Showing titles in Technology & Society

Immerse yourself in the visionary world of "Cities of Tomorrow," an insightful and thought-provoking eBook that transports you to the cutting edge of urban innovation. As our world becomes increasingly reliant on technology, the concept of smart cities has evolved from a futuristic dream into a tangible reality. This riveting exploration takes you deep into the heart of modern urban living, offering a panoramic view of the technologies, designs, and philosophies shaping the metropolises of the future. Embark on an intellectual journey through the intricacies of smart cities, beginning with ...

Digital technology is transforming every corner of the economy, fundamentally altering the way things are done, who does them, and what they earn for their efforts. In The Wealth of Humans, Economist editor Ryan Avent brings up-to-the-minute research and reporting to bear on the major economic question of our time: can the modern world manage technological changes every bit as disruptive as those that shook the socioeconomic landscape of the 19th century? Find out.

From the Model T to the SUV, Autophobia reveals that our vexed relationship with the automobile is nothing new. In fact, debates over whether cars are forces of good or evil in our world have raged for over a century now, ever since the automobile was invented. According to Brian Ladd, this love and hate relationship we share with our cars is the defining quality of the automotive age.

Con humor y espíritu crítico, la periodista Marta García Aller nos sumerge en una búsqueda fascinante de lo que significa ser humano en un mundo incierto dominado por las máquinas. El resultado es un libro imprescindible en el que aparecen todo tipo de testigos de lo inesperado.

What if you knew that something terrible was going to happen? A sudden flash, the words Charing Cross. Four days later, a packed express train comes off the rails outside the station. What if you could share your vision, and stop that train? Could these forebodings help the world to prevent disasters? In 1966, John Barker, a dynamic psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate these questions.

Our world order is under pressure as never before. From new authoritarian regimes in the US, Turkey and Russia to the imminent breakup of the European Union and a social media awash with intolerance, things look set to fall apart just as abruptly as the Soviet Union did some 30 years ago. How did we get here, and what do we do now? In this searching new exploration of our crisis, Paul Mason argues that at its heart lies an attack on the idea of humanity itself.

Our predictions of the future are a wild fantasy, inextricably linked to our present hopes and fears, biases and ignorance. Whether they be the outlandish leaps predicted in the 1920s, like multi-purpose utility belts with climate control capabilities and planes the size of luxury cruise ships, or the forecasts of the '60s, which didn't anticipate the sexual revolution or women's liberation, the path to the present is littered with failed predictions and incorrect estimations. The best we can do is try to absorb from futurism's checkered past, perhaps learning to do a little better.

Online disinformation stormed our political process in 2016 and has only worsened since. Yet as Samuel Woolley shows in this urgent book, it may pale in comparison to what's to come: humanlike automated voice systems, machine learning, "deepfake" AI-edited videos and images, interactive memes, virtual reality, and more. These technologies have the power not just to manipulate our politics, but to make us doubt our eyes and ears and even feelings. Deeply researched and compellingly written, The Reality Game describes the profound impact these technologies will have on our lives.

For too long, under the influence of corporate giants and tech enthusiasts, we’ve accepted the idea that change always means better. But rapidly developing technology isn’t neutral – it’s ambivalent, and capable of enormous harm. To improve our well-being, help future generations flourish and recover our shared humanity, we must become more critical, mindful users of technology, and more discerning of how it uses us.

We are entering a new technological age in which artificial intelligence and immersive media will transform society at all levels. If managed well, this could unleash a new age of abundance. If managed poorly, this technological revolution could easily go astray, deeply compromising our privacy, autonomy, agency, and even our humanity. In Our Next Reality, two industry veterans provide a data-driven debate on whether the new world we're creating will be a technological utopia or an AI-powered dystopia and gives guidance on how to aim for the best future we can.

In this provocative and optimistic rebuke to the catastrophists, Robert Bryce shows how innovation and the inexorable human desire to make things Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper is providing consumers with Cheaper and more abundant energy, Faster computing, Lighter vehicles, and myriad other goods. That same desire is fostering unprecedented prosperity, greater liberty, and yes, better environmental protection.

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.

Cohen shows how smart guys like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg fell in love with a radically individualistic ideal and then mainstreamed it. With these very rich men leading the way, unions, libraries, public schools, common courtesy, and even government itself have been pushed aside to make way for supposedly efficient market-based encounters via the Internet. Donald Trump's election victory was an inadvertent triumph of the "disruption" that Silicon Valley has been pushing. A society that belittles civility, empathy, and collaboration can easily be led astray.

Over the last decade, Azeem Azhar - writer, technologist and creator of the Exponential View platform - has become our leading thinker on how technology is transforming business, politics and society. Now, Azhar offers a holistic way to think about the effects of new tech. Our society, Azhar argues, is afflicted by an 'exponential gap' - the gulf between the growing pace of technological change, and our institutions' struggle to keep up.

"Artificial intelligence" or "AI" is one of the hottest buzzwords of the last decade. And with the release of the AI language bot "ChatGPT" in 2022, the buzz around AI has only grown louder. Ask around and you’ll often hear something rather unbelievable, from “AI will be the end of humanity as we know it!” to “AI will make everything better; you’ll never have to do anything again!”But isn’t there some sort of practical middle ground, free of hysteria?

Thanks to recent advances in AI, humans have entered a world where we are no longer the sole custodians of knowledge. A new wave of 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. It is vital we understand how they work. 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?

In Interconnected Realities, Leslie Shannon, Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting at Nokia, delivers an energizing and optimistic new take on the Metaverse. Starting with metaverse realms already in existence today, the book explores the purpose that each independent platform serves, as well as how all these disparate realms will ultimately be stitched together to permanently transform our personal and business lives.

Dozens of times per day, we all interact with intelligent machines that are constantly learning from the wealth of data now available to them. These machines are remaking the world of the 21st century in the same way that the Industrial Revolution remade the world of the 19th century. AIQ is based on a simple premise: If you want to understand the modern world, then you have to know a little bit of the mathematical language spoken by intelligent machines. AIQ will teach listeners that language - but in an unconventional way, anchored in stories rather than mathematics.

Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we've searched for and when.

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.