Showing titles in History & Culture

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....

The riveting story of the legendary Xerox PARC, a collection of eccentric young inventors brought together by Xerox Corporation at a facility in Palo Alto, California, during the mind-blowing intellectual ferment of the '70s and '80s.

What are you willing to lose for a connected life? Digital detox expert Tanya Goodin explores the cost that our digital life inflicts on our offline existence, and offers a toolkit to anyone who has lost their way.

Ignite your untapped potential with ChatGPT and revolutionize your personal and professional life using this comprehensive, step-by-step guide to AI mastery! With up to 40% of daily work activities capable of being automated, there's never been a better time to dive into the world of AI. In this guide, you'll uncover everything you need to know about ChatGPT and how to use it to streamline your workflow and enhance your productivity. You'll gain practical insights into how to make ChatGPT work for you.

According to Winston Churchill, Alan Turing made the single biggest contribution to the Allied victory over Nazi Germany with his code-breaking machine. The world is also indebted to Turing's genius for the modern computer. It was clear that Turing had a remarkable mind from an early age. He taught himself to read in just three weeks. At his first school, the headmistress said, "I have had clever and hardworking boys, but Alan has genius."

In this eagerly awaited new book from the author of the best-selling Nostalgia Nerd's Retro Tech, Peter Leigh takes a fun, informative and irreverent romp through the history of more than 40 pieces of personal tech, charting the successes, failures and oddities from over five decades of our obsession with gadgetry.

Ready to propel your business into the AI revolution? Curious about how to harness the power of AI, even without technical know-how? Launch into a world of limitless opportunities with ChatGPT, the AI tool that's revolutionizing the landscape of business.

What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather than making things, they simply connect people. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last 10 years.

On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, 200,000 miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. Thirteen is the shocking and miraculous true story of how the astronauts and ground crew guided Apollo 13 back to Earth. Expanding on dispatches written for The New Yorker, Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. brings listeners unparalleled detail on the moment-by-moment developments of one of NASA’s most dramatic missions.

David K. Stumpf demystifies the intercontinental ballistic missile program that was conceived at the end of the Eisenhower administration as a key component of the US nuclear strategy of massive retaliation. Although its nuclear warhead may have lacked power relative to that of the Titan II, the Minuteman more than made up for this in terms of numbers and readiness to launch - making it the ultimate ICBM.

Nat Eliason had six months to make as much money as possible before his first child was born. So, he turned to where countless others did in 2021: crypto. Within a year, he'd made millions writing code holding hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's money. He'd been hacked. He'd sold a picture of a monkey for two hundred grand. He'd become an influencer, speaking at conferences, and writing a weekly newsletter to tens of thousands of fans. Best of all, Nat had amassed a small fortune. But how much of this money was even real?

In the Shadow of the Moon tells the story of the most exciting and challenging years in spaceflight, with two superpowers engaged in a titanic struggle to land one of their own people on the moon. Drawing on interviews with astronauts, cosmonauts, their families, technicians, and scientists, as well as rarely seen Soviet and American government documents, the authors craft a remarkable story of the golden age of spaceflight as both an intimate human experience and a rollicking global adventure.

The artificial intelligence revolution has begun. Today, there are self-driving cars on our streets, autonomous weapons in our armies, robot surgeons in our hospitals - and AI's presence in our lives will only increase. One thing is clear: this is a technology like no other, one that raises profound questions about freedom, justice and the very definition of human agency. In Moral AI, world-renowned researchers in artificial intelligence and philosophy, Jana Schaich Borg, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Vince Conitzer tackle these thorny issues head-on.

The Internet of Things is a networked world of connected devices, objects, and people. In this book Samuel Greengard offers a guided tour through this emerging world and how it will change the way we live and work. Greengard explains that the Internet of Things (IoT) is still in its early stages. Smartphones, cloud computing, RFID (radio-frequency identification), technology, sensors, and miniaturization are converging to make possible a new generation of embedded and immersive technology.

As the host of The Michael Brooks Show and cohost of the Majority Report, Brooks was a progressive fighter whose work brought people together from around the world. In this, his first book, he lets his understanding of the digital media environment direct his analysis of the "conservative rebels" who had taken YouTube by storm in 2018. Brooks provides a theoretically rigorous but accessible critique of the most prominent "renegades," including Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Brett Weinstein while also examining the social, political, and media environment that such rebels thrive in.

When Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. In vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community.

For most of human existence, people lived in a somewhat similar fashion. Everything that has been produced, from food and raw materials to clothing and other finished products, has been done either solely by hand or with some help of animal power. This was the same across the eras and throughout the world, no matter how advanced or backward the various civilizations were. Yet, our lives today couldn’t be more different.

In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, Postman chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it. According to Postman, technology is rapidly gaining sovereignty over social institutions and national life to become self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and omnipresent. He warns that this will have radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, religion, family, education, and more.

Stephen Fry traces the evolution of the mobile phone, from hefty executive bricks that required a separate briefcase to carry the battery, to the smartphones available today. There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet. Stephen Fry talks to the backroom boys who made it all possible, and here’s how the technology succeeded in ways that the geeks had not necessarily intended.

It’s the Second World War and the Savoy, the Dorchester, and Claridge’s teem with those determined not to allow Hitler to impact on their way of life. Spies: Meet Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster, the woman from M15 who has the gravy browning licked from her legs by Dylan Thomas. Royals: Meet Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, born in a suite at Claridge’s that was declared Yugoslav territory for the night. Players: Meet Joyce Stone, whose husband leads the band at the Dorchester. West End Front is a witty and eye-opening account of the extraordinary events that unfolded under the reinforced ceilings of London’s grand hotels.