Computer Age

In The Idea Factory, New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner reveals how Bell Labs served as an incubator for scientific innovation from the 1920s through the1980s. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted nearly 15,000 employees, 1200 of whom held PhDs and 13 of whom won Nobel Prizes. Thriving in a work environment that embraced new ideas, Bell Labs scientists introduced concepts that still propel many of today’s most exciting technologies.

The answer to our contemporary chaos is to practice a rule of life that aligns our habits to our beliefs. The Common Rule offers four daily and four weekly habits, designed to help us create new routines and transform frazzled days into lives of love for God and neighbor.

Nikola Tesla was a major contributor to the electrical revolution that transformed daily life at the turn of the 20th century. His inventions, patents, and theoretical work formed the basis of modern AC electricity, and contributed to the development of radio and television. Like his competitor Thomas Edison, Tesla was one of America's first celebrity scientists, enjoying the company of New York high society and dazzling the likes of Mark Twain with his electrical demonstrations. An astute self-promoter and gifted showman, he cultivated a public image of the eccentric genius.

In this updated and expanded edition of Human + Machine—including a new chapter on gen AI—Daugherty and Wilson show that the essence of the AI paradigm shift is the transformation of all business processes within an organization, whether related to breakthrough innovation, everyday customer service, or personal productivity habits. As humans and smart machines collaborate ever more closely, work processes become more fluid and adaptive, enabling companies to change them on the fly—or completely reimagine them.

From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: Esquire, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Electric Literature...

In The Experimentation Machine, HBS professor, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist Jeffrey J. Bussgang reveals how AI is transforming the way startups find product-market fit and scale.

"This satire offers a thought-provoking and scathing indictment that may prod readers to examine the more sinister possibilities of corporate- and media-dominated culture." —Publishers Weekly(starred review) For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon — a...

TechGnosis is a cult classic of media studies that straddles the line between academic discourse and popular culture; it appeals to both those secular and spiritual, to fans of cyberpunk and hacker literature and culture as much as new-thought adherents and spiritual seekers How does our...

In Part I, this book develops the Cognitive Amplifier Loop, which allows humans to use AI to build on their cognitive and emotional strengths and manage their limitations. Kosslyn discusses ways to employ this loop to offload tasks to AI and to utilize it to train us effectively and efficiently, as well as how to use it to both learn and engage in critical thinking and creative problem-solving—and manage cognitive and emotional constraints. Part II establishes how to draw on the Cognitive Amplifier Loop to help us improve our human relationships.

High-tech innovations are created at a dazzling speed, and it all points to a world that is getting faster at a dizzying pace. Azeem Azhar knows this better than most. Over the last three decades, he has founded companies bought by Amazon and Microsoft, served as the Economist’s first ever internet correspondent, and created a leading international tech newsletter and podcast, the Exponential View. Now, Azhar offers a revelatory new model for understanding how technology is changing the world.

Age of Invisible Machines quickly earned a reputation as a prophetic guide for technology and business leaders, swiftly becoming a Wall Street Journal bestseller by offering listeners an inside perspective shaped by Robb Wilson and Josh Tyson's hands-on experience collaborating with leading innovators across the AI space. When the first edition launched in late 2022, few realized how rapidly generative AI was advancing—but Wilson and Tyson were immersed in the cutting-edge developments happening across the industry.

In the age of artificial intelligence, drafting an essay is as simple as typing a prompt and pressing enter. What does this mean for the art of writing? According to longtime writing teacher John Warner: not very much. More Than Words argues that generative AI programs like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don’t challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking—discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page—and feeling—grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human.

In IRREPLACEABLE, you will discover techniques to boost your career using AI—without losing your job to automation; secrets to unlocking your uniquely human abilities—ones AI can never replicate; counterintuitive methods to raise Future-ready children; strategies to avoid falling into the "AI Obesity" trap; and blueprints for leveraging AI to turn your company into an unstoppable force of innovation.

Beyond Powerful Radio is a complete guide to becoming a powerful communicator for radio, Internet, TV, public speaking - anyone who wants to learn to communicate powerfully. It's a cookbook for communicators and broadcasters to improve. It's practical; it's easy. You'll find techniques to create content, produce and host a show, grow an audience, news gathering, coverage of investigative and breaking stories, and writing and delivering commercial copy.

In a world of polycrisis—where climate collapse, AI acceleration, societal fragmentation, and economic instability collide—business leaders can no longer maintain the status quo. From now until 2030, CEOs will be expected to lead the reinvention in this volatile new reality.

Who invented beds? When did we start cleaning our teeth? How old are wine and beer? Which came first: the toilet seat or toilet paper? What was the first clock? Every day, from the moment our alarm clock wakes us in the morning until our head hits our pillow at night, we all take part in rituals that are millennia old. Structured around one ordinary day, A Million Years in a Day reveals the astonishing origins and development of the daily practices we take for granted.

From a renowned computer scientist, this book seeks the distinctive human quality that will prevail against artificial intelligence. If artificial intelligence takes over decision-making what, then, is unique and irreplaceable about human intelligence? The Atomic Human is a journey of discovery...

From one of the world’s top researchers on work and technology comes an insightful and surprising guide to protecting your skill in a world filling with AI and robots. Think of your most valuable skill, the thing you can reliably do under pressure to deliver results. How did you learn it?...

Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.

Want to know how AT&T's Bell Labs developed semiconductor technology - and how its leading scientists almost came to blows in the process? Want to understand how radio and television work - and why RCA drove their inventors to financial ruin and early graves? Conquering the Electron offers these stories and more, presenting each revolutionary technological advance right alongside blow-by-blow personal battles that all too often took place.