The most recommended technology books

The modern world is defined by the relentless pace of technological change. But what is technology and how in the world does progress occur? Economists often treat the process of innovation as a “black box” out of which new products and processes emerge. Arthur opens the lid of this box and provides an eye-opening set of insights about how things work inside the box, and how that affects the rate and direction of innovation.

This linked story collection is in the same inimitable vein as Egan’s bestselling A Visit from the Goon Squad—and every bit as good. Egan is such a gifted storyteller. She knows how to get and keep the narrative ball rolling and is extremely good at creating vivid characters you have no choice but to root for.

One of the things I love about this book of linked stories is its through-line, a fascinating science fiction conceit revolving around the idea of a mass-downloadable consciousness. In addition to capturing a reader’s imagination, this device allows Egan to display her virtuosity in creating gripping narratives with various highly creative and often experimental points of view.

For me, Egan is a genius, one of the most important and enjoyable short fiction writers of our time!

To be honest, I did not expect to learn something new from this book, given the fact that I have been working on enterprise-level applications since high school, which mostly follow a microservice architecture. 

Still, I have to admit that in Richardson's discussion on decomposition strategies, inter-service communication, and managing distributed data, I still got some valuable insights into dealing with such an architecture. Particularly, the saga pattern for managing transactions was definitely a game-changer for me.

Winchester brings a long life of research to this study of the ways we have striven over millennia to preserve and disseminate knowledge, from the earliest writing to books to the internet.  He sees knowledge as the force for good and recounts how evil can seek to suppress, subvert, or misuse it.

In my poems, I try to question our ideas of progress.  The good we achieve is fragile, always dependent on an endless dialogue of self-awareness.

I like this book because the authors have unearthed powerful insights. In one Reuters study, they say, of slightly more than 1,300 business managers in Europe, the U.S., Southeast Asia, and Australia, 33% of managers were suffering ill health as a direct result of information overload. Nearly two-thirds reported that tension with colleagues and diminished job satisfaction were directly related to the stress of information overload. A majority also admitted that their social and personal relationships have suffered as a result of the stress of having to cope with too much information. That kind of information puts in perspective what so many career professionals experience all too often.

The book delves into territory to which we can all relate, citing, for example, that many managers feel increasing technology leads to loss of privacy, information inundation, and erosion of face-to-face contact. And who among us is happy to have to continually… show more.

Who doesn’t love reading about themselves? 

Chromey has a whole different way of looking at generational differences. When I interviewed him on my podcast, he did a fair critique of the typical division of generations by arbitrary birth years.

Far more important, he says, is to look at the technology that shaped the environment, and hence the mindsets and attitudes of the people who adopted and used that technology as part of their growing up during their ‘coming of age’ years.

Huh. It’s obvious and makes complete sense to me. 

The book outlines the chief technologies that shaped attitudes: transportation-telephone, motion pictures, radio, vinyl, television, space, gamer, cable television, personal computer-cell phone, internet, iTech, robotics. And I’d add coming now - artificial intelligence.

On top of all that is the pattern of swinging between optimism and pessimism across the generations across a spring/summer/winter/autumn cyclical model. Very smart.

Chromey includes timeline… show more.

I have been a fan of Gothic and melodrama since I first watched the 1931 film Frankenstein with Boris Karloff–and I was delighted to discover that the book is even better and so much more than what we’ve ever seen on screen.

Frankenstein’s monster is articulate and soulful in Mary Shelley’s atmospheric, dread-filled original novel, and his plight is all the more moving because of it. She wrote it when she was just 18 years old, still grieving over the death of her first child two years earlier. I feel her aching sorrow on every page. 

Jesikah Sundin is one of my absolute favorite indie authors. Not only are her pages rich with easter eggs and factual knowledge, she weaves them together in a magical way that makes her stories utterly impossible to put down. Of Heart and Stone is technically the second book in the Ealdspell Cycle, but as they’re standalones, you can read them out of order just fine. And this Snow White retelling is so worth the read. Not only does she intermingle a world of technology and magic, she does it so seamlessly it feels completely natural. Add in that she writes delightful slow-burn romance, and add in the feminist vibes that make her stories deeper still, and truly, you’ll inhale the whole series.

This book is a timely primer on the promise and peril of artificial intelligence (AI) authored by an unlikely coalition of insightful thinkers: a 100-year-old diplomat, a former Google chief executive, and an M.I.T. professor.

They present an interesting overview of the range of AI technologies and their likely impact on many spheres of life, from medicine and the military to health care and urban development.

The result is an accessible, thought-provoking book that asks important questions about the role of machine learning in changing human society, for good and ill.

This was a fascinating book that told the interesting story of the brilliant minds that pioneered behavioral economics. Even aside from the actual psychological concepts discussed, the story itself was great.

I found the part about the pushback from the more classically trained University of Chicago-type economists that the early behavioral economists got to be something I wouldn’t have thought would have been the case. The book also provided many examples that introduced the world of how behavioral economists think to me.

It’s a wonderful read for anyone interested in psychology or economics.