Computer Science History

A former US Navy intelligence officer, David Locke Hall was a federal prosecutor when a bizarre-sounding website, CRACK99, came to his attention. It looked like Craigslist on acid, but what it sold was anything but amateurish: thousands of high-tech software products used largely by the military, and for mere pennies on the dollar. Want to purchase satellite tracking software? No problem. Aerospace and aviation simulations? No problem. Communications systems designs? No problem.

Every day, we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, and shop with credit cards. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the 21st century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to profile us as workers, shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists, even lovers. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior.

The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius. In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task.

Fakten, wissenschaftlich fundiert und eindeutig belegt, sind Gold wert. Besonders dann, wenn Fake News oder Halbwahrheiten die öffentliche Debatte bestimmen und ein sachlicher Diskurs nicht mehr möglich ist. Ob Klimawandel, Homöopathie, Feinstaub oder Erblichkeit von Intelligenz - die Wissenschaftsjournalistin Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim räumt bei diesen und anderen großen Streitthemen mit diesem Missstand auf. Klarsichtig und kurzweilig legt sie dar, was faktisch niemand mehr bestreiten kann und worauf wir uns alle einigen können.

The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people.

Big Tech Tyrants boast riches beyond emperors of old but act like juveniles who don't want to grow up. They are modern-day robber barons. Big Tech Tyrants don't know the meaning of privacy, when it comes to you. They try to make you believe they will give their products away for free as a service to society, when really, they are vacuuming your personal data. They use this data to discover your deepest secrets. Big Tech Tyrants is an eye-opening, must-listen book for anyone living in the 21st century.

As AI and robotics eliminate jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels - underfunded or nonexistent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction without comparable job creation - will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources.

In 1977 a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in a house in Ithaca, New York to work on the most important mixtape ever conceived. It wasn’t from one person to another - it was from Earth to the cosmos. When NASA sent Voyagers 1 and 2 on a grand tour of the outer planets, they knew the ultimate fate of these plucky probes would be to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space.

Is it possible for something or someone to be made invisible? This question, which has intrigued authors of science fiction for over a century, has become a headline-grabbing topic of scientific research. In this book, science writer and optical physicist Gregory J. Gbur traces the science of invisibility from its sci-fi origins in the nineteenth-century writings of authors such as H. G. Wells and Fitz James O'Brien to modern stealth technology, invisibility cloaks, and metamaterials. He explores the history of invisibility and its science and technology connections.

We face a collapsing society with advancing technology—a dreadful situation. Here are some of the questions INTELLOPY answers by applying facts of reality and reason...

Beyond Human Thought: Evolution and History of Artificial Intelligence is a captivating journey through the strange, surprising, and often bewildering world of AI—from its philosophical roots in ancient myths to the mind-bending technology shaping our future. This book unpacks how humans went from dreaming about intelligent machines to actually building them. Beyond Human Thought explores the breakthroughs, the blunders, and the brilliant minds behind one of the most revolutionary forces in human history.

AI is a present reality: we live at the threshold of an AI-dominated era. AI is more than a Technology wave. In the 21st century and beyond it is the very core source of power that fuels politics, business, and society: our minds, our work, and our homes. AI also rewrites the rules and forces us to lose no time in rethinking fundamental questions of our humanity. Our human brains will soon be required to adapt at hyper speed to a new paradigm of omnipresent machine intelligence. We all have to deal with both its opportunities and threats in a conscious manner.

With the ongoing advancement of AI and other technologies, our world is becoming increasingly intelligent. From chatbots to innovations in brain-computer interfaces to the possibility of superintelligences leading to the Singularity later this century, our reality is being transformed before our eyes. This is commonly seen as the natural result of progress, but what if there's more to it than that? What if intelligence is an inevitability, an underlying property of the universe?

From Amazon's Alexa to Japan's robot chefs, technology is becoming increasingly saturated into our everyday lives. Previous technological revolutions have come and gone, but this one is different. For the first time in economic history, productivity and employment are diverging, suggesting that humans are contributing less to economic growth.

A New York Times Magazine writer explores the Next Big Thing in tech - the impending revolution in voice recognition - and shows how it will upend Silicon Valley and transform how we use computers, the Web, and much more. Every decade or so brings a seismic shift in how people interact with tech, from the PC to the internet to the smartphone. James Vlahos shows that we are on the cusp of the next shift: to voice computing. Siri and Alexa are early forms of this technology, but soon we may talk as fluently with our phones, appliances, cars, etc. as we do with any human.

The human race is caught in the crosshairs of twin threats stemming from exponential advances in technology. In Crisis of Control, Peter Scott lays out the stark choices and consequences facing us in clear, provocative, and sometimes humorous language.

Edward Ashford Lee explores the ways that engineers use models and abstraction to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of - for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But he also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim everything in the physical world is a computation - that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data.

Virtual reality is able to effectively blur the line between reality and illusion, pushing the limits of our imagination and granting us access to any experience imaginable. With well-crafted simulations, these experiences, which are so immersive that the brain believes they're real, are already widely available with a VR headset and will only become more accessible and commonplace. But how does this new medium affect its users, and does it have a future beyond fantasy and escapism? In Experience on Demand, Jeremy Bailenson draws on two decades spent researching the psychological effects of VR and other mass media to help listeners understand this powerful new tool.

You are a four-dimensional human. Each of us exists in three-dimensional physical space. But as a constellation of everyday digital phenomena rewires our lives, we are increasingly coaxed from the containment of our predigital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information, and global connection.

The Big Ratchet is the story of the ratchets: the technologies and innovations, big and small, that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket. Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. The Big Ratchet is the story of how it happened.