Our Final Invention

Our Final Invention
Author: James Barrat
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1250032261

Elon Musk named Our Final Invention one of 5 books everyone should read about the future A Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013 Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI's Holy Grail—human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine. Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?

Our Final Invention

Our Final Invention
Author: James Barrat
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0312622376

Elon Musk named Our Final Invention one of 5 books everyone should read about the future A Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013 Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI's Holy Grail—human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine. Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?

Our Final Invention

Our Final Invention
Author: James Barrat
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-07-20
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1529434637

'I wish it was science fiction, but I know it's not.' Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype 'If you read just one book that makes you confront scary high-tech realities that we'll soon have no choice but to address, make it this one.' Washington Post Corporations and government agencies around the world have for years been pouring billions into achieving AI's Holy Grail - human-level intelligence. But once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine. First published ten years ago, Our Final Invention predicted much of the artificial 'intelligence explosion' that is now ripping through our culture, and was named by Elon Musk as one of five books everyone should read about the future. Now with an urgent new preface, James Barrat's landmark work explores the ethics, history and future perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Author: Brian Selznick
Publisher: Scholastic
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2015-09-03
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1407166573

An orphan and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy train station. He desperately believes a broken automaton will make his dreams come true. But when his world collides with an eccentric girl and a bitter old man, Hugo's undercover life are put in jeopardy. Turn the pages, follow the illustrations and enter an unforgettable new world!

The Invention of Everything Else

The Invention of Everything Else
Author: Samantha Hunt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2009
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 054708577X

Hunt's novel is a wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between theeccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla lived out his last days.

Pure Invention

Pure Invention
Author: Matt Alt
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2021-06-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1984826719

The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured—and transformed—the world’s imagination. “A masterful book driven by deep research, new insights, and powerful storytelling.”—W. David Marx, author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style Japan is the forge of the world’s fantasies: karaoke and the Walkman, manga and anime, Pac-Man and Pokémon, online imageboards and emojis. But as Japan media veteran Matt Alt proves in this brilliant investigation, these novelties did more than entertain. They paved the way for our perplexing modern lives. In the 1970s and ’80s, Japan seemed to exist in some near future, gliding on the superior technology of Sony and Toyota. Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the “lost decades” of deep recession and social dysfunction. The end of the boom should have plunged Japan into irrelevance, but that’s precisely when its cultural clout soared—when, once again, Japan got to the future a little ahead of the rest of us. Hello Kitty, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and multimedia empires like Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits. Artfully packaged, dangerously cute, and dizzyingly fun, these products gave us new tools for coping with trying times. They also transformed us as we consumed them—connecting as well as isolating us in new ways, opening vistas of imagination and pathways to revolution. Through the stories of an indelible group of artists, geniuses, and oddballs, Pure Invention reveals how Japan’s pop-media complex remade global culture.

The Last Word on Power

The Last Word on Power
Author: Tracy Goss
Publisher: Rosetta Books
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2010-07-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0795308388

How leaders can achieve something meaningful—transform a brand, a workplace, a technology, themselves—beyond holding an influential position. Do you want to do work that is worthy of your time and talent? Do you want to make your mark on your industry, company, or within your community? Are you satisfied with the fact that reengineering, quality improvements, and other changes never really make a lasting impact? Then you need to go beyond the techniques of improvement and learn the skills that it takes to be extraordinary. The power to be extraordinary is not one we are born with. Rather, it is a power that one can learn, and Tracy Goss helps executives realize this power. Here in this book for the first time, Goss makes her coursework available to the general reader. Goss’s unique methodology shows how you how you can “put at risk the success you’ve become for the power of making the impossible happen.” She positions executives to take on the future that they dream about. She teaches how to behave differently so that you are free of past constraints. She shows how you can be at home in the environment in which you are constantly surrounded by threats, and how to transcend the ordinary to make the impossible happen. Her work has resulted in many important life changes and organizational reinventions worldwide. “Goss offers powerful information, far above the glib self-help mush that already lines the shelves. She answers the fundamental question of why management fads do not work: the personal work has not yet been done.” —Library Journal

The Singularity Is Near

The Singularity Is Near
Author: Ray Kurzweil
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 992
Release: 2005-09-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1101218886

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development. “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times “Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

The Invention of Yesterday

The Invention of Yesterday
Author: Tamim Ansary
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1610397975

From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.

The Invention of Humanity

The Invention of Humanity
Author: Siep Stuurman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2017-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674977513

For much of history, strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. Siep Stuurman traces evolving ideas of human equality and difference across continents and civilizations from ancient times to the present. Despite humans’ deeply ingrained bias against strangers, migration and cultural blending have shaped human experience from the earliest times. As travelers crossed frontiers and came into contact with unfamiliar peoples and customs, frontier experiences generated not only hostility but also empathy and understanding. Empires sought to civilize their “barbarians,” but in all historical eras critics of empire were able to imagine how the subjected peoples made short shrift of imperial arrogance. Drawing on the views of a global mix of thinkers—Homer, Confucius, Herodotus, the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, the Haitian writer Antenor Firmin, the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal, and more—The Invention of Humanity surveys the great civilizational frontiers of history, from the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies in ancient Eurasia and Africa, to Europeans’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the New World, to the Enlightenment invention of universal “modern equality.” Against a backdrop of two millennia of thinking about common humanity and equality, Stuurman concludes with a discussion of present-day debates about human rights and the “clash of civilizations.”