Showing titles in Technology & Society

What will it take to restore balance to our world, repair past injustices, and support future generations' survival? Looking deeply into the web of life that created and supports us, and drawing inspiration from diverse cultural traditions and perspectives, spirited thinkers Michael Pawlyn and Sarah Ichioka propose a bold set of regenerative principles with potential to transform how we design, make, and manage our buildings; infrastructure; and communities.

We live in an incredible period in history. The computer revolution may be even more life-changing than the Industrial Revolution. We can do things with computers that could never be done before, and computers can do things for us that could never be done before. But our love of computers should not cloud our thinking about their limitations. The AI Delusion explains why we should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data-mining is knowledge discovery, and that black boxes should be trusted.

Technology - at least in theory - is improving our productivity, efficiency, and communication. The one thing it's not doing is making us happier. We are experiencing historically high levels of depression and dissatisfaction. But it doesn't have to be that way. Technology can drive - not diminish - human happiness.

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put it on the shelf, lend it to a friend, or sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the eBooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don't own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your eBook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation - as Amazon deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers.

Ninguna empresa científica reciente ha resultado tan seductora, aterradora y llena de extravagantes promesas y frustrantes reveses como la IA. La galardonada científica informática Melanie Mitchell revela su turbulenta historia, la reciente oleada de aparentes éxitos, las grandes esperanzas y temores que la rodean, y las cuestiones más urgentes hoy: ¿hasta qué punto son realmente inteligentes los programas de IA? ¿Qué pueden hacer realmente? ¿Hasta qué punto esperamos que se asemejen a los humanos y cuándo debemos preocuparnos de que nos superen?

Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. He argues that our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse.

As a pastor in Silicon Valley, Jay Kim has experienced the digital church in all its splendor. In Analog Church, he grapples with the ramifications of a digital church, from our worship and experience of Christian community to the way we engage Scripture and sacrament. Could it be that in our efforts to stay relevant in our digital age, we've begun to give away the very thing that our age most desperately needs: transcendence? Could it be that the best way to reach new generations is in fact found in a more timeless path?

Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It's becoming clear that the tech industry's promised "innovation" is neither sustainable nor always desirable.

The world of golf is at a crossroads. As technological innovations displace traditional philosophies, the golfing community has splintered into two deeply combative factions: the old-school teachers and players who believe in feel, artistry, and imagination, and the technical-minded who want to remake the game around data. In Golf’s Holy War, “an obvious hole-in-one for golfers and their coaches” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), Brett Cyrgalis takes us inside the heated battle playing out from weekend hackers to PGA Tour pros.

In Revolutionary Algorithms, Torey Akers approaches TikTok with a deep understanding of the app, as both a prolific creator and consumer of its content. In these essays, she interrogates how the TikTok ban and the multiple genocides happening around the world are deeply intertwined; how the app can empower creators, amplify social movements, and document abuses of power. She addresses the good, bad, and sometimes uncanny parts of maneuvering and communicating in a digital space.

Almost everything about our day-to-day lives - and the broader scheme of human culture - can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now. In Tubes, Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing a fresh look at the online world we think we know.

Our fascination with AI stems from the perceived uniqueness of human intelligence. We believe it's what differentiates us. Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displaces us from our position at the centre of the world. Neil D. Lawrence's visionary book shows why these fears may be misplaced. By contrasting our own intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, The Atomic Human reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded.

In this provocative and optimistic rebuke to the catastrophists, Robert Bryce shows how innovation and the inexorable human desire to make things Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper is providing consumers with Cheaper and more abundant energy, Faster computing, Lighter vehicles, and myriad other goods. That same desire is fostering unprecedented prosperity, greater liberty, and yes, better environmental protection.

Those of you living through the next 30 years will become the most powerful creatures that have ever existed. You will have the opportunity and the duty to create a decidedly better world. Experience and maturity alone cannot provide the required wisdom fast enough. You will need to maximize your innate potential to accelerate wisdom. The Potentialist: Your Future in the New Reality of the Next Thirty Years explains the first steps to achieve your potential and accelerate wisdom. You will discover how forces of change create a New Reality by breaking down the one we know.

You've heard the stories about the dark side of the internet—hackers, #gamergate, anonymous mobs attacking an unlucky victim, and revenge porn—but they remain just that: Stories. Surely these things would never happen to you. Zoe Quinn used to feel the same way. She is a video game developer whose ex-boyfriend published a crazed blog post cobbled together from private information, half-truths, and outright fictions, along with a rallying cry to the online hordes to go after her. They answered in the form of a so-called movement known as #gamergate.

In the coming decades, the technology that enables virtual and augmented reality will improve beyond recognition. Within a century, world-renowned philosopher David J. Chalmers predicts, we will have virtual worlds that are impossible to distinguish from non-virtual worlds. But is virtual reality just escapism? In a highly original work of 'technophilosophy', Chalmers argues categorically, no: virtual reality is genuine reality. Virtual worlds are not second-class worlds. We can live a meaningful life in virtual reality - and increasingly, we will.

In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising - the beating heart of the internet - is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008. From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that the true value of consumers' attention is wildly misrepresented.

Today's world is complicated: companies are becoming more powerful than nations, the lines between public and corporate institutions grow murkier, and the internet is shredding our privacy. To combat these onslaughts, people everywhere - rich and not so rich, in business and in their personal lives - are turning away from traditional police, lawyers, and government regulators toward a new champion: the private investigator.

In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion.

Part memoir, part searing revelation, Seen Yet Unseen takes listeners behind the scenes of some of the world’s biggest tech companies and exposes the way their exclusion of and, at times, hostility toward Black women have lasting impacts on the technology we use every day.