Ever since middle school, when our teacher promised that we would have
flying cars in our lifetimes, I’ve had a keen interest in scientific
and technological breakthroughs. And now, with the advancements in
Artificial Intelligence and genetic engineering, my interest has only
grown. I love technology, but my concern is that with the acceleration
of AI, science is outpacing common sense. Are we creating our
replacements? I hope you read my new novel: Crystal and the
Underlings: the future of humanity, and discover what could happen
when AI takes over!
Michio Kaku’s Visions inspired me to write my first novel focusing on artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and Androids.
Kaku interviewed one hundred and fifty peers in the scientific community to predict what the future might be like. Genetic Elites will roam the earth as well as Humanoid Robots, where Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing lead the way to seemingly impossible breakthroughs.
New in paperback, from the bestselling author of Hyperspace, this spellbinding book brings together the cutting-edge research of today's foremost scientists to explore the science of tomorrow. Michio Kaku describes the development of computers and artificial intelligence, reveals how the decoding of the genetic structure of DNA will allow us to alter and reshape our genetic inheritance, and observes how quantum physicists are perfecting new ways of harnessing the matter and energy of the Universe. Visions is an exhilarating adventure into the future of our planet and ourselves.
Saying just the right words in just the right way can cause a box of electronics to behave however you want it to behave… that’s an idea that has captivated me ever since I first played around with a computer at Radio Shack back in 1979. I’m always on the lookout for compelling ways to convey the topic to people who are open-minded, but maybe turned off by things that are overly technical. I teach computer science and study artificial intelligence as a way of expanding what we can get computers to do on our behalf.
The fields of Psychology, Economics, and Biology are well-known for offering interesting and informative introductory courses that provide a doorway into the area for budding scientists but also essential background knowledge appropriate for any educated person.
In Computer Science, we don't really do things that way. I wanted to offer a new kind of Computer Science introductory course that laid out the coolest ideas we have to offer along with compelling descriptions of why they matter.
I ended up using this book as the required reading in the class I built because it tells a personal, moving story while taking the reader from the nuts and bolts of bits and bytes all the way up to cutting-edge ideas surrounding artificial intelligence. It's a great read! Plus, it's short so I thought I could get my students to actually finish it.
Most people are baffled by how computers work and assume that they will never understand them. What they don't realize,and what Daniel Hillis's short book brilliantly demonstrates,is that computers'seemingly complex operations can be broken down into a few simple parts that perform the same simple procedures over and over again. Computer wizard Hillis offers an easy-to-follow explanation of how data is processed that makes the operations of a computer seem as straightforward as those of a bicycle.Avoiding technobabble or discussions of advanced hardware, the lucid explanations and colourful anecdotes in The Pattern on the Stone go straight to the heart…
It’s 2027. Rory O’Connor is the financial genius who helped create ICARUS, a quantum computer that controls the world’s stock markets with AI and algorithms. But Rory has recently suffered some tough breaks. He’s checked out of high finance and into a luxury Caribbean condo. After a former colleague finds…
I embarked on this arduous journey of making sense of the I in AI while working as an Assistant Professor of Finance, which, however, began to look increasingly uninteresting and oppressive. With this innovative endeavor, I return home to philosophy. Apart from being passionate about AI in academia, I’m a tech entrepreneur by heart with three software start-ups in Germany, Switzerland, and Malawi under my belt. Moreover, I served as Deputy Director of and Head of AI at the Swiss Fintech Innovation Lab in Zurich, as Director of Startup Grind Geneva, and I continue to fulfill my role as start-up coach/judge and mentor in various startup programs.
If there were only five things I could bring to an island to live on, Terrel Miedaner’s deeply thought-provoking fiction book The Soul of Anna Klane would be among those five items.
His book is on a question which is more fundamental than the one on the I in AI. The Soul of Anna Klane ponders the many sides of the question of what constitutes life and consciousness: the scientific, the atheistic, and the religious with due respect.
It showed me how little we know about the brain, mind, and soul. And if we don’t understand the center of human intelligence, how can we make sense of the I in AI? Undoubtedly one of the best books I have ever read. For this reason, it would be on an island where I only possess five things so that I’m not distracted from reading it again and again. The effect would…
She's the golden darling of a wealthy genius. A child-prodigy. Yogi adept. And dying of brain tumor. She wants to heal herself, but the courts and the doctors cry "no" - and enter her brain with an incredible million-dollar probe that cures her body, while it splits her soul -- and sends it hurtling into a psychic hell...
Only Anatol Klane knows of his daughter's spirit-death. Now he must take her life... and convince an astonished world that he has set her free...
I have always loved asking the big questions. What is justice? What is freedom? How should we live? I’ve been lucky to turn these questions into a career teaching philosophy, and I’m always inspired by authors who ask “Why?” in ways that shift our paradigms and broaden our minds. I’m also passionate about women who ask these questions—for too long, women were excluded from philosophy and not taken seriously when they wanted to know why. I loved writing a biography of Lydia Maria Child. So my list includes books by and about women like her: smart, witty, powerful women who ask why. Here’s to asking more questions and finding better answers!
This book is simultaneously so exhilarating and creepy that it had me yelling at my car’s sound system as I listened to it! O’Gieblyn uses biography, history, and current events to ask why humans are pursuing artificial intelligence and what it means for the value of being human.
She weaves her life story, including losing her fundamentalist faith and spiraling into addiction, into a riveting analysis of artificial intelligence with all its promise and peril. I loved that she gave historical background about our search for artificial intelligence while also explaining what is at stake as AI infiltrates our very understanding of what it is to be human.
I finished the book feeling better informed about AI and better grounded in why being human is valuable, no matter what technology does next.
A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States.
"Meghan O’Gieblyn is a brilliant and humble philosopher, and her book is an explosively thought-provoking, candidly personal ride I wished never to end ... This book is such an original synthesis of ideas and disclosures. It introduces what will soon be called the O’Gieblyn genre of essay writing.” —Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock
For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our…
I've been teaching math and physics for more than 20 years as a private tutor. During this time, I experimented with different ways to explain concepts to make them easy to understand. I'm a big fan of using concept maps to show the connections between concepts and teaching topics in an integrated manner, including prerequisites and applications. While researching the material for my book, I read dozens of linear algebra textbooks and watched hundreds of videos, looking for the best ways to explain complicated concepts intuitively. I've tried to distill the essential ideas of linear algebra in my book and prepared this list to highlight the books I learned from.
I like Prof. Cohen's book because it includes computational examples based on Python and NumPy to illustrate each concept. This is the way I like to think about linear algebra concepts.
Yes, it's important to understand the formulas and theoretical ideas, but applying linear algebra operations in the real world will always involve some computational platform and not pen and paper. This is the only book I know that shows readers the practical computational linear algebra in parallel with the theory.
The author provides computational notebooks for each chapter on GitHub, which makes it easy to explore all the material from a code-first computational perspective.
Linear algebra is perhaps the most important branch of mathematics for computational sciences, including machine learning, AI, data science, statistics, simulations, computer graphics, multivariate analyses, matrix decompositions, signal processing, and so on. The way linear algebra is presented in traditional textbooks is different from how professionals use linear algebra in computers to solve real-world applications in machine learning, data science, statistics, and signal processing. For example, the "determinant" of a matrix is important for linear algebra theory, but should you actually use the determinant in practical applications? The answer may surprise you! If you are interested in learning the mathematical…
As a graduate in computer science and electronics, I have had a successful career in the tech sector. I am interested in writing about the pattern of evolution that manifests in both humanity and machines. My books are based on science and contemplate the long history of human spirituality and how the two must someday converge.
The classic of classics, 2001: A Space Odyssey, offers a setting that could well be a reality in just a few years. The story begins long ago when alien intelligence leaves a marker for the apes that inhabit the Earth. The only problem is this marker is on the moon. But when humans are finally smart enough to discover it, it sends a signal to Jupiter. One of the inferences in the sequels to 2001 is that the alien intelligence itself is artificial—the product of a race that has delegated control and development of the galaxy to machines.
To pursue man's destiny, the mission to Jupiter must be placed in the care of the HAL 9000 computer. HAL is presented as the perfect mimic of human emotions and the ideal caretaker of its human cargo. But to carry out its mission, HAL must do something it can't. It must…
Written when landing on the moon was still a dream, and made into one of the most influential films of all time, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY remains a classic work of science fiction fifty years after its original publication.
The discovery of a black monolith on the moon leads to a manned expedition deep into the solar system, in the hope of establishing contact with an alien intelligence. Yet long before the crew can reach their destination, the voyage descends into disaster . . .
Brilliant, compulsive and prophetic, Arthur C. Clarke's timeless novel tackles the enduring theme of mankind's…
Captain Heron finds himself embroiled in a conflict that threatens to bring down the world order he is sworn to defend when a secretive Consortium seeks to undermine the World Treaty Organisation and the democracies it represents as he oversees the building and commissioning of a new starship.
When I left Wisconsin and arrived for a position at the University of Alaska Anchorage, I was struck by the state’s nearly manic fear of low prices for the oil flowing from Prudhoe Bay through the Alaska (or North Slope) oil pipeline. Years later I returned to Wisconsin and quickly learned that there was relatively little interest in a pipeline that ran down the entire state in the manner of the Alaska pipeline. Only this pipeline carried synthetic crude made from natural asphalt hacked or melted out of the ground in Alberta, Canada. My interest in the environmental and political aspects of that pipeline set me on the path to a book about asphalt.
Arguably, Bill McKibben has been this nation’s preeminent environmentalist since 1989 when he published The End of Nature. Falteris his latest book and it is a numbing take on our species and how we have damaged the environment, perhaps, to the point of no return. On the other hand, McKibben is as much an activist as an environmentalist and as such he cannot and, so far at least, has not lost hope no matter how dire the straits.
Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.
Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience.
I grew up loving sci-fi and fantasy, but especially today, I recognize how a lot of older sci-fi is patriarchal or even misogynistic. When I started to write my own books, like A Dragonbird in the Fern, I vowed to create my fantastical settings as I’d like our world to be someday—with all genders considered equal. Whether it’s a queen wielding all of the power or a witch who can save the world, women and girls in my stories get things done, and no one bats an eye.
The two girls in City of
Shattered Light could not be fiercer! Asa’s a runaway rich girl who flees
home to save her sister, a victim of scientific tests. Riven’s a tough smuggler
gunning for a big bounty to guarantee her a place in one of the city’s
matriarchal (!) crime syndicates. There’s kidnapping, a wild neon sci-fi world,
and a healthy portion of romantic longing. I loved this misfit team!
As darkness closes in on the city of shattered light, an heiress and an outlaw must decide whether to fend for themselves or fight for each other. As heiress to a powerful tech empire, seventeen-year-old Asa Almeida strives to prove she's more than her manipulative father's shadow. But when he uploads her rebellious sister’s mind to an experimental brain, Asa will do anything to save her sister from reprogramming—including fleeing her predetermined future with her sister’s digitized mind in tow. With a bounty on her head and a rogue AI hunting her, Asa’s getaway ship crash-lands in the worst possible…
I’m a New Zealand philosopher who’s written a lot about the human enhancement debate. Philosophers are well known for their willingness to defend unpopular conclusions against all critics. Sometimes they engage in what I call “philosophical shit-stirring". You may think that’s a profanity but it’s actually a technical term. I’ve advocated some deliberately unpopular shit-stirring conclusions in the past. One of these is liberal eugenics - the idea that you can turn an evil like eugenics into something good by prefacing it with the feel-good term “liberal”. These dialogues are the beginning of a philosophical stock-take on what we should or might become.
Schneier’s book taught me that hacking isn’t just something that occasionally happens to your laptop. The powerful hack the laws that govern our society too.
I wondered how the hacking mindset could apply to enhancement techs. Which enhancement techs will the elite reserve for themselves and which might they impose on the gig workers of the future? Suppose Neuralink does manage to get its tech into our heads. Imagine Musk finds himself just short of the funds needed to found his planned Martian city. Might beneficiaries of his brain-computer interfaces find themselves abruptly subject to overpowering urges to immediately own ten Teslas? This sounds absurd.
Perhaps the right question to ask is how crazy it is relative to cities of a million on Mars by 2050. Is it beyond the reach of Musk’s rule-breaking, can-do imagination?
A hack is any means of subverting a system's rules in unintended ways. The tax code isn't computer code, but a series of complex formulas. It has vulnerabilities; we call them "loopholes." We call exploits "tax avoidance strategies." And there is an entire industry of "black hat" hackers intent on finding exploitable loopholes in the tax code. We call them accountants and tax attorneys.
In A Hacker's Mind, Bruce Schneier takes hacking out of the world of computing and uses it to analyse the systems that underpin our society: from tax laws to financial markets to politics. He reveals an…
After solving her first case, private eye Siobhan O’Brien is hired by Phillip Ahn, an octogenarian billionaire with his own personal island in the Pacific Northwest. Ahn, a genius in artificial intelligence, swears that Duke, his youngest child and only son, is an impostor. Is Ahn crazy, or is Duke…
I am an African Australian writer and have a deep passion for black people's stories. I write across genres and forms, and my award-winning works are mostly Afrocentric. I have a master's degree in distributed computer systems, with distinction, a master's degree in creative writing, and a PhD in creative writing. I am especially curious about unique voices in black speculative fiction in transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, writing the other, and betwixt. I am an author of several novels and fiction collections, and a finalist in the 2022 World Fantasy Award. I was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’.
This Nommo-award-winning collection is experiential in its offerings of literary fragments yet bold and playful—a clean taste of Wole Talabi’s creativity and curiosity on genre and reimagining a future Africa. Talabi is unlike your typical short story writer, if there’s ever one. His stories are sharp, brisk, hauling the reader to mindful captivation. The collection is a transcultural odyssey into Yoruba mythology in stories of logic, illogic, the known and unknown, relationship and fallout, trust and betrayal, transposition, exposition, and much escapade. Virtual reality has a role here, as do gods and goddesses, victors, and survivors. Incomplete Solutions is a cross-genre degustation of possibilities and impossibilities that deconstruct the reader’s mindset.
An elderly woman in early 22nd century Lagos is called in to help test the artificial intelligence built from her genius mother’s mind, but all is not as it seems in the Nommo-award winning story, “The Regression Test”.
Exiled from Earth for a crime of passion, a young man must learn to survive a barely habitable prison planet and come to peace with his past in “Polaris”.
“Wednesday’s Story”, nominated for the 2018 Caine Prize, is at once a retelling of nursery rhymes and folklore and a meta-fictional meditation on the mechanics, art and power of storytelling.
