Showing titles in Technology & Society

Restoring Our Sanity Online is the entertaining, informative, and frequently jaw-dropping social reset by Mark Weinstein, contemporary tech leader, privacy expert, and one of the visionary inventors of social networking. This book is for all of us. Casual and heavy users of social media, parents, teachers, students, techies, entrepreneurs, investors, and elected officials. Restoring Our Sanity Online is the catapult to an exciting, enriching, and authentic future. Listeners will embark on a captivating journey leading to an inspiring and actionable reinvention.

An innovation expert illuminates why your power to make a difference is no longer bound by your status. In The Power of Onlyness, Nilofer Merchant, one of the world's top-ranked business thinkers, reveals that we have now reached an unprecedented moment of opportunity for your ideas to "make a dent" on the world.

We're living through what is arguably one of the most exciting, confusing, and powerful social moments in the history of humanity, the shift from the Digital Age to the Virtual Age. This shift is being driven by technology, and the people who are leading it are the ones who know it best: the Virtual Natives. This book will introduce you to the Virtual Native cohort and mindset, decipher their socio-cultural and economic experiences, and unpack their expectations of companies looking to engage, market, or employ them.

A former US Navy intelligence officer, David Locke Hall was a federal prosecutor when a bizarre-sounding website, CRACK99, came to his attention. It looked like Craigslist on acid, but what it sold was anything but amateurish: thousands of high-tech software products used largely by the military, and for mere pennies on the dollar. Want to purchase satellite tracking software? No problem. Aerospace and aviation simulations? No problem. Communications systems designs? No problem.

The US Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that law-enforcement agencies have access to more than 100 million names stored in criminal history databases. In some cities, 80 percent of the black male population is registered in these databases. Digitize and Punish explores the long history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past 40 years - with devastating impact on poor communities of color.

A particular form of AI is now embedded in our tech, our infrastructure, and our lives. How did it get there? Where and why should we be concerned? And what should we do now? The Shortcut: Why Intelligent Machines Do Not Think Like Us provides an accessible yet probing exposure of AI in its prevalent form today, proposing a new narrative to connect and make sense of events that have happened in the recent tumultuous past, and enabling us to think soberly about the road ahead.

We have been underselling the future. In fact, the future will be neither dystopia nor utopia (which is an actively harmful dichotomy) - it will be what we do the work to make it. And the best way to the brightest future is to focus on what we can do, and make sure we are working to get there. Kate O’Neill, author of Tech Humanist and Pixels and Place, explores the ways we have already begun to solve human problems at scale, and makes the case for an approach that’s both hopeful and strategic as our best chance at a truly bright future.

"AI Ethics" offers a comprehensive exploration of the moral principles that should guide the development and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies. The book addresses the urgent need to ensure these technologies are aligned with ethical standards in an era where AI systems are becoming increasingly integrated into various aspects of society. This book provides a roadmap for understanding how AI can be innovative and ethical by examining the foundational ethical frameworks.

Silicon Valley technology is transforming the way we work, and Uber is leading the charge. Upending our understanding of work in the digital age, Uberland paints a future where any of us might be managed by a faceless boss. Based on award-winning technology ethnographer Alex Rosenblat's experience of riding over 5,000 miles with Uber drivers, daily visits to online forums, and face-to-face discussions with senior Uber employees, Uberland goes beyond the headlines to reveal the complicated politics of popular technologies that are manipulating both workers and consumers.

Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry.

With a razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley's unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade's worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy offers an alternative history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes, its blind triumphs, and its unintended consequences.

Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Lisa Yin Han traces how contemporary developments in underwater sensing and imaging materially and imaginatively transmogrify the ocean bottom into a resource frontier capable of sustaining a digitally connected global future.

In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging.

We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We'd nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There's more knowledge than ever, of course, but it's different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker - if you know how.

As the speed and complexity of the world increases, governments and nonprofit organizations need new ways to effectively tackle the critical challenges of our time-from pandemics and global warming to social media warfare. In Power to the Public, Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank describe a revolutionary new approach - public interest technology - that has the potential to transform the way governments and nonprofits around the world solve problems.

In lively, mordantly witty prose, Negroponte decodes the mysteries--and debunks the hype--surrounding bandwidth, multimedia, virtual reality, and the Internet, and explains why such touted innovations as the fax and the CD-ROM are likely to go the way of the BetaMax.

The artificial intelligence revolution has begun. Today, there are self-driving cars on our streets, autonomous weapons in our armies, robot surgeons in our hospitals - and AI's presence in our lives will only increase. One thing is clear: this is a technology like no other, one that raises profound questions about freedom, justice and the very definition of human agency. In Moral AI, world-renowned researchers in artificial intelligence and philosophy, Jana Schaich Borg, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Vince Conitzer tackle these thorny issues head-on.

Those of you living through the next 30 years will become the most powerful creatures that have ever existed. You will have the opportunity and the duty to create a decidedly better world. Experience and maturity alone cannot provide the required wisdom fast enough. You will need to maximize your innate potential to accelerate wisdom. The Potentialist: Your Future in the New Reality of the Next Thirty Years explains the first steps to achieve your potential and accelerate wisdom. You will discover how forces of change create a New Reality by breaking down the one we know.

Screen media use (accessing digital content on tablets, cell phones, etc.) is quickly replacing traditional family time, and there is an accepted view that nothing can be done. With few resources available, many parents are driven to the challenge of looking for a new framework to make the best decisions for their families.

Former physicist Andrew Maynard threads together his love of science-fiction movies with his expertise on emerging technologies to engage, entertain, and make you think about the relationship between technology and society. Through the imagination and creativity of science-fiction movies, Maynard introduces listeners to the profound capabilities presented by new and emerging technologies, and the complex personal and societal challenges they present.