Computer History

UNLOCK YOUR GAME'S NARRATIVE POTENTIAL! With increasingly sophisticated video games being consumed by an enthusiastic and expanding audience, the pressure is on game developers like never before to deliver exciting stories and engaging characters. With Video Game Storytelling, game writer and...

This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people - specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism) - and invites listeners to "build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability".

A top cybersecurity journalist tells the story behind the virus that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear efforts and shows how its existence has ushered in a new age of warfare—one in which a digital attack can have the same destructive capability as a megaton bomb. “Immensely enjoyable...

This provocative book introduces a brand-new view of technology. It suggests that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kevin Kelly looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover "what it wants." He uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology's long course and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where technology is headed.

This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.

In Millennium, best-selling historian Ian Mortimer takes the listener on a whirlwind tour of the last 10 centuries of Western history. It is a journey into a past vividly brought to life and bursting with ideas, that pits one century against another in his quest to measure which century saw the greatest change. We journey from a time when there was a fair chance of your village being burned to the ground by invaders - and dried human dung was a recommended cure for cancer - to a world in which explorers sailed into the unknown and civilizations came into conflict.

Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz reveals in fascinating detail how big data offers insights into the most intimate aspects of our psyches and how these insights empower an external influence over the choices we make. This can be creepy, manipulative, and downright harmful, with scandals like that of British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica being merely the tip of the iceberg.

NASA’s history is a familiar story, one that typically peaks with Neil Armstrong taking his small step on the Moon in 1969. But America’s space agency wasn’t created in a vacuum. It was assembled from pre-existing parts, drawing together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer. Breaking the Chains of Gravity tells the story of America’s nascent space program, its scientific advances, its personalities and the rivalries it caused between the various arms of the US military.

Artificial Intelligence is no longer confined to data science and automation—it’s now a powerful ally in the creative process. AI in Creative Workflows explores how cutting-edge AI tools are reshaping the way artists, designers, writers, and content creators conceptualize, produce, and refine their work.

Block by Block offers an original perspective on thermodynamic science and history based on the three approaches of a practicing engineer, academician, and historian. The book synthesizes and gathers into one accessible volume a strategic range of foundational topics involving the atomic theory, energy, entropy, and the laws of thermodynamics.

A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives—and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes listeners inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.

The extraordinary story of how the human brain evolved… and is still evolving. We’ve come a long way. The earliest human had a brain as small as a child’s fist; ours are four times bigger, with spectacular abilities and potential we are only just beginning to understand. This is How the...

Paul Kennedy, award-winning author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and one of today’s most renowned historians, now provides a new and unique look at how World War II was won. Engineers of Victory is a fascinating nuts-and-bolts account of the strategic factors that led to Allied victory. Kennedy reveals how the leaders’ grand strategy was carried out by the ordinary soldiers, scientists, engineers, and businessmen responsible for realizing their commanders’ visions of success.

A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in American corporate history.

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 The Distracted Mind, leading psychologist Larry Rosen and pioneering neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley explain why our minds have become addicted to email, text messages, virtual worlds, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Through compelling true stories and scientific research, they show how digital distractions affect every aspect of life, from work, safety, and communication to our relationships and health.

En esta monumental historia, Vaclav Smil ofrece una impresionante panorámica de cómo la energía ha impulsado el progreso cultural y económico de las sociedades humanas durante los últimos diez mil años, desde los primeros grupos de cazadores-recolectores hasta la civilización fósil, pasando por las sociedades agrícolas tradicionales y la "gran transición" que lo cambió todo.

Both entertaining and instructive, High Noon offers valuable lessons for taking charge of your destiny and succeeding in a fast-paced, unpredictable, and even hostile environment. It is the inside story of Sun Microsystem's rise to power, from its shaky start in Silicon Valley through its transformation under the aggressive and inspirational leadership of Scott McNealy.

The term metaverse is suddenly everywhere, from debates over Fortnite to the pages of the New York Times to the speeches of Mark Zuckerberg, who proclaimed in June 2021 that “the overarching goal” of Facebook is to “bring the metaverse to life”. But what, exactly, is the metaverse? As pioneering theorist and venture capitalist Matthew Ball explains, it is the successor to the mobile internet that has defined the last two decades.

Like a thief in the night, artificial intelligence has inserted itself into our lives. It makes important decisions for us every day. Often, we barely notice. As Joe Allen writes in this groundbreaking book, “Transhumanism is the great merger of humankind with the Machine. At this stage in history, it consists of billions using smartphones. Going forward, we’ll be hardwiring our brains to artificial intelligence systems.” With an academic background in both science and theology, Allen confronts the paradox of what he calls “good people constructing a digital abomination.”