Computer Science History

Optimization is the driving principle of our modern world. We now can manufacture, transport, and organize things more cheaply and faster than ever. Optimized models underlie everything from airline schedules to dating site matches. We strive for efficiency in our daily lives, obsessed with productivity and optimal performance. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsize cultural shape? And what is lost when efficiency is gained? Optimal Illusions traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America’s founding principles to its modern manifestations.

The story of the rise of modern navigation technology, from radio location to GPS—and the consequent decline of privacy. What does it mean to never get lost? You Are Here examines the rise of our technologically aided era of navigational omniscience—or how we came to know exactly where we are at all times. Filled with tales of scientists and astronauts, inventors and entrepreneurs, You Are Here tells the story of how humankind ingeniously solved one of its oldest and toughest problems—only to herald a new era in which it’s impossible to hide.

Afrique 3.0 propose une voie réaliste, ambitieuse et profondément ancrée dans les réalités du continent. Porté par l’expérience d’un expert engagé dans les transformations digitales africaines, ce livre mêle récits historiques, diagnostics concrets et réflexions stratégiques. Il démontre qu’il est possible de faire beaucoup avec peu – à condition de penser frugal, d’agir agile, et de bâtir sur le capital humain africain.

Imagine a world with a robot in every home, office, and hospital. While many people may not yet be able to fully conceptualize it, this is the future that awaits us. The robot revolution will change our lives in ways we can't even yet imagine. With rapid advances in robotics technology, artificial intelligence, and battery energy storage, society is on the cusp of witnessing a breakthrough in a new kind of industrial revolution—one that will see intelligent robots playing an increasingly important role in our everyday lives.

Humanity is racing to create machine intelligence vastly smarter than the human brain. We will succeed. Blending accessible philosophy with the latest in AI developments, Mind Crime: The Moral Frontier of Artificial Intelligence forces listeners to grapple with the moral questions we can no longer afford to ignore. Are we prepared for the consequences of artificial superintelligence? Will humanity's survival be threatened, perhaps within years? Is digital consciousness possible? Are we sleepwalking into horrific moral catastrophe?

What kind of fossils will we leave, as relics into the far future? A blizzard of new objects has suddenly appeared on Earth: plastic bottles, ballpoint pens, concrete flyways, chicken bones, cans, teabags, phones, shirts. They're produced for our comfort and pleasure then quickly discarded. This new-made treasure chest underpins our lives. But it is also giving a completely new style of fossilization to our planet. Designed to resist corrosion and decay, many will remain, petrified, as future geology.

The idea that human history is approaching a "singularity" - that ordinary humans will someday be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence, or both - has moved from the realm of science fiction to serious debate. Some singularity theorists predict that if the field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop at its current dizzying rate, the singularity could come about in the middle of the present century.

AI + The New Human Frontier: Reimagining the Future of Time, Trust + Truth by Erica Orange, a renowned futurist, offers a compelling exploration of generative AI's potential to enhance human creativity rather than replace it. This pivotal book navigates how AI tools will help shape the human experience, and aid in augmenting human ingenuity and imagination.

In Eisenhower's Sputnik Moment, Yanek Mieczkowski examines the early history of America's space program, reassessing Eisenhower's leadership. He details how Eisenhower approved breakthrough satellites, supported a new civilian space agency, signed a landmark science education law, and fostered improved relations with scientists. Offering a fast-paced account of this Cold War episode, Mieczkowski demonstrates that Eisenhower built an impressive record in space and on earth.

Women are not ancillary to the history of technology; they turn up at the very beginning of every important wave. But they've often been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize. Vice reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the Internet what it is today. Evans shows us how these women built and colored the technologies we can't imagine life without.

Former Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen was among the earliest to write about the dangers that the Internet poses to our culture and society. His 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur was critical in helping advance the conversation around the Internet, which has now morphed from a tool providing efficiencies and opportunities for consumers and business to an elemental force that is profoundly reshaping our societies and our world.

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put it on the shelf, lend it to a friend, or sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the eBooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don't own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your eBook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation - as Amazon deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers.

When Pete Etchells was 13, his father died from motor neurone disease. In order to cope, he immersed himself in a virtual world - first as an escape, but later to try to understand what had happened. Etchells is now a researcher into the psychological effects of video games, and was co-author on a recent paper explaining why WHO plans to classify "game addiction" as a danger to public health are based on bad science and (he thinks) are a bad idea. In this, his first book, he journeys through the history and development of video games via scientific study....

Our smartphones have brought digital technology into the most intimate spheres of life. It's time to take control of them, repurposing them as pathways to a democratically designed and maintained digital commons that prioritizes people over profit. Smartphones have appeared everywhere seemingly overnight: since the first iPhone was released, in 2007, the number of smartphone users has skyrocketed to over two billion.

Break out the TV dinners! From the author who gave us Cod, Salt, and other informative bestsellers, the first biography of Clarence Birdseye, the eccentric genius inventor whose fast-freezing process revolutionized the food industry and American agriculture.

Homesteading Space is more than a story of technological and scientific success; it is also an absorbing, sometimes humorous, often inspiring account of the determined, hardworking individuals who shepherded the program through a near-disastrous launch, a heroic rescue, an exhausting study of Comet Kohoutek, and the lab's descent into the Indian Ocean. Featuring the unpublished in-flight diary of astronaut Alan Bean, it is replete with the personal recollections and experiences of the Skylab crew and those who worked with them in training, during the mission, and the return.

A worldwide race is on to perfect the next engine of economic growth, the advanced lithium-ion battery. It will power the electric car, relieve global warming, and catapult the winner into a new era of economic and political mastery. Can the United States win? Steve LeVine was granted unprecedented access to a secret federal laboratory outside Chicago, where a group of geniuses is trying to solve this next monumental task of physics. But these scientists - almost all foreign born - are not alone.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies had become deeply embedded in children’s lives, despite a growing body of research detailing the harms of excessive immersion in the unregulated, powerfully seductive, profit-driven world of the “kid-tech” industry. In Who’s Raising the Kids? Linn—one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of Big Tech and big business on children—explores the roots and consequences of this monumental shift toward a digitized, commercialized childhood, focusing on kids’ values, relationships, and learning.

Virtually Human explores what the not-too-distant future will look like when cyberconsciousness - simulation of the human brain via software and computer technology - becomes part of our daily lives. Meet Bina48, the world's most sentient robot, commissioned by Martine Rothblatt and created by Hanson Robotics.

There has been a lot of ink devoted to discussions of how robots will replace us and take our jobs. But MIT Media Lab researcher and technology policy expert Kate Darling argues just the opposite, and that treating robots with a bit of humanity, more like the way we treat animals, will actually serve us better.