Showing results for "Technology and the Future" in History & Culture

Technology promises to save humanity. How's that working out? In this comedy-science podcast, comedy legends Richard Ayoade (determinedly pessimistic) and Warwick Davis (inexplicably cheerful) venture beneath Audible HQ to the Future Tense lab, fully equipped to interrogate the future we're all being told to look forward to.

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 Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a "usable past" that can help us determine our digital future. What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources - like the internet - in common?

In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team.

How will AI evolve and what major innovations are on the horizon? What will its impact be on the job market, economy, and society? What is the path toward human-level machine intelligence? What should we be concerned about as artificial intelligence advances? Architects of Intelligence contains a series of in-depth, one-to-one interviews where New York Times best-selling author Martin Ford uncovers the truth behind these questions from some of the brightest minds in the artificial intelligence community.

Terrence Sejnowski offers a nuanced exploration of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and what their future holds. How should we go about understanding LLMs? Do these language models truly understand what they are saying? Or is it possible that what appears to be intelligence in LLMs may be a mirror that merely reflects the intelligence of the interviewer? In this book, Sejnowski, a pioneer in computational approaches to understanding brain function, answers all our urgent questions about this astonishing new technology.

Today, not only is everything digital getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, we also have the Internet. When these two revolutions - one in technology and the other in communications - joined, an explosive force was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation. And with any change, we have seen many strategic blunders and extraordinary learning curves along the way.

Acclaimed futurist, author, and digital strategist Bernard Marr delivers a compelling and engaging discussion of the technologies driving the impending—and ongoing—transformation of the internet, including blockchain, augmented reality (AR), and more. In the book, you'll explore the risks and opportunities presented by these game-changing techs and how they might impact you, your organization, and community.

Künstliche Intelligenz ist die Coming Wave, der nächste technologische Sprung, der sich nicht aufhalten lässt. Wir nähern uns einem kritischen Punkt in der Menschheitsgeschichte. Die Künstliche Intelligenz steht noch am Anfang, doch die Welle baut sich auf, und wir sind darauf nicht vorbereitet. Mustafa Suleyman ist Mitbegründer von DeepMind, dem KI-Pionier, der nun Teil von Alphabet ist, dem Google-Mutterkonzern. Er ist der ultimative KI-Insider. Sein Buch zeigt, was auf dem Spiel steht, und fragt, wie wir von den neuen Technologien profitieren können, ohne die Kontrolle zu verlieren.

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 grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

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?

Artificial intelligence may be the most transformative technology of our time. As AI’s power grows, so does the need to figure out what—and who—this technology is really for. AI Needs You argues that it is critical for society to take the lead in answering this urgent question and ensuring that AI fulfills its promise.

In an era of seemingly instant change, it's easy to think that today's revolutions - in communications, business, and many areas of daily life - are unprecedented. Today's changes may be new and may be happening faster than ever before. But our ancestors at times were just as bewildered by rapid upheavals in what we now call “networks” - the physical links that bind any society together.

In this pioneering work, technology lawyer Rahul Matthan traces the changing notions of privacy from the earliest times to its evolution through landmark cases in the UK, US and India. In the process, he reimagines the way we should be thinking about privacy today if we are to take full advantage of modern data technologies, cautioning against getting so obsessed with their potential harms that we design our laws to prevent us from benefiting from them at all.

As AI takes hold across the planet and wealthy nations seek to position themselves as global leaders of this new technology, the gap is widening between those who benefit from it and those who are subjugated by it. As Rachel Adams shows in this hard-hitting book, growing inequality is the single biggest threat to the transformative potential of AI. Not only is AI built on an unequal global system of power, it stands poised to entrench existing inequities, further consolidating a new age of empire.

Astrophysicist J. Craig Wheeler, former president of the American Astronomical Society, takes a critical look at the technological advances shaping our future. From artificial intelligence to genetic engineering, Wheeler explores how these innovations are interconnected and the potential they hold for humanity's evolution. With thought-provoking insights into the ethical dilemmas we face, Wheeler stresses the importance of staying informed and proactive.

No longer an uncertain technology of the distant future, artificial intelligence is starting to shape every aspect of our daily lives, from how we think to who we love. In this urgent polemic, leading barrister Susie Alegre explores the ways in which artificial intelligence threatens our fundamental human rights—including the rights to life, liberty and fair trial; the right to private and family life; and the right to free expression—and how we protect those rights.

Former physicist Andrew Maynard threads together his love of science-fiction movies with his expertise on emerging technologies to engage, entertain, and make you think about the relationship between technology and society. Through the imagination and creativity of science-fiction movies, Maynard introduces listeners to the profound capabilities presented by new and emerging technologies, and the complex personal and societal challenges they present.

Digital Liberty explores the imminent convergence of three pivotal themes: data, artificial intelligence, and society’s intricate social graph, and warns of a looming crisis that threatens to challenge the very foundations of liberal democracies. Two distinct paths unfurl–a dystopian trajectory marked by surging inequality, globalized elites, and societal unrest, and a utopian alternative rooted in adapting to this impending crisis.