In the next ten years, change will happen even faster. As Hillary Clinton's Senior Advisor for Innovation, Alec Ross travelled nearly a million miles to forty-one countries, the equivalent of two round-trips to the moon. From refugee camps in the Congo and Syrian war zones, to visiting the world's most powerful people in business and government, Ross's travels amounted to a four-year masterclass in the changing nature of innovation. In The Industries of the Future, Ross distils his observations on the forces that are changing the world. He highlights the best opportunities for progress and explains how countries thrive or sputter. Ross examines the specific fields that will most shape our economic future over the next ten years, including robotics, artificial intelligence, the commercialization of genomics, cybercrime and the impact of digital technology. Blending storytelling and economic analysis, he answers questions on how we will need to adapt. Ross gives readers a vivid and informed perspective on how sweeping global trends are affecting the ways we live, now and tomorrow.

    Mirroring his theory, Minsky boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose pieces are assembled along the way. Each chapter -- on a self-contained page -- corresponds to a piece in the puzzle. As the pages turn, a unified theory of the mind emerges, like a mosaic. Ingenious, amusing, and easy to read, The Society of Mind is an adventure in imagination.

    The shift toward automation is about to create a tsunami of unemployment. Not in the distant future—now. One recent estimate predicts 45 million American workers will lose their jobs within the next twelve years—jobs that won't be replaced. In a future marked by restlessness and chronic unemployment, what will happen to American society? In The War on Normal People, Andrew Yang paints a dire portrait of the American economy. Rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and automation software are making millions of Americans' livelihoods irrelevant. The consequences of these trends are already being felt across our communities in the form of political unrest, drug use, and other social ills. The future looks dire-but is it unavoidable? In The War on Normal People, Yang imagines a different future—one in which having a job is distinct from the capacity to prosper and seek fulfillment. At this vision's core is Universal Basic Income, the concept of providing all citizens with a guaranteed income-and one that is rapidly gaining popularity among forward-thinking politicians and economists. Yang proposes that UBI is an essential step toward a new, more durable kind of economy, one he calls "human capitalism."

    These topics lie at the heart of many exciting areas of contemporary science and engineering - communication, signal processing, data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics, and cryptography. This textbook introduces theory in tandem with applications. Information theory is taught alongside practical communication systems, such as arithmetic coding for data compression and sparse-graph codes for error-correction. A toolbox of inference techniques, including message-passing algorithms, Monte Carlo methods, and variational approximations, are developed alongside applications of these tools to clustering, convolutional codes, independent component analysis, and neural networks. The final part of the book describes the state of the art in error-correcting codes, including low-density parity-check codes, turbo codes, and digital fountain codes -- the twenty-first century standards for satellite communications, disk drives, and data broadcast. Richly illustrated, filled with worked examples and over 400 exercises, some with detailed solutions, David MacKay's groundbreaking book is ideal for self-learning and for undergraduate or graduate courses. Interludes on crosswords, evolution, and sex provide entertainment along the way. In sum, this is a textbook on information, communication, and coding for a new generation of students, and an unparalleled entry point into these subjects for professionals in areas as diverse as computational biology, financial engineering, and machine learning.

    

    Algorithms have made our lives more efficient, more entertaining, and, sometimes, better informed. At the same time, complex algorithms are increasingly violating the basic rights of individual citizens. Allegedly anonymized datasets routinely leak our most sensitive personal information; statistical models for everything from mortgages to college admissions reflect racial and gender bias. Meanwhile, users manipulate algorithms to "game" search engines, spam filters, online reviewing services, and navigation apps.Understanding and improving the science behind the algorithms that run our lives is rapidly becoming one of the most pressing issues of this century. Traditional fixes, such as laws, regulations and watchdog groups, have proven woefully inadequate. Reporting from the cutting edge of scientific research, The Ethical Algorithm offers a new approach: a set of principled solutions based on the emerging and exciting science of socially aware algorithm design. Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth explain how we can better embed human principles into machine code - without halting the advance of data-driven scientific exploration. Weaving together innovative research with stories of citizens, scientists, and activists on the front lines, The Ethical Algorithm offers a compelling vision for a future, one in which we can better protect humans from the unintended impacts of algorithms while continuing to inspire wondrous advances in technology.

    Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Dr. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide. In Connected, the authors explain why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, Connected overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm-that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.

    Blade Runner, The Matrix, Star Wars, Avatar, Star Trek, Ready Player One and Avengers show us futuristic worlds where holograms, intelligent robots, smart devices, virtual avatars, digital transactions, and universe-scale teleportation work together perfectly, somehow seamlessly combining the virtual and the physical with the mechanical and the biological. Science fiction has done an excellent job describing a vision of the future where the digital and physical merge naturally into one — in a way that just works everywhere, for everyone. However, none of these visionary fictional works go so far as to describe exactly how this would actually be accomplished. While it has inspired many of us to ask the question—How do we enable science fantasy to become....science fact? The Spatial Web achieves this by first describing how exponentially powerful computing technologies are creating a great “Convergence.” How Augmented and Virtual Reality will enable us to overlay our information and imaginations onto the world. How Artificial Intelligence will infuse the environments and objects around us with adaptive intelligence. How the Internet of Things and Robotics will enable our vehicles, appliances, clothing, furniture, and homes to become connected and embodied with the power to see, feel, hear, smell, touch and move things in the world, and how Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies will secure our data and enable real-time transactions between the human, machine and virtual economies of the future. The book then dives deeply into the challenges and shortcomings of the World Wide Web, the rise of fake news and surveillance capitalism in Web 2.0 and the risk of algorithmic terrorism and biological hacking and “fake-reality” in Web 3.0. It raises concerns about the threat that emerging technologies pose in the hands of rogue actors whether human, algorithmic, corporate or state-sponsored and calls for common sense governance and global cooperation. It calls for business leaders, organizations and governments to not only support interoperable standards for software code, but critically, for ethical, and social codes as well. Authors Gabriel René and Dan Mapes describe in vivid detail how a new “spatial” protocol is required in order to connect the various exponential technologies of the 21st century into an integrated network capable of tracking and managing the real-time activities of our cities, monitoring and adjusting the supply chains that feed them, optimizing our farms and natural resources, automating our manufacturing and distribution, transforming marketing and commerce, accelerating our global economies, running advanced planet-scale simulations and predictions, and even bridging the gap between our interior individual reality and our exterior collective one. Enabling the ability for humans, machines and AI to communicate, collaborate and coordinate activities in the world at a global scale and how the thoughtful application of these technologies could lead to an unprecedented opportunity to create a truly global “networked” civilization or "Smart World.” The book artfully shifts between cyberpunk futurism, cautionary tale-telling, and life-affirming call-to-arms. It challenges us to consider the importance of today’s technological choices as individuals, organizations, and as a species, as we face the historic opportunity we have to transform the web, the world, and our very definition of reality.

    The algorithms you'll use most often as a programmer have already been discovered, tested, and proven. If you want to take a hard pass on Knuth's brilliant but impenetrable theories and the dense multi-page proofs you'll find in most textbooks, this is the book for you. This fully-illustrated and engaging guide makes it easy for you to learn how to use algorithms effectively in your own programs.Grokking Algorithms is a disarming take on a core computer science topic. In it, you'll learn how to apply common algorithms to the practical problems you face in day-to-day life as a programmer. You'll start with problems like sorting and searching. As you build up your skills in thinking algorithmically, you'll tackle more complex concerns such as data compression or artificial intelligence. Whether you're writing business software, video games, mobile apps, or system utilities, you'll learn algorithmic techniques for solving problems that you thought were out of your grasp. For example, you'll be able to:Write a spell checker using graph algorithmsUnderstand how data compression works using Huffman codingIdentify problems that take too long to solve with naive algorithms, and attack them with algorithms that give you an approximate answer insteadEach carefully-presented example includes helpful diagrams and fully-annotated code samples in Python. By the end of this book, you will know some of the most widely applicable algorithms as well as how and when to use them.

    of Toronto and Google), Rodney Brooks (Rethink Robotics), Yann LeCun (Facebook) , Fei-Fei Li (Stanford and Google), Yoshua Bengio (Univ. of Montreal), Andrew Ng (AI Fund), Daphne Koller (Stanford), Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley), Nick Bostrom (Univ. of Oxford), Barbara Grosz (Harvard), David Ferrucci (Elemental Cognition), James Manyika (McKinsey), Judea Pearl (UCLA), Josh Tenenbaum (MIT), Rana el Kaliouby (Affectiva), Daniela Rus (MIT), Jeff Dean (Google), Cynthia Breazeal (MIT), Oren Etzioni (Allen Institute for AI), Gary Marcus (NYU), and Bryan Johnson (Kernel).Martin Ford is a prominent futurist, and author of Financial Times Business Book of the Year, Rise of the Robots. He speaks at conferences and companies around the world on what AI and automation might mean for the future. Editorial reviews: "In his newest book, Architects of Intelligence, Martin Ford provides us with an invaluable opportunity to learn from some of the most prominent thought leaders about the emerging fields of science that are shaping our future." -Al Gore, Former Vice President of the US "AI is going to shape our future, and Architects of Intelligence offers a unique and fascinating collection of perspectives from the top researchers and entrepreneurs who are driving progress in the field." - Eric Schmidt, former Chairman and CEO, Google "The best way to understand the challenges and consequences of AGI is to see inside the minds of industry experts shaping the field. Architects of Intelligence gives you that power." -Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI "Architects of Intelligence gets you inside the minds of the people building the technology that is going to transform our world. This is a book that everyone should read." -Reid Hoffman, Co-founder of LinkedIn

    Our bodies are hardwired for sweets, so food giants have developed fifty-six types of sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying; we've evolved to prefer fast, convenient meals, hence our modern-day preference for ready-to-eat foods. Moss goes on to show how the processed food industry--including major companies like Nestlé, Mars, and Kellogg's--has tried not only to evade this troubling discovery about the addictiveness of food but to actually exploit it. For instance, in response to recent dieting trends, food manufacturers have simply turned junk food into junk diets, filling grocery stores with "diet" foods that are hardly distinguishable from the products that got us into trouble in the first place. As obesity rates continue to climb, manufacturers are now claiming to add ingredients that can effortlessly cure our compulsive eating habits. An account of the legal battles, insidious marketing campaigns, and cutting-edge food science that have brought us to our current public health crisis, Moss lays out all that the food industry is doing to exploit and deepen our addictions, and shows us why what we eat has never mattered more.From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Salt Sugar Fat comes a powerful exposé of how the processed food industry exploits our evolutionary instincts, the emotions we associate with food, and legal loopholes in their pursuit of profit over public health.

    In today’s economy, we have far too much dismay along with our amazement, and technology bears some of the blame. In this combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action, Tim O'Reilly, Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual and the founder of O’Reilly Media, explores the upside and the potential downsides of today's WTF? technologies. What is the future when an increasing number of jobs can be performed by intelligent machines instead of people, or done only by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to our consumer based societies—to workers and to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? Is income inequality and unemployment an inevitable consequence of technological advancement, or are there paths to a better future? What will happen to business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? How should companies organize themselves to take advantage of these new tools? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional institutions? How can individuals continue to adapt and retrain? Will the fundamental social safety nets of the developed world survive the transition, and if not, what will replace them? O'Reilly is "the man who can really can make a whole industry happen," according to Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet (Google.) His genius over the past four decades has been to identify and to help shape our response to emerging technologies with world shaking potential—the World Wide Web, Open Source Software, Web 2.0, Open Government data, the Maker Movement, Big Data, and now AI. O’Reilly shares the techniques he's used at O’Reilly Media  to make sense of and predict past innovation waves and applies those same techniques to provide a framework for thinking about how today’s world-spanning platforms and networks, on-demand services, and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole. He provides tools for understanding how all the parts of modern digital businesses work together to create marketplace advantage and customer value, and why ultimately, they cannot succeed unless their ecosystem succeeds along with them.The core of the book's call to action is an exhortation to businesses to DO MORE with technology rather than just using it to cut costs and enrich their shareholders. Robots are going to take our jobs, they say. O'Reilly replies, “Only if that’s what we ask them to do! Technology is the solution to human problems, and we won’t run out of work till we run out of problems." Entrepreneurs need to set their sights on how they can use big data, sensors, and AI to create amazing human experiences and the economy of the future, making us all richer in the same way the tools of the first industrial revolution did. Yes, technology can eliminate labor and make things cheaper, but at its best, we use it to do things that were previously unimaginable! What is our poverty of imagination? What are the entrepreneurial leaps that will allow us to use the technology of today to build a better future, not just a more efficient one? Whether technology brings the WTF? of wonder or the WTF? of dismay isn't inevitable. It's up to us!

    citizen recognized its ominous potential. Armed with clear evidence of computer espionage, he began a highly personal quest to expose a hidden network of spies that threatened national security. But would the authorities back him up? Cliff Stoll's dramatic firsthand account is "a computer-age detective story, instantly fascinating [and] astonishingly gripping" (Smithsonian). Cliff Stoll was an astronomer turned systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab when a 75-cent accounting error alerted him to the presence of an unauthorized user on his system. The hacker's code name was "Hunter" -- a mysterious invader who managed to break into U.S. computer systems and steal sensitive military and security information. Stoll began a one-man hunt of his own: spying on the spy. It was a dangerous game of deception, broken codes, satellites, and missile bases -- a one-man sting operation that finally gained the attention of the CIA...and ultimately trapped an international spy ring fueled by cash, cocaine, and the KGB.

    Internet pioneer and renowned filmmaker Tiffany Shlain takes us on a provocative and entertaining journey through time and technology, introducing a strategy for living in our 24/7 world: turning off all screens for twenty-four hours each week. This practice, which she’s done for nearly a decade with her husband and kids, has completely changed their lives, giving them more time, productivity, connection, and presence. She and her family call it “Technology Shabbat.” Drawn from the ancient ritual of Shabbat, living 24/6 can work for anyone from any background. In this “useful and much-needed guide to turning the clock back to a less frazzled pre-Internet and -smartphone day” (Kirkus Reviews), Shlain shares her story, offers lessons she has learned, and provides a blueprint for how to do it yourself. Along the way, she delves into the neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and history of a weekly day of rest across cultures, making the case for why we need to bring this ritual back. A compelling personal story and a fascinating, far-reaching examination of the complex world we’ve created, 24/6 is a call to regain “the essential dignity of being human in a digital age” (Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human).

    Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists—“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”—Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and dozens of major manufacturers: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspicious death, and bankruptcy. Exposed for false claims, and even accused of war crimes, it closed its doors in 1970 and all but vanished. Until Lepore came across the records of its remains.The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.