Machine World

In the fourth book of the series, James McGill is up for promotion. Not everyone is happy about that, and McGill must prove he's worth his stripes. Deployed to a strange alien planet outside the boundaries of the Galactic Empire, he's caught up in warfare and political intrigue. Earth expands, the Cephalopod Kingdom launches ships to stop us, and a grand conspiracy emerges among the upper ranks of the Hegemony military.

Authors Womack, Jones, and Roos provided a comprehensive description of the entire lean system. They exhaustively documented its advantages over the mass production model pioneered by General Motors and predicted that lean production would eventually triumph. Indeed, they argued that it would triumph not just in manufacturing but in every value-creating activity from health care to retail to distribution.

In June of 2024, thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of video game equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer. Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI.

From a New York Times investigative reporter, this “authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media” (New York Times Book Review) tracks the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech’s breakneck race to drive engagement—and profits—at all costs fractured the world, and is “an essential book for our times” (Ezra Klein).

'Jaw-dropping revelations . . . The incredible story of [Man United] laid bare in new book' – Daily Mail 'A gripping tale, full of insight. Blackhurst is an enormously talented writer' – City A.M. From Chris Blackhurst, the former Editor of the Independent, comes The World's Biggest Cash...

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

After a shootout in Dubai left Hamza al-Saud dead and elevated brilliant aeronautical engineer Qasim Nadar to hero status in England, everyone assumes the terrorist threat from al Qadar has been eliminated. Everyone except JSOC counterterrorism analyst Whitney Watts. But when she decides to help MI6 penetrate Nadar’s secret network, Watts gets a little too close to the truth and finds herself in a deadly situation not even her teammates from Tier One can save her from.

Not too long ago, the cyborg NSLICE-00P—Non-Standard Leashed-Intelligence Cybernetic Enforcer—was an unstoppable machine of war. But when a fateful murder caused her to be launched into a whole new reality, she slowly began to realize that she could be something more . . . if she wanted.

Liam Chapman cannot believe his good fortune. He just bought a real, working time machine at a garage sale for $3. Sure, it’s labeled “World’s Worst Time Machine,” but how bad could it be? The time machine, as it turns out, is so much worse than Liam could have imagined. First, it summons Thomas Edison, but not that Thomas Edison. This Thomas Edison is a 10-year-old aspiring gangster from 1933 who demands to be called “Tommy Twinkles” and is also very interested in robbing a bank of the future.

To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making.

This audiobook is masterfully read by the author, Mo Gawdat. One of The Sunday Times' Business Books of the Year Technology is putting our humanity at risk to an unprecedented degree. This book is not for engineers who write the code or the policy makers who claim they can regulate it. This is a...

Did the ancient Greeks and Romans have conspiracy theories? Did they come close to an industrial revolution? Did they drink beer? In a series of fast-paced essays, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines answers 40 questions that ancient historian Garrett Ryan has been asked in the classroom and through his popular YouTube channel ToldinStone. As in Dr. Ryan's previous book—Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants—the emphasis is on the fascinating details of daily life in the classical world.

What does it mean to be smart? To be human? What do we really want from life and the intelligence we have, or might create? With deep and exclusive reporting, across hundreds of interviews, New York Times Silicon Valley journalist Cade Metz brings you into the rooms where these questions are being answered. Where an extraordinarily powerful new artificial intelligence has been built into our biggest companies, our social discourse, and our daily lives, with few of us even noticing.

Artificial intelligence is going to change the world as we know it. But the real danger isn't some robot that's going to enslave us: It's our own brain. Our brains are constantly making decisions using shortcuts, biases, and hidden processes—and we're using those same techniques to create technology that makes choices for us. In The Loop, award-winning science journalist Jacob Ward reveals how we are poised to build all of our worst instincts into our AIs, creating a narrow loop where each generation has fewer, predetermined, and even dangerous choices.

The rulers’ mistakes are paid for with the blood of the people. This is shown in history both recent and ancient, time and time again. It was no different for an Austrian mountain farmer’s son who was thrown into the carnage of the Eastern Front. He was in the prime of his youth, and the German Reich was already close to losing the war. In ripe-old age, he remembers those dark hours that have haunted him throughout his life.

Real-World Machine Learning will teach you the concepts and techniques you need to be a successful machine learning practitioner without overdosing you on abstract theory and complex mathematics. By working through immediately relevant examples in Python, you'll build skills in data acquisition and modeling, classification, and regression. You'll also explore the most important tasks like model validation, optimization, scalability, and real-time streaming. When you're done, you'll be ready to successfully build, deploy, and maintain your own powerful ML systems.

This book celebrates the immense drama and beauty of the car, of the genius embodied in the Ford Model T, of the glory of the brilliant-red Mercedes Benz S-Class made by workers for Nelson Mandela on his release from prison, of Kanye West's "chopped" Maybach, of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, and even of that harbinger of the end—the Tesla Model S and its creator Elon Musk. As the age of the car as we know it comes to an end, Bryan Appleyard's brilliantly insightful book tells the story of the rise and fall of the incredible machine that made the modern world what it is today.

H.G. Wells (1866 -1946)—the master of the genre—created his "scientific romances" and set the standard for futuristic literature that teemed with both social commentary and a prescient view of the world to come. Here, we present The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, two of the most popular and thrilling science-fiction novels ever created...together in one volume.

In what many refer to as one of the first and greatest science fiction thrillers, a mysterious stranger wanders into an inn, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages. What lies beneath the bandages is something even more mysterious. As Wells tackles issues of identity, deception, and the deterioration of the human mind, listeners will be drawn into the story of the mysterious man, whose own mistakes end up whisking him into a whirlwind of deceit, terror, and even murder. In the end, the question will be asked: when your sense of self and identity vanish, who will you become?

The tragic fate of the British airship R101—which went down in a spectacular fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later—has been largely forgotten. In His Majesty’s Airship, S.C. Gwynne resurrects it in vivid detail, telling the epic story of great ambition gone terribly wrong.