Computer Science Technology

In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions - clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips - and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer.

Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder memorably recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations.

Size explains the regularities—and peculiarities—of the key processes shaping life (from microbes to whales), the Earth (from asteroids to volcanic eruptions), technical advances (from architecture to transportation), and societies and economies (from cities to wages).

Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos. What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans, or shared with other beings—beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence.

In practical terms, making AI your ally and guide depends on the art of the prompt, the questions a user poses to a chatbot. As Chopra shows in detail, by asking the right questions, you can bring AI into your inner world, which is where personal growth happens. Chopra provides a personal assessment for you to better understand yourself and exercises to help you expand your awareness in any part of your life.

Generative AI: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you understand the potential of these new technologies, pick the right Gen AI projects, and reinvent your business for the new age of AI.

A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives—and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes listeners inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.

On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience—unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent, Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world, from technology that marks children as future criminals, to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community.

In Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku - the New York Times best-selling author of Physics of the Impossible - gives us a stunning, provocative, and exhilarating vision of the coming century based on interviews with over 300 of the world’s top scientists who are already inventing the future in their labs. The result is the most authoritative and scientifically accurate description of revolutionary developments taking place....

Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.

AI is much more than a sexy marketing gimmick. At its core, it’s a powerful business tool that can make operations and decision-making more efficient, employees more productive, and customers delighted. Unfortunately, leaders who want to take advantage of artificial intelligence often don’t know where to start. The process can feel overwhelming—from analyzing existing processes and software systems and choosing where to apply AI automation, to preparing every tier of the organization for the transition.

Generative AI is rewriting the rulebook with its seemingly endless capabilities, from crafting intricate industrial designs, writing computer code, and producing mesmerizing synthetic voices to composing enchanting music and innovating genetic breakthroughs. In Generative AI in Practice, renowned futurist Bernard Marr offers listeners a deep dive into the captivating universe of GenAI. This comprehensive guide introduces you to the basics of this groundbreaking technology and outlines the profound impact that GenAI will have on business and society.

Popular Lost Cities author David Hatcher Childress takes us into the amazing world of ancient technology, from computers in antiquity to the flying machines of the gods. Childress looks at the technology that was allegedly used in Atlantis and the theory that the Great Pyramid of Egypt was originally a gigantic power station. He examines tales of ancient flight and the technology that it involved; how the ancients used electricity; megalithic building techniques; the use of crystal lenses and the fire from the gods; and more.

Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.

The Mobile Wave argues that the changes brought by mobile computing are so big and widespread that it’s impossible for us to see it all, even though we are all immersed in it. Saylor explains that the current generation of mobile smart phones and tablet computers has set the stage to become the universal computing platform for the world. In the hands of billions of people and accessible anywhere and anytime, mobile computers are poised to become an appendage of the human being and an essential tool for modern life.

From the latest applications of AI to blockchain-enabled business models to 5G networks, the most important technological innovations of the past year are reshaping the present and future of business. What should you and your company be doing now to take advantage of the new opportunities they are creating? The Year in Tech, 2021 will help you understand today's most essential thinking on these topics, what the latest tech innovations mean for your organization, and how you can use them to compete and win in the new landscape of business.

FinOps brings financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud. Used by the majority of global enterprises, this management practice has grown from a fringe activity to the de facto discipline managing cloud spend. In this book, authors J. R. Storment and Mike Fuller outline the process of building a culture of cloud FinOps by drawing on real-world successes and failures of large-scale cloud spenders. Complete with a road map to get you started, this revised second edition includes new chapters that cover forecasting, sustainability, and connectivity to other frameworks.

In 1714, England's Parliament offered a huge reward to anyone whose method of measuring longitude could be proven successful. The scientific establishment--from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton--had mapped the heavens in its certainty of a celestial answer. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution--a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had been able to do on land. And the race was on....

The definitive history, packed with untold stories, of one of America’s most controversial and powerful companies: Facebook. Based on hundreds of interviews from inside and outside Facebook, Levy’s sweeping narrative of incredible entrepreneurial success and failure digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.

In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI - the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself - is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.