Showing titles in History & Culture

Brought to you by Penguin. The Extinction of Experience reveals the true cost of our digital age – and shows us how to return to the real world, while we still can. Human experiences are disappearing. Community is now found online; schools prioritise typing; and with headphones in and eyes...

'One of the best books about the paranormal I have read... Uncannily good' DANNY ROBINS 'A fascinating testimony to our nervous hunger to map the hazy, haunted territory at the edges of the rational... engrossing, entertaining and distinctly unsettling' SARAH WATERS 'Shiversomely eerie... so...

In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team.

A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in American corporate history.

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.

Penguin presents the audiobook of Like A Thief In Broad Daylight by Slavoj Žižek read by Jamie East. In recent years, techno-scientific progress has started to utterly transform our world - changing it almost beyond recognition. In this extraordinary new book, renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek...

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried 58 shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From Wharton professor and author of the popular One Useful Thing Substack newsletter Ethan Mollick comes the definitive playbook for working, learning, and living in the new age of AI Something new entered our world in November 2022 — the first general...

Microsoft project veteran Scott Berkun offers a collection of essays on field-tested philosophies and strategies for defining, leading, and managing projects. Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere.  

Brought to you by Penguin. Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future: The Inventions that will Transform our Lives is a hypothetical journey through the next 100 years of scientific innovation, as told by the scientists who are making it happen. We all wish we could predict the future, but most of us...

Brought to you by Penguin. A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every...

Brought to you by Penguin. A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain from them, and how to fight back. Is AI going to take...

This audiobook is masterfully read by the author, Mo Gawdat. One of The Sunday Times' Business Books of the Year Technology is putting our humanity at risk to an unprecedented degree. This book is not for engineers who write the code or the policy makers who claim they can regulate it. This is a...

In Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, the revolutionary, acclaimed book, radio series and podcast, best-selling economist Tim Harford introduced us to a selection of 50 radical inventions that changed the world. Along the way he entertained us with a myriad of great stories and revealed some of the most surprising landmarks in our history. 

The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.

Read by the author, Madhumita Murgia, this audio edition includes a fascinating exclusive author interview, led by the global AI lead at publisher Pan Macmillan, Sara Lloyd. SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024 What does it mean to be human in a world that is rapidly changing...

In How Progress Ends, Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies—the United States and China—have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change

The Genius Makers tells the story of AI from pioneering days to current achievements to future potential. At the same time it takes the lid off what has effectively become an arms race between Google, Microsoft, Facebook and OpenAI, in which Google may be the clear frontrunner at present, but Facebook has shown itself to be both nimble and innovative, and OpenAI, the company recently founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, has made itself the confident upstart of the pack. 

Brought to you by Penguin. Feel like you're always drowning in email? How much more would you achieve without them - and how much happier would you be? Emails are an integral part of work today. But the 'kind regards', forwards and attachments we check every 5.4 minutes are making us...

The #1 New York Times bestseller from David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize—the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly—Wilbur and Orville Wright. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two...