Computer History

Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines? But we aren't really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don't even know where that path might be. Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence and what it would take to get there.

In the course of our enduring quest for knowledge about ourselves and our universe, we haven't found answers to one of our most fundamental questions: Does life exist anywhere else in the universe? Ten years and billions of dollars in the making, the Mars rover Curiosity is poised toanswer this all-important question.

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.

From facial recognition—capable of checking us onto flights or identifying undocumented residents—to automated decision systems that inform everything from who gets loans to who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn't just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this "attention economy", we need to recognize the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to take back control.

Are there innovation truisms that hold from one initiative to the next? Are there strategies that appear again and again in the success stories of businesses as varied as gaming and cloud infrastructure? Are there behaviors common to creative leadership in every role, from research to sales? And if these patterns exist, could they be distilled into teachable practices? These are the questions Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin, two senior innovation leaders at Microsoft, set out to answer.

Von der Gründung der USA bis weit ins 20. Jahrhundert hinein arbeiteten die brillantesten Ingenieure und der demokratische Staat zusammen, um Technologien zu entwickeln, die die Welt verändern sollten. Diese Partnerschaft sicherte dem Westen eine beherrschende Stellung in der geopolitischen Ordnung. Doch diese Beziehung ist inzwischen erodiert. Statt die größten Herausforderungen unserer Zeit zu bewältigen, konzentriert sich das Silicon Valley auf den kapitalistischen Verbrauchermarkt.

„Wie KI unsere Zukunft gestalten wird“ ist in einem leicht verständlichen Stil geschrieben und widmet sich einer der zentralen Fragen unserer Zeit: Was können wir von der rasanten Entwicklung der KI erwarten? Wie wird sie unser Leben und unsere Gesellschaft in den kommenden Jahrzehnten verändern?

In this critical time between worlds, technology is shaping the future of our lives, both as individual human beings and collectively as a species. Technology has brought great blessings in multiple vectors, and those benefits are regularly sung in the public sphere. However, the notion that technology is value-neutral is simply not true. All technology is encoded with value, pseudo-value—or tragically, with anti-value. So technology also threatens us with risks to our very existence on this planet.

The first rung of the career ladder is gone. If you’re still hiring like it’s there, you’re building on air. Entry-level jobs are disappearing. AI agents are quietly replacing the roles that once gave humans a foothold. Internships lead nowhere. Degrees don’t translate. And your best-intentioned hiring programs are quietly failing the people they were designed to help. The Broken Ladder, created by Autonomous AI Agents, is your guide to stopping the collapse and building what comes next.

Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet.

Renowned space historian John Logsdon traces the greatest moments in human spaceflight by weaving together essential, fascinating documents from NASA's history with his expert narrative guidance. Beginning with rocket genius Wernher von Braun's vision for voyaging to Mars and closing with Elon Musk's contemporary plan to get there, this volume traces major events like the founding of NASA, the first American astronauts in space, the Apollo moon landings, the Challenger disaster, the daring Hubble Telescope repairs, and more.

If you want to learn key AI concepts to get you quickly up to speed with all things AI, then pay attention...This audiobook covers everything from machine learning to robotics and the internet of things. By the time you finish listening, you will be aware of what artificial neural networks are, how gradient descent and back propagation work, and what deep learning is. You will also learn a comprehensive history of AI, from the first invention of automations in antiquity to the driver-less cars of today.

Artificial intelligence surrounds us. More and more of the systems and services you interact with every day are based on AI technology. Most AI is narrowly specific; that is, it can only do a single thing, in a single context. Human intelligence is different. We can solve a variety of tasks, including those we have not seen before. In Artificial General Intelligence, Julian Togelius explores technical approaches to developing more general artificial intelligence and asks what general AI would mean for human civilization.

The most chilling dystopia is the one we build ourselves. What if George Orwell's 1984 wasn't a warning about the future—but a blueprint that Silicon Valley has been following for decades? In Room 101 Has Wi-Fi, David G. Stone exposes the terrifying reality that we're living in Orwell's dystopia right now. The difference? We're not prisoners—we're willing participants.

The bestselling author of E=mc2 weaves tales of romance, divine inspiration, and fraud through an account of the invisible force that permeates our universe—electricity—and introduces us to the virtuoso scientists who plumbed its secrets. For centuries, electricity was seen as little more...

The audiobook, How to Build a Computer (For Beginners), outlines step-by-step instructions on how to build a computer from the bare bones to the finished product. The book includes a list of choices for tools and supplies necessary to successfully build a computer on your own; using the author's educated knowledge and background on computer software and hardware.

Since Alan Turing first posed the question "Can machines think?" artificial intelligence has evolved from a speculative idea to a transformative force. The Shortest History of AI traces this evolution, from Ada Lovelace's visionary work to IBM's groundbreaking defeat of the chess world champion and the revolutionary emergence of ChatGPT. It also explores AI's cultural journey, touching on classics such as Frankenstein, A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

AIs are everywhere, and they're changing everything. AI Explained: Facts, Fiction, and Future from best-selling author Nigel Poulton is your fast-track easy-to-understand guide to the exciting new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The electrifying story behind technology’s greatest breakthroughs. From the first sparks of electrification to the dawn of artificial intelligence, Visionaries, Rebels and Machines is a rip-roaring adventure through the history of technology. It reveals how curiosity, ingenuity, bold breakthroughs and pure chance have driven progress, leading to the artificial intelligence, automation and cloud computing that’s reshaping our world today. It’s not just about how we got here, but also where we’re heading.