Computer History

What really distinguishes the people who literally change the world - those creative geniuses who give us one breakthrough after another? What differentiates Marie Curie or Elon Musk from the merely creative, the many one-hit wonders among us? Melissa Schilling, one of the world's leading experts on innovation, invites us into the lives of eight people - Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs - to identify the traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, over and over again.

From parsing Silicon Valley personal ads, hanging out with high tech gurus, attending conferences-cum-rallies or exposing the flaws in technolibertarian thinking, Borsook's observations, mordant wit, and furious passion awakens you to the social and political consequences of having computer geeks run the world.

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.

기술 혁신보다 중요한 것은 '일하는 방법'의 혁신이다! 가장 중요하지만 아무도 말하지 않는 4차 산업혁명의 본질과 핵심 인공지능, 플랫폼, 블록체인, 증강현실 등이 어느덧 익숙한 말이 됐다. 그래서인지 많은 이들이 이런 새로운 기술을 알면 4차 산업혁명을 제대로 이해하는 것이라고 생각한다. 누구보다 빠르고 정확하게 변화를 감지해야 하는 비즈니스맨조차 4차 산업혁명을 기술적 측면에서만 바라본다. 그러나 급속히 달라지는 비즈니스 생태계에서 승패를 좌우하는 것은 기술 혁신이 아니다. 4차 산업혁명은 100개의 레고 조각을 가지고 놀다가 갑자기 레고 조각이 1억 개로 늘어난 것과 같다. 이런 상황에서는 '노는 방법'을 완전히 달리해야 한다. 스포츠에 비유하자면 야구를 하던 선수들이 농구 선수로 뛰어야 하는 상황이다. 지금까지 9명이 공을 던지고 받는 연습을 하며 정교한 작전을 짰다면, 이제부터는 5명이 몸싸움을 해가며 순발력을 발휘해야 하는 것이다. 그래서 필요한 것이 바로 '일하는 방법의 혁신'이다. 신생 스타트업에서 '유니콘 기업'으로 성장해 기존의 강자들을 위협하고 있는 몇몇 기업을 살펴보면 '일하는 방법을 완전히 바꿨다'는 공통점이 있다.

On January 15, 2009, a US Airways Airbus A320 had just taken off from LaGuardia Airport in New York when a flock of Canada Geese collided with it, destroying both of its engines. The plane's pilot, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, managed to glide it to a safe landing in the Hudson River. It was an instant media sensation---the "Miracle on the Hudson"---and Captain Sully was the hero. But how much of the success of this dramatic landing can actually be credited to the genius of the pilot?

The world of golf is at a crossroads. As technological innovations displace traditional philosophies, the golfing community has splintered into two deeply combative factions: the old-school teachers and players who believe in feel, artistry, and imagination, and the technical-minded who want to remake the game around data. In Golf’s Holy War, “an obvious hole-in-one for golfers and their coaches” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), Brett Cyrgalis takes us inside the heated battle playing out from weekend hackers to PGA Tour pros.

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 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.

Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation - to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? Find out.

Near the end of the Apollo 15 mission, David Scott and fellow moonwalker James Irwin conducted a secret ceremony unsanctioned by NASA: they placed on the lunar soil a small tin figurine called The Fallen Astronaut, along with a plaque bearing a list of names. By telling the stories of those sixteen astronauts and cosmonauts who died in the quest to reach the moon between 1962 and 1972, this book enriches the saga of humankind's greatest scientific undertaking, Project Apollo, and conveys the human cost of the space race.

Few organizations solve as many impossible problems as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and nobody knows more about leading rocket scientists to unlikely breakthroughs than Adam Steltzner. As the phase lead and development manager for EDL (entry, descent, and landing) of the Curiosity rover to Mars, Steltzner spearheaded the creation of one of engineering's wackiest kluges - the sky crane, which allowed the heaviest rover in the history of space exploration to land on Mars unscathed.

Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next 10 years - for businesses, governments, and the global community - and how we can navigate them.

In You Mind?, Richard Arsenault takes listeners on an extraordinary exploration into the future of human consciousness, where artificial intelligence, brain-machine interfaces, and cloud-based minds are reshaping our very existence. Blending deeply personal reflections with cutting-edge science, philosophy, and technology, this book asks profound questions about identity, mortality, and the boundaries of human potential.

Few of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code” makes it sound immutable or even inevitable. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This” demonstrates that, far from being preordained, computer code is the result of very human decisions, ones we all live with when we use social media, take photos, drive our cars, and engage in a host of other activities.

Award-winning author William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it: the steam engine.

Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new audiobook, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?

This is the story of how a handful of geeks and mavericks dragged the computer out of corporate back rooms and laboratories and into our living rooms and offices. It is a tale not only of extraordinary innovation and vision but also of cunning business deals, boardroom tantrums and acrimonious lawsuits.

In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson documents how every technological innovation - from the printing press to the telegraph - has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a summary and analysis of the book and not the original book. World-renowned expert on AI and China Kai-Fu Lee presents a broad look at the current state of AI, China's dramatic progress in the last five years, and the massive social disruption that will occur as AI replaces half the jobs in the world.

"An engrossing microcosm of the internet’s Wild West years" (Kirkus Reviews), award-winning journalist David Kushner tells the incredible battle between the founder of Match.com and the con man who swindled him out of the website Sex.com, resulting in an all-out war for control for what still powers the internet today: love and sex.