History & Culture

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh.

New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host Chris Hayes offers a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services.

From one of tech’s boldest thinkers and his longtime deputy and advisor, a sweeping indictment of Silicon Valley, showing how the West has slid into a culture of complacency, even as we enter a new era of mounting global threats.

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world....

Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living a focused life in a noisy world. Author Cal Newport introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives....

Tech visionary and co-founder of Manas AI Reid Hoffman shares his unique insider’s perspective on an AI-powered future, making the case for its potential to unlock a world of possibilities.

El esperado nuevo libro de Yuval Noah Harari, uno de los pensadores más innovadores, interesantes y clarividentes de la actualidad, y autor de Sapiens, el fenómeno literario global que ha cautivado a millones de lectores.

How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society, and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology....

A veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist shadows the top thinkers in the field of Artificial Intelligence, introducing the breakthroughs and developments that will change the way we live and work.

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story behind the story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet....

Computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor reveal what you need to know about AI—and how to defend yourself against bogus AI claims and products.

Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us - and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases.

The bestselling author of The God Equation takes an exhilarating tour of humanity's next great technological achievement—quantum computing—which may supercharge artificial intelligence, solve some of humanity's biggest problems, like global warming, world hunger, and incurable disease.

Scary Smart is an insider look at the future not only of technology and AI, but of our species, together with an accessible blueprint for what we can do to safeguard ourselves, those we love and the planet itself....

In November 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was ChatGPT, and was unlike any app people had used before. Parmy Olson uses her experience covering technology to bring to light the exploitation of the greatest invention in human history, and how it will impact us all.

Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs....

With nearly two decades of experience as a serial entrepreneur, author, and investor, Rob Walling is one of the world's leading experts in SaaS. In this audiobook, he shares little-known strategies that have been battle-tested by some of today's most successful founders....

From an acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter comes the first biography of the enigmatic leader of the AI revolution, charting his ascent within the tech world as well as his ambitions for this powerful new technology.

Bitcoin was promised to be a liberating technology, a free market alternative to state-controlled money. But that promise was broken after a small group of insiders took over the project and fundamentally changed Bitcoin's design.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has dramatically empowered people in all walks of life, from artists to business executives to policymakers. But as the technology becomes more powerful and more ubiquitous, it is giving rise to urgent questions about the future of humanity.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. It offers a reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization....

Superagency offers a roadmap for using AI inclusively and adaptively to improve our lives and create positive change. While acknowledging challenges like disinformation and potential job changes, the book focuses on AI’s immense potential to increase individual agency and create better outcomes for society as a whole. Imagine AI tutors personalizing education for each child, researchers rapidly discovering cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer, and AI advisors empowering people to navigate complex systems and achieve their goals.

Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally arrived? In AI Valley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin brings us deep into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a year, Rivlin closely follows founders and venture capitalists trying to capitalize on this AI moment.

Are there innovation truisms that hold from one initiative to the next? Are there strategies that appear again and again in the success stories of businesses as varied as gaming and cloud infrastructure? Are there behaviors common to creative leadership in every role, from research to sales? And if these patterns exist, could they be distilled into teachable practices? These are the questions Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin, two senior innovation leaders at Microsoft, set out to answer.

The venture capital playbook is causing unique harms to society. And in World Eaters, Catherine Bracy offers a window into the pernicious aspects of VC and shows us how its bad practices are bleeding into all industries, undermining the labor and housing markets and posing unique dangers to the economy at large. VC’s creates a wide, powerful wake that impacts the average consumer just as much as it does investors and entrepreneurs.

In The Second Machine Age MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—two thinkers at the forefront of their field—reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives. Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.

Internationally renowned privacy expert Daniel J. Solove draws from a range of fields, from law to philosophy to the humanities, to illustrate the profound changes technology is wreaking upon our privacy, why they matter, and what can be done about them. Solove provides incisive examinations of key concepts in the digital sphere, including control, manipulation, harm, automation, reputation, consent, prediction, inference, and many others.

The biggest revolution in Benjamin Franklin’s lifetime was made to fit in a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flatpack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the era's most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to England, Italy, and beyond. It was more than just a material object, however—it was also a hypothesis. Franklin was proposing that, armed with science, he could invent his way out of a climate crisis: a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters sometimes brought life to a standstill.

In this accessible, up-to-date, and authoritative examination of the world’s most radical technology, neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield explores what it really takes to build a brain from scratch. We have entered a world in which disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us—and are beginning to transform everything we do. But can AI ‘think’, 'know' and ‘understand’? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence?

Il tema dell'intelligenza artificiale sta dominando ormai da alcuni anni il dibattito pubblico. Questo perché, anche se abbiamo appena iniziato ad avvertire l'impatto che l'IA avrà sulle nostre vite, stiamo diventando sempre più consapevoli che i suoi effetti saranno profondi, così come sarà profondo il modo in cui essa trasformerà il nostro rapporto con la realtà, la conoscenza e la verità. Le sue potenzialità aumentano a un ritmo vertiginoso, e i progressi, come i benefici che sapremo trarne, appaiono straordinari. Tuttavia, non mancano i segnali d'allarme.

Living today means most of us must contend with things like workplace surveillance, cyberstalking, ransomware attacks, and facial recognition. But it's not too late to protect our privacy. Written in blunt, jargon-free prose, On Privacy defines today’s privacy landscape while also reminding listeners of the joys of keeping things to ourselves—that privacy creates space for intimacy, is essential to mental health, and is a fundamental right in a free society.

Curious about AI, but unsure how it works? Want to tap into the lucrative potential of this rapidly advancing technology? Unlock the immense potential of AI with this transformative book! Welcome to Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence & Large Language Models, the second in a series of books crafted to help you join a movement toward a more financially fruitful future.

Unlock the future with "The Age of Artificial Intelligence," a compelling exploration into the transformative world of generative AI. This thought-provoking eBook serves as your ultimate guide to understanding how AI is reshaping the modern landscape across various domains. Start your journey with an introduction to the rise of generative models, discovering their evolution from humble algorithms to complex systems capable of creativity. Delve deep into the mechanics powering generative AI, from neural networks to transformers, and gain insight into the data-driven processes that breathe ...

Throughout history, technological revolutions have been driven by the invention of machines. But today, the power of the technology transforming our world lies in an intangible and impenetrable cosmos of software: algorithmic code. So symbiotic has our relationship with this code become that we barely notice it anymore. We can't see it, are not even sure how to think about it, and yet we do almost nothing that doesn't depend on it. In a world increasingly governed by technologies that so few can comprehend, who—or what—controls the future?

The convergence of neuroscience and artificial intelligence represents one of the most fascinating frontiers in modern science and technology. As researchers push the boundaries of what is possible, the intricate workings of the human brain provide an unparalleled blueprint for the advancement of AI. Simultaneously, artificial intelligence challenges us to reconsider what we know about cognition, learning, and consciousness. BRIDGING MINDS: Neuroscience of the Human Brain & Artificial Intelligence, Neuroplasticity, and Cognitive Behavior Therapy with AI explores this dynamic interplay, ...

2030: A Blueprint for Humanity’s Exponential Leap explores the transformative technologies poised to reshape our world over the next decade. Written for investors, executives, policymakers, educators, and curious individuals alike, this book delivers powerful insights into the technological revolution ahead, offering predictions and actionable strategies to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape. From quantum computing, AI, robotics, to 3D printing, space travel, and beyond, 2030 examines how these advancements will impact every facet of life.