Computer Science History

In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues that the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message. Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman describes how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and how they have interpreted those times' meanings. And in a rebuttal to the demand for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can come to those who wait.

For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, technology has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.

More people know who Khloe Kardashian is than who Rene Descartes was. Most can't find Delaware on a map, correctly spell the word occurrence, or name the largest ocean on the planet. But how important is it to fill our heads with facts? A few keystrokes can summon almost any information in seconds. Why should we bother learning facts at all? Best-selling author William Poundstone confronts that timely question in Head in the Cloud.

The Big Ratchet is the story of the ratchets: the technologies and innovations, big and small, that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket. Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. The Big Ratchet is the story of how it happened.

Big Tech Tyrants boast riches beyond emperors of old but act like juveniles who don't want to grow up. They are modern-day robber barons. Big Tech Tyrants don't know the meaning of privacy, when it comes to you. They try to make you believe they will give their products away for free as a service to society, when really, they are vacuuming your personal data. They use this data to discover your deepest secrets. Big Tech Tyrants is an eye-opening, must-listen book for anyone living in the 21st century.

Silicon Valley is imperializing the planet. With nearly bottomless supplies of cash and ambition, a small group of companies have been gradually seizing symbolic and practical civic leadership in America and worldwide. But Silicon Valley does not answer to the electorate; nor have they been voted into office. And the perils of their influence are only now making themselves known.

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of Amazon, and the elegance of our Apple devices, but it’s a one-way, top-down process. We’re not asked for our input or our opinions - only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. Srinivasan argues that we must think in terms beyond the Valley.

Nikola Tesla was a bundle of contradictions - a consummate showman and a private recluse; a man of science addicted to self-promotion; a prolific inventor of technologies that made other people’s fortunes. Tesla made giant leaps in the technology of electrical supply, X-rays, radio remote control, and wireless electrical transmission. He embodied the aspirations and the contradictions of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp. Then as now, he attracted cranks and visionaries in equal number.

The digital age we live in is as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, and Joshua Cooper Ramo explains how to survive. If you find yourself longing for a disconnected world where information is not always at your fingertips, you may eventually be as useful as the carriage maker post-Henry Ford. It's practically impossible to know where the marriage of imagination and technology will take us (sorry, Betamax and Kodak), and the only certainty is that in the networked world we will only become more intertwined.

Sociologist Felicia Wu Song has spent years considering the personal and collective dynamics of living in digital ecosystems. In this book she combines psychological, neurological, and sociological insights with theological reflection to explore two major questions: What kind of people are we becoming with personal technologies in hand? And who do we really want to be? Song unpacks the soft tyranny of the digital age, including the values embedded in our apps and the economic systems that drive our habits and their subtle yet pervasive effects.

When Sleepers, Wake! was released in Australia, it immediately became influential around the world. Now its author, the polymath and former politician Barry Jones, turns his attention to what has happened since - especially to politics, health, and our climate in the digital age - and to the challenges faced by increasingly fragile democracies and public institutions.

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.

A big source of tension between the US and China at the moment is technology. And one very small component is now at the centre of this battle for global dominance: the microchip. Controlling chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The country that controls this manufacturing can throttle the military and economic power of others. At the heart of this battle is ARM Holdings. The Everything Blueprint describes the titanic power struggle for control of the microchip.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices—once regarded as radical, unorthodox, or marginal—are disrupting the status quo in politics, business, and culture. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the internet and AI have become high-speed vectors for the spread of misinformation.

In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed media scholar and technology author Douglas Rushkoff calls on us to abandon the monopolist, winner-takes-all values we are unwittingly embedding into the digital economy and to embrace the more distributed possibilities of these platforms. He shows how we can optimize every aspect of the economy - from central currency and debt to corporations and labor - to create sustainable prosperity for business and people alike.

In a world of self-driving cars and big data, smart algorithms and Siri, we know that artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. Though all these nifty devices and programs might make our lives easier, they're also well on their way to making "good" jobs obsolete. A computer winning Jeopardy might seem like a trivial, if impressive, feat, but the same technology is making paralegals redundant as it undertakes electronic discovery, and is soon to do the same for radiologists.

After the Apollo program put 12 men on the moon and safely brought them home, anything seemed possible. In this spirit, the team at NASA set about developing the space shuttle, arguably the most complex piece of machinery ever created.

Humanity has reached a critical moment. Our world is unsettled and rapidly changing, and we face existential risks over the next century. Various outcomes - good and bad - are possible. Yet our approach to the future is characterized by short-term thinking, polarizing debates, alarmist rhetoric, and pessimism. In this short, exhilarating book, renowned scientist and best-selling author Martin Rees argues that humanity’s prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow.

AI + The New Human Frontier: Reimagining the Future of Time, Trust + Truth by Erica Orange, a renowned futurist, offers a compelling exploration of generative AI's potential to enhance human creativity rather than replace it. This pivotal book navigates how AI tools will help shape the human experience, and aid in augmenting human ingenuity and imagination.

This is the origin story of the airwaves - the foundational technology of the communications age - as told through the 40-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend, Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio.