Showing titles in Technology & Society

Through narratives and case studies spanning the brilliant history of engineering, Madhavan shows how the concepts of prototyping, efficiency, reliability, standards, optimization, and feedback are put to use in fields as diverse as transportation, retail, health care, and entertainment. Equal parts personal, practical, and profound, Applied Minds charts a path to a future where we apply strategies borrowed from engineering to create useful and inspired solutions to our most pressing challenges.

If you've replaced a computer lately - or a cell phone, a camera, a television - chances are, the old one still worked. And chances are even greater that the latest model won't last as long as the one it replaced. Welcome to the world of planned obsolescence - a business model, a way of life, and a uniquely American invention that this eye-opening book explores from its beginnings to its perilous implications for the very near future.

In Animals, Robots, Gods, acclaimed anthropologist Webb Keane provides a new vision of ethics, defined less by our minds, religion or society, and more by our interactions with those around us. Drawing on ground-breaking research by fieldworkers around the world, he explores the underpinnings of our moral universe. Along the way we investigate the ethical dilemmas of South Asian animal rights activists, Balinese cockfighters, Japanese robot fanciers -- even macho cowboys. 

The Age of Living Machines describes some of the most exciting new developments and the scientists and engineers who helped create them. Virus-built batteries. Protein-based water filters. Cancer-detecting nanoparticles. Mind-reading bionic limbs. Computer-engineered crops. Together they highlight the promise of the technology revolution of the 21st century to overcome some of the greatest humanitarian, medical, and environmental challenges of our time. 

In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman's uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world.

Artificial intelligence is driving workforce disruption on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution. In schools and universities, AI technology has forced a re-evaluation of the way students are taught and assessed. Meanwhile ChatGPT has become a cultural phenomenon, reaching 100 million users and attracting a $10 billion dollar investment in its parent company OpenAI. The race to dominate the generative AI market is accelerating at breakneck speed, inspiring breathless headlines and immense public interest.

This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed, and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. Part II focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerge alongside rapid developments in AI technology.  

A new approach to the challenges surrounding artificial intelligence that argues for assessing AI actions as if they came from a human being.

Surveillance Capitalism in America offers a crucial historical perspective on the intimate relationship between surveillance and capitalism. While surveillance is often associated with governments, today the role of the private sector in the spread of everyday surveillance is the subject of growing public debate. Tech giants like Google and Facebook are fueled by a continuous supply of user data and digital exhaust. Surveillance is not just a side effect of digital capitalism; it is the business model itself.

Our society has a technology problem. Many want to disconnect from screens but can't help themselves. These days we spend more time online than ever. Some turn to self-help measures to limit their usage, yet repeatedly fail, while parents feel particularly powerless to help their children. Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies shows us a way out. Rather than blaming users, the book shatters the illusion that we autonomously choose how to spend our time online. It shifts the moral responsibility and accountability for solutions to corporations.

The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook. Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and...

In this easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide, you will not only learn the foundation of Facebook advertising but will also be taught how you can launch your first FB advertising campaign today.

The noted inventor and futurist’s successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come Since it was first published in 2005, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near and its vision of an exponential future have...

Renowned AI strategist and pioneer Mark Minevich delivers an exciting and practical discussion of how to implement groundbreaking artificial intelligence technologies at every level of your organization. You'll learn to create sustainable, effective competitive advantage by introducing previously unheard-of levels of adaptability, resilience, and innovation into your company.

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. 

Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of communication act as a super-amplifier of our natural collaborative mindset. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the emergence of a new kind of social collaboration enabled by networked technologies. This new collaborative society might be characterized as a series of services and startups that enable peer-to-peer exchanges and interactions though technology.

Connectional intelligence unlocks the 21st-century secret to getting "big things done" regardless of who you are, where you live, or what you do. We typically associate success and leadership with smarts, passion, and luck. But in today's hypercompetitive world, even those gifts aren't enough. Get Big Things Done argues that the game changer is a thoroughly modern skill called connectional intelligence.

’A fascinating hybrid. Part freewheeling history of the rise of the modern autonomous vehicle, part intimate memoir from an insider who was on the front lines for much of that history, Autonomy will more than bring readers up to speed on one of today’s most closely watched technologies’...

James Howard Kunstler's critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long Emergency, originally published in 2005, quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler's shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions.

The titans of Silicon Valley are racing to build a single world-changing piece of software. They know that whoever gets there first will revolutionise our relationship with technology - and make billions of dollars in the process. They call it voice computing. Computers that can speak and think just as clearly as humans may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they are mere years away from becoming a reality. In Talk to Me, veteran tech journalist James Vlahos meets the researchers at Google, Amazon and Apple who are leading the way to a voice computing revolution.