Showing titles in Technology & Society

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. 

This program includes an introduction read by the author. No recent scientific enterprise has proved as alluring, terrifying, and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. The award-winning author Melanie Mitchell, a leading computer scientist, now...

This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.

Brought to you by Penguin. What if we could stop cancer in its tracks, prevent cardiovascular disease, lose weight at will and reverse the effects of ageing? With new developments in artificial intelligence, gene editing and robotics, it might all be possible sooner than you think. In Hacking...

Learn how to switch off and find calm - from the New York Times bestselling author of A World Without Email 'Digital Minimalism is the Marie Kondo of technology' Evening Standard 'An eloquent, powerful and enjoyably practical guide to cutting back on screen time' The Times 'An urgent call to...

What happens when intelligent machines aren’t just in our pockets but are also driving our cars, making our decisions, folding our laundry, and educating our kids? You’ve heard the hype: AI will make us healthier, give every child a personalized tutor, run our businesses more efficiently...

The dramatic, larger-than-life true story behind the founding of Oculus and its quest for virtual reality, by the bestselling author of Console Wars. From iconic books like Neuromancer to blockbuster films like The Matrix, virtual reality has long been hailed as the ultimate technology. But...

'Communication strategies that should be taught to everyone with a story to tell' - Marc Randolph, co-founder and first CEO of Netflix Jeff Bezos is a dreamer who turned a bold idea into the world’s most influential company. He learned to elevate the way his employees write, collaborate...

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...

Evocatively read by the author, Tom Chatfield. 'Powerful, profound and completely engrossing, a meditation on not only technology but also history, culture, ideas, ethics, psychology and, above all, what it means to be human.' – Michael Bhaskar, co-author of The Coming Wave Wise Animals...

Rising star New York Times technology reporters, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, tell for the first time the full and shocking inside story of Elon Musk’s unprecedented hostile takeover of Twitter and the forty-four-billion-dollar deal’s seismic political, social, and financial fallout. This is the defining story of our time told with uncommon style and peerless rigor. In a world of viral ideas and emotion, who gets to control the narrative, who gets to be heard, and what does power really cost?

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. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem.

The Real-World Blueprint to Critical Thinking, Logic & Decision Making is the guide you need. Backed by cognitive science and grounded in real-life examples, this hands-on workbook helps you outthink bias, avoid manipulation, and make better choices in every area of life.

A big source of tension between the US and China at the moment is technology. And one very small component is now at the centre of this battle for global dominance: the microchip. Controlling chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The country that controls this manufacturing can throttle the military and economic power of others. At the heart of this battle is ARM Holdings. The Everything Blueprint describes the titanic power struggle for control of the microchip.

Brought to you by Penguin. The global, open internet is fragmenting. How To Save the Internet outlines the global cooperation needed to reform Big Tech and preserve the internet as we know it. As democracies aim to control Big Tech, Silicon Valley adopts an America-first agenda, and...

Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity...doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Odell sees our attention as the most precious - and overdrawn - resource we have. 

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a loan, how much we pay for insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: everyone is judged according to the same rules and bias is eliminated. And yet, as Cathy O'Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated and incontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination. 

As cyberthreats grow and infrastructure evolves, organizations must prioritize effective, dynamic, and adaptable incident response. Based on the original print bestseller, Blue Team Handbook: Incident Response is now available for the first time in audio. This trusted and widely used field guide...

A social history of AI that finally reveals its roots in the spatial computation of industrial factories and the surveillance of collective behaviour. What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence," a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind...

Artificial Intelligence is transforming human society fundamentally and profoundly. Not since the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason have we changed how we approach knowledge, politics, economics, even warfare. Three of our most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore Artificial...

How AI Really Thinks takes you behind the screen and uncovers the ten core secrets that make modern artificial intelligence work. You’ll discover why data acts as AI’s fuel, how algorithms function as its rulebook, and how machines learn from examples the same way people learn from experience. You’ll explore the training methods that help AI recognise pictures and understand speech, and you’ll see how neural networks—loosely inspired by the human brain—allow AI to detect patterns far too complex for us to notice.

Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte. Now, hounded by the state, she has 10 arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for - while she stands trial for speaking the truth. 

A searing investigation into the child influencer industry and the perils of childhood internet fame, Like, Follow, Subscribe is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the costs of internet fame, and the ethics of online content. What is it like to grow up with a camera in your face...

Deep beneath our feet, vast and sprawling, lies one of the most sophisticated empires the world has ever known. At first glance, it might not look like much - it is made up of fibre optic cables and obscure payment systems. But according to prominent political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, this network is the key source of American power on the global stage, more significant than its military might. Underground Empire weaves together tales of economic conflict, shadowy surveillance technologies and covert infrastructure projects to present an explosive new vision of geopolitics.

Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion.

Brought to you by Penguin. THE ACCLAIMED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a...

In a world more connected than ever, we have never been more divided. The Echo Chamber Effect is a powerful and deeply thought-provoking exploration of how social media platforms quietly shape the way we think, feel, and interact. Drawing on psychology, technology, and human behaviour, Elira Fontayne exposes the subtle mechanics that transform our online experiences into self-reinforcing bubbles of belief.

Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever "speak for themselves."

Brought to you by Penguin. Hotly-anticiaped new guide to working, learning and living with the latest genereations of AI, from the acclaimed Wharton Professor of Management and author of the One Useful Thing Substack. Cutting through the noise of AI evangelists and AI doom-mongers, Wharton...

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...

Brought to you by Penguin. A withering takedown of four billionaires (from Andreessen to Zuckerberg) who are selling us fantasies while the world burns. At a time when multiple crises are compounding to create epic inequality, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our...