Book picks similar to
The Network State: How To Start a New Country by Balaji S. Srinivasan
politics
non-fiction
crypto
philosophy
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
Stuart Russell - 2019
Conflict between humans and machines is seen as inevitable and its outcome all too predictable.In this groundbreaking book, distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we rethink AI from the ground up. Russell begins by exploring the idea of intelligence in humans and in machines. He describes the near-term benefits we can expect, from intelligent personal assistants to vastly accelerated scientific research, and outlines the AI breakthroughs that still have to happen before we reach superhuman AI. He also spells out the ways humans are already finding to misuse AI, from lethal autonomous weapons to viral sabotage.If the predicted breakthroughs occur and superhuman AI emerges, we will have created entities far more powerful than ourselves. How can we ensure they never, ever, have power over us? Russell suggests that we can rebuild AI on a new foundation, according to which machines are designed to be inherently uncertain about the human preferences they are required to satisfy. Such machines would be humble, altruistic, and committed to pursue our objectives, not theirs. This new foundation would allow us to create machines that are provably deferential and provably beneficial.In a 2014 editorial co-authored with Stephen Hawking, Russell wrote, "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last." Solving the problem of control over AI is not just possible; it is the key that unlocks a future of unlimited promise.
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
Joichi Ito - 2016
The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, transforming every aspect of society, from business to culture and from the public sphere to our most private moments. The people who succeed will be the ones who learn to think differently. In Whiplash, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe distill that logic into nine organizing principles for navigating and surviving this tumultuous period: Emergence over AuthorityPull over PushCompasses over MapsRisk over SafetyDisobedience over CompliancePractice over TheoryDiversity over AbilityResilience over StrengthSystems over Objects Filled with incredible case studies and cutting-edge research and philosophies from the MIT Media Lab and beyond, Whiplash will help you adapt and succeed in this unpredictable world.
Who Can You Trust?: How Technology is Rewriting the Rules of Human Relationships
Rachel Botsman - 2017
But this isn't the age of distrust--far from it. In this revolutionary book, world-renowned trust expert Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the tipping point of one of the biggest social transformations in human history--with fundamental consequences for everyone. A new world order is emerging: we might have lost faith in institutions and leaders, but millions of people rent their home to total strangers, exchange digital currencies, or find themselves trusting a bot. This is the age of "distributed trust", a paradigm shift driven by innovative technologies that are rewriting the rules of an all-too-human relationship. If we are to benefit from this radical shift, we must understand the mechanics of how trust is built, managed, lost and repaired in the digital age. In the first book to explain this new world, Botsman provides a detailed map of this uncharted landscape--and explores what's next for humanity.
No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush
Gideon Lewis-Kraus - 2014
They're burning through cash, sales have stalled, and investors are nowhere to be found. Welcome to the reality of the new tech boom. Sure, it has produced its glittering share of billion-dollar "exits." But for the vast majority of startups life is nasty, brutish, and short on glamour. NO EXIT explores the feverish world of company founders who are desperately trying to keep their dream afloat. It’s a harrowing and hilarious look at the Silicon Valley no one sees. This is an extended version of a story that appears in the May 2014 issue of WIRED magazine.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't
Nate Silver - 2012
He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
Rutger Bregman - 2014
A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today. "A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell."—The New York Times After working all day at jobs we often dislike, we buy things we don't need. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, reminds us it needn't be this way—and in some places it isn't. Rutger Bregman's TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. A quarter of a million views later, the subject of that video is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders the world over. It's just one of the many utopian ideas that Bregman proves is possible today. Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think can happen. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, and beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he champions ideas whose time have come. Every progressive milestone of civilization—from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy—was once considered a utopian fantasy. Bregman's book, both challenging and bracing, demonstrates that new utopian ideas, like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the fifteen-hour workweek, can become a reality in our lifetime. Being unrealistic and unreasonable can in fact make the impossible inevitable, and it is the only way to build the ideal world.
Made in Britain
Evan Davis - 2011
Like Andrew Marr's HISTORY OF MODERN BRITAIN or Michael Palin's HIMALAYA, the book will have a coherence and life beyond the television series, mirroring its basic structure, but looking at some issues in greater depth, and telling additional stories to illustrate some of the ideas.This book is about the things that Britain produces in order to pay its way in the world, from physical goods that we can see and feel, to intangible services that are much harder to quantify. We don't have to be prejudiced in favour of certain types of value: we shouldn't assume finance is modern, and manufacturing out of date for example. What matters is what sells and for how much. From manufacturing to technology, design and the services industries, this book will provide a cutting edge analysis - via entertaining stories - about what we make and why it matters.
World After Capital
Albert Wenger
When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting once more. We need to figure out how to live in a World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.
Crushing YouTube: How to Start a YouTube Channel, Launch Your YouTube Business and Make Money
Joseph Hogue - 2019
If you're serious about starting a YouTube business and want to make money on YouTube, I can show you the way. I've doubled my monthly income by creating a YouTube channel. Thousands of people watch each video and I've built a community that supports and motivates me every day...and that's all in less than two years! Is it Too Late to Start a YouTube Business? I"ve been developing online businesses since 2012 but was late to the game on YouTube. By the time I started my YouTube channel, people were already saying, "YouTube is dead!"; People were saying you couldn"t grow on YouTube anymore and that small channels couldn't win in the YouTube algorithm. I'm living proof you CAN start a YouTube business and be successful. I average $3,500 a month on ads alone (June 2019) and another three- to four-thousand on sponsorships, affiliates and my own products. In fact, I believe we’re just coming into the Age of YouTube with the rollout of 5G and every business owner needs a video presence.
A YouTube How-To from Someone that's Been There
I've seen the frustration for small YouTubers, trying to compete and get views against the million-subscriber monsters. I know what it’s like to start a channel from nothing. I’ll not only show you how to set up your channel to look professional, I’ll reveal the secrets even some of the biggest YouTube creators don’t know. In this book, you'll learn: How to get YouTube video ideas and hack the most popular videos for viral success (Pg 49) Five steps to building a YouTube channel brand that creates an army of supporters (Pg 69) The easy way to record videos, even if you don't like to be on camera (Pg 85) Five income streams that guarantee you WILL make money on YouTube (Pg 135) Since starting my YouTube channel, I've consulted and helped other video influencers grow their channels for millions of views. I’ve helped them find sponsorships and make enough money to quit their day job to make YouTube a full-time business. I can do the same for you with this book. I can show you the way but YOU have to get started. Scroll back up and click Buy Now to create your YouTube business and start making money on YouTube.
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
David Deutsch - 2011
Taking us on a journey through every fundamental field of science, as well as the history of civilization, art, moral values, and the theory of political institutions, Deutsch tracks how we form new explanations and drop bad ones, explaining the conditions under which progress—which he argues is potentially boundless—can and cannot happen. Hugely ambitious and highly original, The Beginning of Infinity explores and establishes deep connections between the laws of nature, the human condition, knowledge, and the possibility for progress.
Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State
William H. Janeway - 2012
Janeway provides an accessible pathway for readers to appreciate the dynamics of the interaction between the state, financiers and entrepreneurs in the innovation economy.
A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
Daniel Susskind - 2020
For centuries, such fears have been misplaced, and many economists maintain that they remain so today. But as Daniel Susskind demonstrates, this time really is different. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of jobs are increasingly at risk.Drawing on almost a decade of research in the field, Susskind argues that machines no longer need to think like us in order to outperform us, as was once widely believed. As a result, more and more tasks that used to be far beyond the capability of computers – from diagnosing illnesses to drafting legal contracts, from writing news reports to composing music – are coming within their reach. The threat of technological unemployment is now real.This is not necessarily a bad thing, Susskind emphasizes. Technological progress could bring about unprecedented prosperity, solving one of humanity’s oldest problems: how to make sure that everyone has enough to live on. The challenges will be to distribute this prosperity fairly, to constrain the burgeoning power of Big Tech, and to provide meaning in a world where work is no longer the center of our lives. Perceptive, pragmatic, and ultimately hopeful, A World Without Work shows the way.
Identity Is the New Money
David Birch - 2014
Because of technological change the two trends are converging so that all that we need for transacting will be our identities captured in the unique record of our online social contacts. Social networks and mobile phones are the key technologies. They will enable the building of an identity infrastructure that can enhance both privacy and security - there is no trade-off. The long-term consequences of these changes are impossible to predict, partly because how they take shape will depend on how companies take advantage of business opportunities to deliver transaction services. But one prediction made here is that cash will soon be redundant - and a good thing too. In its place we will see a proliferation of new digital currencies.
Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier - 2013
Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks.Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it.But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.