction without comparable job creation - will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources.

We live in a world where data can help us make more informed decisions about how to navigate traffic, who to date, what to buy, who to network with and how to better manage our finances. But when it comes to our personal health and wellness, we have no roadmap. We need something to show us where we are in terms of our health, with landmarks for risks and opportunities. A GPS that makes it easier to move toward our personal health goals. A new way to look at health and life.

Futurist Gerd Leonhard breaks new ground again by bringing together mankind’s urge to upgrade and automate everything - down to human biology itself - with our timeless quest for freedom and happiness.

In Work Mate Marry Love, Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex.

In The Republican Noise Machine, David Brock, a former right-wing insider and the author of the New York Times best seller Blinded by the Right, uses his keen understanding of the strategies, tactics, financing, and personalities of the American right wing to demonstrate how the once-fringe phenomenon of right-wing media has all but subsumed the regular media conversation, shaped the national consciousness, and turned American politics sharply to the right.

Xi Jinping es una de las figuras más influyentes y enigmáticas del siglo XXI, moldeando el destino de China y redefiniendo el equilibrio del poder global. Este libro biográfico, desarrollado exclusivamente con inteligencia artificial, explora la trayectoria completa de Xi, desde sus raíces humildes hasta su ascenso al liderazgo del Partido Comunista Chino y su consolidación como líder de una superpotencia mundial.

Following the massive international success "The Netocrats" and its ambitious follow-up "The Global Empire", in this third installment of the "Futurica Trilogy", Bard and Söderqvist approach something far more personal - the fragile human being herself and, most of all, her brain. "The Body Machines", with a title borrowed from René Descartes, explains what a brain is, how it has developed and how it functions, and why it spends such an incredible amount of time and energy on fooling itself.

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the anthropocene - the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies - is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age - the novacene - has already begun.

Shame is a powerful and sometimes useful tool. When we publicly shame corrupt politicians, abusive celebrities or predatory corporations, we reinforce values of fairness and justice. But as best-selling author Cathy O'Neil argues in this revelatory book, shaming has taken a new and dangerous turn. It is increasingly being weaponised - used as a way to shift responsibility for social problems from institutions to individuals. O'Neil explores the machinery behind all this shame, showing how governments, corporations and the healthcare system capitalise on it.

In 1996, Linda Cruse, a stressed-out single mum working in a job she hated, was driving along a motorway in the middle of the night, when she suffered temporary blindness. This terrifying episode led to a blinding insight: What is the point of living if living has no point? Determined to make a difference, Linda began a new life. This was the start of a scary, lonely, but always emotionally fulfilling job: teaching skills and bringing aid - and, above all, love - to war-torn refugees, the poverty-stricken, and the victims of disaster.

John Maeda is one of the world's preeminent thinkers on technology and design, and in How to Speak Machine, he offers a set of simple laws that govern not only the computers of today but the unimaginable machines of the future. Machines are already more powerful than we can comprehend and getting more powerful at an exponential pace. Once set in motion, algorithms never tire. And when a program's size, speed and endlessness combine with its ability to learn and transform itself, the outcome can be unpredictable and dangerous.

In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles, micro-robots, has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive.

In 1919, in the wake of the First World War, a group of extraordinary women came together to create the Women's Engineering Society. They were trailblazers, pioneers and boundary breakers, but many of their stories have been lost to history. To mark the centenary of the society's creation, Magnificent Women and Their Revolutionary Machines brings them back to life.

Sensational media reports speculate about the "rise of the machines" but fail to see that there's no real intelligence in AI. It is not an all-seeing master, but rather a functional tool that must combine with the intelligence we possess to be effective. With The AI Republic, Terence Tse, Mark Esposito, and Danny Goh have not written a book for coders, but for everyone curious about a future shaped by AI. They demystify this life-changing technology and explain how we can build a shared space where humans and intelligent automation work together.

In his blockbuster new book, To Save America, former Speaker of the House and best-selling author Newt Gingrich issues a dire warning for America. Gingrich argues that the big-spending, big-government programs and bureaucracies of the secular socialist Left are the greatest threat to our nation’s survival since the Civil War.