Showing titles in Technology & Society

With a razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley's unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade's worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy offers an alternative history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes, its blind triumphs, and its unintended consequences.

As Audrey Kurth Cronin explains in Power to the People, what we are seeing now is an exacerbation of an age-old trend. Over the centuries, the most surprising developments in warfare have occurred because of advances in technologies combined with changes in who can use them. Indeed, accessible innovations in destructive force have long driven new patterns of political violence. When Nobel invented dynamite and Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, each inadvertently spurred terrorist and insurgent movements that killed millions and upended the international system.

Most businesses identify six key digital technologies as critical to their relevance and growth over the coming 10 years. These disruptive new technologies present significant opportunity for businesses in every industry. The first businesses to understand automation and these transformative technologies will be the ones to reap the greatest rewards in the marketplace. Author Steve Brown shares his insights to help leaders take full advantage of the next wave of digital transformation.

Spielerisch die Welt verstehen Videospiele können die Welt verändern – und zwar auf positive Art und Weise. Davon ist die international hoch angesehene österreichische Informatikerin Johanna Pirker überzeugt. Sie zeigt, dass Videospiele nicht nur Kultur- und Innovationstreiber sind...

Willkommen in einer Welt, in der Maschinen nicht mehr nur Werkzeuge sind, sondern intelligente Begleiter, die unseren Alltag verändern – oft schneller, als wir es wahrhaben wollen. Künstliche Intelligenz, kurz KI, ist längst kein Zukunftsphantasie mehr, sondern Teil unseres Lebens geworden. Doch was verbirgt sich wirklich hinter diesem Begriff? Wie kann KI dein Leben erleichtern – und wo lauern vielleicht auch Risiken? In diesem Buch nehme ich dich mit auf eine Reise durch die spannende Welt der Künstlichen Intelligenz.

In Only Humans Need Apply, Thomas Hayes Davenport and Julia Kirby reframe the conversation about automation, arguing that the future of increased productivity and business success isn't either human or machine. It's both. The key is augmentation, utilizing technology to help humans work better, smarter, and faster. Instead of viewing these machines as competitive interlopers, we can see them as partners and collaborators in creative problem solving as we move into the next era.

Our increasing reliance on technology and the Internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy, what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits, and increasingly we are relinquishing our decision making to algorithms - are we giving up this up too easily?

The Wireless World sets out a new research agenda for the history of international broadcasting, and for radio history more generally. It examines global and transnational histories of long-distance wireless broadcasting, combining perspectives from international history, media and cultural history, the history of technology, and sound studies. Bringing together their knowledge of a wide range of different countries, languages, and archives, the coauthors show how broadcasters and states deployed international broadcasting as a tool of international communication and persuasion.

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the modern world. It is ubiquitous-in our homes and offices, in the present and most certainly in the future. Today, we encounter AI as our distant ancestors once encountered fire. If we manage AI well, it will become a force for good, lighting the way to many transformative inventions. If we deploy it thoughtlessly, it will advance beyond our control. As AI policy experts Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie show in The New Fire, few choices are more urgent—or more fascinating—than how we harness this technology and for what purpose.

In this sequel to his prescient New York Times best seller Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford presents us with a striking vision of the very near future. He argues that AI is a uniquely powerful technology, a kind of 'electricity of intelligence' that is altering every dimension of human life, often for the better with advanced science being done by machines who can solve problems humans can not. AI has the potential to help us fight climate change or the next pandemic, but it also has a capacity for profound harm.

Connectional intelligence unlocks the 21st-century secret to getting "big things done" regardless of who you are, where you live, or what you do. We typically associate success and leadership with smarts, passion, and luck. But in today's hypercompetitive world, even those gifts aren't enough. Get Big Things Done argues that the game changer is a thoroughly modern skill called connectional intelligence.

What To Do When Machines Do Everything is a guidebook to succeeding in the next generation of the digital economy. When systems running on Artificial Intelligence can drive our cars, diagnose medical patients, and manage our finances more effectively than humans it raises profound questions on the future of work and how companies compete. Drawing upon real-world cases, data, and insight, the authors provide clear strategic guidance and actionable steps to help you and your organization move ahead in a world where exponentially developing new technologies are changing how value is created.

Harry Parker's life changed overnight when he lost his legs to an IED in Afghanistan. That took him into an often surprising landscape of a very human kind of hacking, and he wondered, are all humans hybrids? Whether it's putting on contact lenses every day or DIY biohackers tinkering in garages, Parker introduces us to the exhilarating breadth of human invention - and intervention. Grappling with his own new identity and disability, he discovers the latest robotics, tech and implants that might lead us to powerful, liberating possibilities for what a body can be.

This audiobook explains why AI is unique, what legal and ethical problems it could cause, and how we can address them. It argues that AI is unlike any other previous technology, owing to its ability to take decisions independently and unpredictably. This gives rise to three issues: responsibility - who is liable if AI causes harm; rights - the disputed moral and pragmatic grounds for granting AI legal personality; and the ethics surrounding the decision-making of AI.

This program is read by the author A concise but wide-ranging personal history of the internet from—for the first time—the point of view of the user In a shockingly short amount of time, the internet has bound people around the world together and torn us apart and changed not just the way we...

Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It's becoming clear that the tech industry's promised "innovation" is neither sustainable nor always desirable.

This 50th anniversary edition of Men, Machines, and Modern Times, though ultimately concerned with a positive alternative to an Orwellian 1984, offers an entertaining series of historical accounts taken from the 19th century to highlight a main theme: the nature of technological change, the fission brought about in society by such change, and society's reaction to that change.

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.

Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Yet today's researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world.

As we approach a great turning point in history when technology is poised to redefine what it means to be human, The Fourth Age offers fascinating insight into AI, robotics, and their extraordinary implications for our species. “If you only read just one book about the AI revolution, make it...