Computer Age

In simple and easy-to-understand language, this book provides you with the knowledge and tools to recognize and counteract cyber threats, helping you navigate the digital world with confidence and security.

The Age of Living Machines describes some of the most exciting new developments and the scientists and engineers who helped create them. Virus-built batteries. Protein-based water filters. Cancer-detecting nanoparticles. Mind-reading bionic limbs. Computer-engineered crops. Together they highlight the promise of the technology revolution of the 21st century to overcome some of the greatest humanitarian, medical, and environmental challenges of our time.

Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to "build out" democracy into cyberspace.

Machines That Think explores how artificial intelligence helps us understand human intelligence, machines that compose music and write stories - and asks if AI is really a threat. Sometime in the future, the intelligence of machines will exceed that of human brain power. So are we on the edge of an AI-pocalypse, with superintelligent devices superseding humanity, as predicted by Stephen Hawking? Or will this herald a kind of utopia, with machines doing a far better job at complex tasks than us?

The late 19th century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but arguably the most important invention of all was Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb. Unveiled in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory in 1879, the light bulb overwhelmed the American public with the sense of the birth of a new age. More than any other invention, the electric light marked the arrival of modernity.

We are living in a new age. With developments emerging every day, Artificial Intelligence will soon surpass most human competencies and drastically transform technology's role in our day-to-day world. The solution for organizational leaders is not to become more like computers. In order for our organizations to survive as we stand at the threshold of a new era, we must tap into the qualities that make us uniquely human. Nick Chatrath interweaves an analysis of antiquated leadership modes with his newly developed strategies for more effective "threshold" leadership methods.

An ordinary Utah college student named Reggie Shaw fatally strikes two rocket scientists while texting and driving. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Matt Richtel follows Reggie from the moment of the tragedy, through the police investigation, the state's groundbreaking prosecution, and ultimately, Reggie's wrenching admission of responsibility. Richtel parallels Reggie's journey with leading-edge scientific findings regarding human attention and the impact of technology on our brains.

Medieval Robots recovers the forgotten history of fantastical, aspirational, and terrifying machines that captivated Europe in imagination and reality between the ninth and 14th centuries. E. R. Truitt traces the different forms of self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured objects from their earliest appearances in the Latin West through centuries of mechanical and literary invention. This original and wide-ranging study reveals the convergence of science, technology, and imagination in medieval culture.

Technology insider Alice Marwick contends in this insightful book, “Web 2.0” only encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention. Her original research - which includes conversations. Marwick analyzes status-building techniques - such as self-branding, micro-celebrity, and life-streaming - to show that Web 2.0 did not provide a cultural revolution, but only furthered inequality and reinforced traditional social stratification, demarcated by race, class, and gender.

The story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to the ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires.

Nev Schulman is the host of the wildly popular TV series Catfish which investigates online relationships to determine whether they are based on truth or fiction (spoiler: it's almost always fiction).

Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn't found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple's founders, or the way it set the stage for the company's multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software.

Drawing on years of work interpreting and explaining data about almost anything, renowned data journalist Kiko Llaneras offers practical tools and shortcuts to help you understand the numbers and make better decisions using a quantitative lens. Through a series of compelling examples, he reveals some of the surprising insights that a data-driven perspective can offer.

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?

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.

For more than a decade, Amanda Hess has documented the ways that social media and new technologies have upended our identities, living the contradictions of the internet even as she has tried to make sense of them. But when Hess discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she found herself unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis of her own.

While warnings of a robot world-takeover could seem dramatic, the truth is more mundane―robots have come to take our jobs. Winning in the Robotic Workplace: How to Prosper in the Automation Age will teach you the skills needed to reprogram the way you work in anticipation of this technological shift. Author John F. Wasik believes learning to thrive in the automation age can in fact humanize the workplace once again. You will learn to emphasize the conceptualization and pursuit of creative ideas, a practice that most robots are unequipped to perform in a meaningful way.

A new way of thinking that improves how we work, create and live, empowering listeners to outsmart AI—a tool that can never do what humans do.

The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), designed to quickly deliver thermonuclear weapons to distant targets, was the central weapons system of the Cold War. ICBMs also carried the first astronauts and cosmonauts into orbit. More than a generation later, we are still living with the political, technological, and scientific effects of the space race, while nuclear-armed ICBMs remain on alert and in the headlines around the world. Christopher Gainor explores the US Air Force's decision, in March 1954, to build the Atlas, America's first ICBM.

This audiobook narrated by Teri Schnaubelt explains how to put democracy at the heart of AI governance.