Showing titles in Technology & Society

Increasing numbers of parents grapple with children who are acting out without obvious reason. Revved up and irritable, many of these children are diagnosed with ADHD, bipolar illness, autism, or other disorders, but don't respond well to treatment. They are then medicated, often with poor results and unwanted side effects. Based on emerging scientific research and extensive clinical experience, integrative child psychiatrist Dr. Victoria Dunckley has pioneered a four-week program to treat the frequent underlying cause, Electronic Screen Syndrome (ESS).

Why do some leap ahead while others fall behind in today's chaotic, hyperconnected world? In New Power, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms confront the biggest stories of our age - the rise of megaplatforms like Facebook and Uber; the out-of-nowhere rise of Trump and Corbyn - and reveal what's really behind them: the rise of New Power. For most of human history, the rules of power were clear. To get ahead or get things done, you mastered 'old power', which is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven....

When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles that lay ahead — or the powerful forces their invention would unleash. Nearly 10 years after the launch of the JUUL, Backfired: The Vaping Wars asks: Could e-cigarettes have been the solution to one of the world’s most pressing public health problems—or was this technology doomed to introduce a whole new generation to nicotine, and end up perpetuating an intractable addiction?

In The AI Con, the renowned AI insiders-turned-critics Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across all its forms, exposing it for what it really is: a mask for data theft, surveillance capitalism, and the devaluing of human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines.

In this timely and enlightening audiobook, Cal Newport introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives. Digital minimalists are all around us. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can have fun with friends and family and eat out at restaurants without the obsessive urge to document the experience...Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement and makes a case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world.

Digital transformation of the business landscape is well underway, and businesses are being reshaped faster than ever before. Agility and adaptability are now critical components of these businesses' survival. But building these traits requires a holistic approach with an unrelenting focus on automation. How does one go about developing that focus? Vijay Tella, Scott Brinker, and Massimo Pezzini deliver a guide to implementing automation in the real world, avoiding jargon and vague bromides in favor of concrete examples.

Award-winning biographer Walter Isaacson is often asked who, of the people living today, would he consider to be in the same league as the innovators he’s profiled: Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs. Isaacson’s answer? Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder shares the traits that made Isaacson’s innovators irresistible subjects. These qualities include a passionate curiosity, fervent imagination and a child-like sense of wonder.

Two defense experts explore the collision of war, politics, and social media, where the most important battles are now only a click away. Through the weaponization of social media, the Internet is changing war and politics, just as war and politics are changing the Internet. Terrorists livestream their attacks, “Twitter wars” produce real world casualties, and viral misinformation alters not just the result of battles, but the very fate of nations. The result is that war, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battlespace that plays out on our smartphones.

In this groundbreaking and provocative treatise, Alexander C. Karp, co-founder and chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, and Nicholas W. Zamiska, head of corporate affairs at the company, offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of creative and cultural ambition. They argue that in order for the West to maintain its geopolitical advantage—and the freedoms that we take for granted—the software industry must redirect its attention to our most urgent challenges and rebuild its relationship with government.

Penguin Audio presents Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, read by Rob Shapiro. We stand at the beginning of a new era. What was once science fiction is fast becoming reality, as AI transforms war, crime, justice, jobs and society - and even our very sense of what it means to be human. More than any other technology, AI has the potential to revolutionise our collective future - and there's nobody better situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, whose work has helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

Before he conceived of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk flexed his control and influence during his unprecedented, $44 billion buyout of Twitter. This is the stunning true story of how Musk managed to upend the world's largest free speech platform through sheer, unilateral force—and what that means for the protection of power in the modern age.

In Like, bestselling author and renowned strategist Martin Reeves and coauthor Bob Goodson—Silicon Valley veteran and participant in the invention of the like button—take listeners along on a fascinating quest to find out what's behind the world's friendliest icon. It's a story that starts out as simply as a thumbs-up cartoon but ends up presenting surprises and new mysteries at every turn, some of them as deep as anthropological history and others as speculative as the AI-charged future.

The Economic Singularity is the time when most people cannot find employment, because machines can do everything that humans can do for money cheaper, faster, and better than they can. Some people say this will never happen, but most AI professionals think it will, although they disagree about when.

In Artificial Intelligence, Mitchell turns to the most urgent questions concerning AI today: How intelligent - really - are the best AI programs? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Along the way, she introduces the dominant methods of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors, and the historical lines of thought that led to recent achievements.

Within a few years, humans will be able to voyage to Mars. SpaceX is at the forefront of companies already building fleets of spaceships to make interplanetary travel as affordable as Old-World passage to America – to the New World. We will settle the red planet, transforming its raw materials into resources and tackling the challenges that await us, creating a new frontier for humankind. Dr Robert Zubrin explains how populous Martian city-states will emerge, producing their own air, water, food, power and more. How they must be beautiful to attract settlers, and what that might look like.

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.

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.

In this riveting feat of reporting, Kashmir Hill uncovers the secret history of Clearview AI, a mysterious start-up selling an app that can identify you using just a blurry photo of your face. The app can find your name, your social media profiles, your friends and family – even your home address. Launched by computer engineer Hoan Ton-That and politician Richard Schwartz, and assisted by a cast of controversial characters with connections to the alt-right, this app would have society-altering potential.

What kind of fossils will we leave, as relics into the far future? A blizzard of new objects has suddenly appeared on Earth: plastic bottles, ballpoint pens, concrete flyways, chicken bones, cans, teabags, phones, shirts. They're produced for our comfort and pleasure then quickly discarded. This new-made treasure chest underpins our lives. But it is also giving a completely new style of fossilization to our planet. Designed to resist corrosion and decay, many will remain, petrified, as future geology.

The venture capital playbook is causing unique harms to society. And in World Eaters, Catherine Bracy offers a window into the pernicious aspects of VC and shows us how its bad practices are bleeding into all industries, undermining the labor and housing markets and posing unique dangers to the economy at large. VC’s creates a wide, powerful wake that impacts the average consumer just as much as it does investors and entrepreneurs.