Impact of science & technology on society
Showing 1–16 of 19 results
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21 Lessons For the 21St Century
£12.9921 Lessons For the 21St Century
‘Sapiens’ showed us where we came from. ‘Homo Deus’ looked to the future. ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’ explores the present. How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war, ecological cataclysms and technological disruptions? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? What should we teach our children? Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a thrilling journey through today’s most urgent issues.
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A city on Mars
£10.99A city on Mars
Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away – no climate change, no war, no Twitter – beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of original research, and interviews with leading space scientists, engineers and legal experts, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space tech and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the deep knowledge needed to have space-kids, build space-farms and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, ‘A City on Mars’ investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create a nightmare, both for settlers and the people they leave behind.
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Brave new words
£25.00Brave new words
Whether we like it or not, the AI revolution is coming to education. In ‘Brave New Words’, Salman Khan, the visionary behind Khan Academy, explores how artificial intelligence and GPT technology will transform learning, offering a roadmap for teachers, parents, and students to navigate this exciting (and sometimes intimidating) new world. An insider in the world of education technology, Khan explains the ins and outs of these cutting-edge tools and how they will forever change the way we learn and teach. Rather than approaching the ChatGPT revolution with white-knuckled fear, Khan wants parents and teachers to embrace AI and adapt to it (while acknowledging its imperfections and limitations), so that every student can complement the work they’re already doing in profoundly new and creative ways, to personalize learning, adapt assessments, and support success in the classroom.
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Fancy bear goes phishing
£10.99Fancy bear goes phishing
With lucidity and wit, Scott Shapiro establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society. And because hacking is a human story, he tells the fascinating tales of perpetrators including Robert Morris Jr, the graduate student who accidentally crashed the internet in the 1980s, and the Bulgarian ‘Dark Avenger’ who invented the first mutating computer-virus engine. We also meet a sixteen-year-old from South Boston who took control of Paris Hilton’s cell phone and the Russian intelligence officers who sought to take control of a US election, among others. In telling their stories, he exposes the hackers’ tool kits and gives fresh answers to vital questions – why is the internet so vulnerable, and what can we do in response?
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Joined-Up Thinking
£22.00Joined-Up Thinking
Almost everything we’ve ever achieved has been done by groups of people working together, sometimes across time and space. Like a hive of bees, or a flock of birds, our naturally social, interconnected brains are designed to function best collectively. New technology is helping us share our wisdom and knowledge much more diversely across race, class, gender and borders. And AI is sparking a revolution in our approach to intelligent thinking – linking us into fast-working brainnets for problem solving. Hannah Critchlow brings us an enlightening guide to our future through the evolving new science of collective intelligence. She reveals what it says about us as human beings, shares compelling examples and stories, and shows us how best we can work collectively at work, in families, in any team situation to improve our outcomes, our wellbeing, and our prospects.
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Ka-boom!
£10.99Ka-boom!
David Darling travels through space and time to find the largest, smallest, stickiest, loudest, quietest, fastest, slowest, heaviest and brightest?
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Money
£5.99Money
The titles in the ‘Vintage Minis’ series feature contributions by some of the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human.
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Pencil
£9.99Pencil
‘Object Lessons’ is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it. Pencils were used to sketch civilization’s greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw’s blade should make a cut, a pencil is creating. ‘Pencil’ offers a deep look at this common, almost ubiquitous, object.
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Surveillance
£8.99Surveillance
Surveillance is everywhere today, generating data about our purchasing, political, and personal preferences. This book shows how surveillance makes people visible and affects their lives, considers the technologies involved and how it grew to its present size and prevalence, and explores the pressing ethical questions surrounding it.
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The anxious generation
£25.00The anxious generation
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents in many countries around the world deteriorated suddenly in the early 2010s. Why have rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide risen so sharply, more than doubling in many cases? In this book, Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the decline of free-play in childhood and the rise of smartphone usage among adolescents are the twin sources of increased mental distress among teenagers. Haidt delves into the latest psychological and biological research to show how, between 2010 and 2015, childhood and adolescence got rewired.
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The atomic human
£25.00The atomic human
Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displaces us from our position at the centre of the world. Neil D. Lawrence’s book shows why these fears may be misplaced. Atomism, proposed by Democritus, suggested it was impossible to continue dividing matter down into ever smaller components: eventually we reach a point where a cut cannot be made (the Greek for uncuttable is ‘atom’). In the same way, by slicing away at the facets of human intelligence that can be replaced by machines, AI uncovers what is left: an indivisible core that is the essence of humanity. By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, the book reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded.
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The burning earth
£30.00The burning earth
Ever since innovations in agriculture vastly expanded production of the staples of food energy, our remarkable achievements in reshaping nature have brought about an overwhelming expansion in the life chances of billions of people. Yet every technological innovation has also empowered humans to exploit each other and the planet with devastating brutality, twinning the stories of environment and of Empire, genocide and eco-cide, as with Spanish silver mining in Peru and British gold mining in South Africa. After the age of empire, new nations raced to make up lost ground, expanding human freedom at devastating ecological cost. Amrith’s environmental lens provides an essential new way of understanding war: as a massive reshaping of the earth through the global mobilization of natural resources, those resources including humans themselves.
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The coming wave
£25.00The coming wave
We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will carry out complex tasks – operating businesses, producing unlimited digital content, running core government services and maintaining infrastructure. This will be a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than a step change in human capability. We are not prepared. As cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies.
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The coming wave
£10.99The coming wave
We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will carry out complex tasks – operating businesses, producing unlimited digital content, running core government services and maintaining infrastructure. This will be a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than a step change in human capability. We are not prepared. As cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies.
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The Lazarus Heist
£12.99The Lazarus Heist
Meet the Lazarus Group, a shadowy cabal of hackers accused of working on behalf of the North Korean state. They form one of the most effective criminal enterprises on the planet, having stolen more than $1bn in an international crime spree. Their targets include central banks, cryptocurrency companies, film studios and even the British National Health Service. Geoff White examines how the North Korean regime has harnessed cutting-edge technology to launch a decade-long campaign of brazen and merciless raids on its richer, more powerful adversaries.
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The long history of the future
£18.99The long history of the future
We love to imagine the future. But why is dramatic future technology always just around the corner, and never a reality? For decades we’ve delighted in dreaming about a sci-fi utopia, from flying cars and bionic humans to hoverboards; with driverless cars first proposed at the 1939 World’s Fair. And why not? Building a better world, be it a free-flying commute or an automated urban lifestyle is a worthy dream. Given the pace of technological change, nothing seems impossible anymore. But why are these innovations always out of reach? Delving into the remarkable history of technology, ‘The Long History of the Future’ also looks at what lies ahead, showing how the origins of our technology may provide insight into how it realistically evolves.
£18.99