Computer Science History

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.

The cell phone changed the world. It revolutionized how people communicate, freed them to get in touch with one another at any time, in any place, without the constraints of the wired network. The cell phone led to the creation and growth of new industries. Yet the true story of its creation has not been told. This book tells that story. It centers on a battle for control of how people communicate, involving government regulators, lobbyists, police, technology breakthroughs, failures, quartz, and a horse. At the center of that story was Martin Cooper.

An exhilarating, elegant memoir and a significant polemic on how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and of who we are. Bitwise is a wondrous ode to the computer languages and codes that captured technologist David Auerbach's imagination.

Edward Ashford Lee explores the ways that engineers use models and abstraction to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of - for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But he also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim everything in the physical world is a computation - that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data.

In this profound and urgent new book, leading thinker on technology Kester Brewin shows how AI is both stunningly new and rooted in the most ancient human desires. Hailed by the UK government's own lead on AI as 'god-like', as we finally welcome this stunning technology amongst us—with Frankenstein and Faustus, from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to the underbelly of Silicon Valley—Brewin skillfully leads us through the myths, machines, and monsters that have influenced the development of our greatest and most longed-for invention, and how we can learn to live alongside it.

In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging.

Starting with hands, abacus, and slide rule, humans have always reached for tools to simplify math. Pocket-sized calculators ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, took us to the bottom of the ocean, and accompanied us to the moon. The pocket calculator changed our world, until it was supplanted by more modern devices that, in a cruel twist of irony, it helped to create. Keith Houston transports listeners from the nascent economies of the ancient world to World War II, and into the technological arms race that led to the first affordable electronic pocket calculators.

Technology rules us as much as laws do. It shapes the legal, social, and ethical environments in which we act. Every time we cross a street, drive a car, or go to the doctor, we submit to the silent power of technology. Yet, much of the time, the influence of technology on our lives goes unchallenged by citizens and our elected representatives. Our embrace of novel technological pathways, Sheila Jasanoff shows, leads to a complex interplay among technology, ethics, and human rights.

The runaway success of the microchip processor may be nearing its end, with profound implications for our economy, society and way of life, even leaving Silicon Valley as a new Rust Belt, its technology obsolete. Step forward the quantum computer, which harnesses the power and complexity of the atomic realm, and may be useful in solving humanity's greatest challenges from climate change, to global starvation, to incurable diseases. Humanity's next great technological achievement already promises to be every bit as revolutionary as the transistor and microchip once were.

In Electronic Dreams, Tom Lean tells the story of how computers invaded British homes for the first time, as people set aside their worries of electronic brains and Big Brother and embraced the wonder technology of the 1980s. This book charts the history of the rise and fall of the home computer, the family of futuristic and quirky machines that took computing from the realm of science and science fiction to being a user-friendly domestic technology.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices—once regarded as radical, unorthodox, or marginal—are disrupting the status quo in politics, business, and culture. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the internet and AI have become high-speed vectors for the spread of misinformation.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: 21 layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex" - a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.

Taking listeners back to the days of TaB cola, dot matrix printers, and digging through the couch for just one more quarter, Alex Rubens combines his knowledge of the tech industry and experience as a gaming journalist to conjure the wild silicon frontier of the 8-bit ’80s. 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari's Missile Command offers the first in-depth, personal history of an era for which fans have a lot of nostalgia.

Simply put, an algorithm is a set of instructions-it's the code that makes computers run. A basic idea that proved elusive for hundreds of years and bent the minds of the greatest thinkers in the world, the algorithm is what made the modern world possible. Without the algorithm, there would have been no computer, no Internet, no virtual reality, no e-mail, or any other technological advance that we rely on every day.

Künstliche Intelligenz ist die Coming Wave, der nächste technologische Sprung, der sich nicht aufhalten lässt. Wir nähern uns einem kritischen Punkt in der Menschheitsgeschichte. Die Künstliche Intelligenz steht noch am Anfang, doch die Welle baut sich auf, und wir sind darauf nicht vorbereitet. Mustafa Suleyman ist Mitbegründer von DeepMind, dem KI-Pionier, der nun Teil von Alphabet ist, dem Google-Mutterkonzern. Er ist der ultimative KI-Insider. Sein Buch zeigt, was auf dem Spiel steht, und fragt, wie wir von den neuen Technologien profitieren können, ohne die Kontrolle zu verlieren.

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.

In lively, mordantly witty prose, Negroponte decodes the mysteries--and debunks the hype--surrounding bandwidth, multimedia, virtual reality, and the Internet, and explains why such touted innovations as the fax and the CD-ROM are likely to go the way of the BetaMax.

An innovation expert illuminates why your power to make a difference is no longer bound by your status. In The Power of Onlyness, Nilofer Merchant, one of the world's top-ranked business thinkers, reveals that we have now reached an unprecedented moment of opportunity for your ideas to "make a dent" on the world.

Il tema dell'intelligenza artificiale sta dominando ormai da alcuni anni il dibattito pubblico. Questo perché, anche se abbiamo appena iniziato ad avvertire l'impatto che l'IA avrà sulle nostre vite, stiamo diventando sempre più consapevoli che i suoi effetti saranno profondi, così come sarà profondo il modo in cui essa trasformerà il nostro rapporto con la realtà, la conoscenza e la verità. Le sue potenzialità aumentano a un ritmo vertiginoso, e i progressi, come i benefici che sapremo trarne, appaiono straordinari. Tuttavia, non mancano i segnali d'allarme.

In a contest of change, which century from the past millennium would come up trumps? Imagine the Black Death took on the female vote in a pub brawl, or the Industrial Revolution faced the Internet in a medieval joust - whose side would you be on? In this hugely entertaining book, celebrated historian Ian Mortimer takes us on a whirlwind tour of Western history, pitting one century against another in his quest to measure change.