Invention Machine

Hailed for over a century as one of the finest science fiction stories of all time, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is a classic story of adventure, exploration, and scientific curiosity. The Time Machine relates the story of the Time Traveller, a Victorian inventor who creates a machine that allows him to travel to any time period. He chooses to rocket forward into the unknown world of the future, landing in the year 802,701 where he encounters the humanoids descendants of Earth, the seemigly friendly and benign Eloi, and the subterranean and primitive Morlocks.

Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail - human-level intelligence.

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI.

In the tradition of Why Nations Fail, this book solves one of the great puzzles of history: Why did the West become the most powerful civilization in the world? Western exceptionalism—the idea that European civilizations are freer, wealthier, and less violent—is a widespread and powerful...

The inside story of Lean, a computer program that answers the age-old question: How do you know if something is true? It began as an obscure bug-checking program at Microsoft Research developed by a lone computer engineer named Leo de Moura. Then an unlikely crew of mathematical misfits caught...

He was a genius who gave the world access to technology that is still changing the world. To this day, his greatest accomplishment is the iPhone and still is. Taken away too soon, his legacy still lives on. Countless entrepreneurs look up to him and use his advice to succeed in the business world. If it wasn't for him, we would have never been introduced to portable computers and mobile phones with touch screens.