AIQ explores the fascinating history of the ideas that drive this technology of the future and demystifies the core concepts behind it; the result is a positive and entertaining look at the great potential unlocked by marrying human creativity with powerful machines.” —Steven D. Levitt, bestselling co-author of Freakonomics From leading data scientists Nick Polson and James Scott, what everyone needs to know to understand how artificial intelligence is changing the world and how we can use this knowledge to make better decisions in our own lives. Dozens of times per day, we all interact with intelligent machines that are constantly learning from the wealth of data now available to them. These machines, from smart phones to talking robots to self-driving cars, are remaking the world in the 21st century in the same way that the Industrial Revolution remade the world in the 19th century. AIQ is based on a simple premise: if you want to understand the modern world, then you have to know a little bit of the mathematical language spoken by intelligent machines. AIQ will teach you that language—but in an unconventional way, anchored in stories rather than equations. You will meet a fascinating cast of historical characters who have a lot to teach you about data, probability, and better thinking. Along the way, you'll see how these same ideas are playing out in the modern age of big data and intelligent machines—and how these technologies will soon help you to overcome some of your built-in cognitive weaknesses, giving you a chance to lead a happier, healthier, more fulfilled life.

    He believes that we should investigate what makes some countries more capable than others. Complex products—from films to robots, apps to automobiles—are a physical distillation of an economy’s knowledge, a measurable embodiment of its education, infrastructure, and capability. Economic wealth accrues when applications of this knowledge turn ideas into tangible products; the more complex its products, the more economic growth a country will experience.A radical new interpretation of global economics, Why Information Grows overturns traditional assumptions about the development of economies and the origins of wealth and takes a crucial step toward making economics less the dismal science and more the insightful one.

    

    The cause of their failure was a complete mystery.Five months later, a seemingly unrelated event occurred. A computer security firm in Belarus was called in to troubleshoot some computers in Iran that were caught in a reboot loop—crashing and rebooting repeatedly. At first, technicians with the firm believed the malicious code they found on the machines was a simple, routine piece of malware. But as they and other experts around the world investigated, they discovered a virus of unparalleled complexity and mysterious provenance and intent. They had, they soon learned, stumbled upon the world’s first digital weapon.Stuxnet, as it came to be known, was unlike any other virus or worm built before: It was the first attack that reached beyond the computers it targeted to physically destroy the equipment those computers controlled. It was an ingenious attack, jointly engineered by the United States and Israel, that worked exactly as planned, until the rebooting machines gave it all away. And the discovery of Stuxnet was just the beginning: Once the digital weapon was uncovered and deciphered, it provided clues to other tools lurking in the wild. Soon, security experts found and exposed not one but three highly sophisticated digital spy tools that came from the same labs that created Stuxnet. The discoveries gave the world its first look at the scope and sophistication of nation-state surveillance and warfare in the digital age.Kim Zetter, a senior reporter at Wired, has covered hackers and computer security since 1999 and is one of the top journalists in the world on this beat. She was among the first reporters to cover Stuxnet after its discovery and has authored many of the most comprehensive articles about it. In COUNTDOWN TO ZERO DAY: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon, Zetter expands on this work to show how the code was designed and unleashed and how its use opened a Pandora’s Box, ushering in an age of digital warfare in which any country’s infrastructure—power grids, nuclear plants, oil pipelines, dams—is vulnerable to the same kind of attack with potentially devastating results. A sophisticated digital strike on portions of the power grid, for example, could plunge half the U.S. into darkness for weeks or longer, having a domino effect on all other critical infrastructures dependent on electricity.

    Republished in book form shortly thereafter, it has since gone through four hardcover and sixteen paperback printings. It is a revolutionary work, astounding in its foresight and contemporaneity. The University of Illinois Press is pleased and honored to issue this commemorative reprinting of a classic.

    Heart of the Machine explores the next giant step in the relationship between humans and technology: the ability of computers to recognize, respond to, and even replicate emotions. Computers have long been integral to our lives, and their advances continue at an exponential rate. Many believe that artificial intelligence equal or superior to human intelligence will happen in the not-too-distance future; some even think machine consciousness will follow. Futurist Richard Yonck argues that emotion, the first, most basic, and most natural form of communication, is at the heart of how we will soon work with and use computers.Instilling emotions into computers is the next leap in our centuries-old obsession with creating machines that replicate humans. But for every benefit this progress may bring to our lives, there is a possible pitfall. Emotion recognition could lead to advanced surveillance, and the same technology that can manipulate our feelings could become a method of mass control. And, as shown in movies like Her and Ex Machina, our society already holds a deep-seated anxiety about what might happen if machines could actually feel and break free from our control. Heart of the Machine is an exploration of the new and inevitable ways in which mankind and technology will interact.

    Fukuyama sketches a brief history of man's changing understanding of human nature: from Plato and Aristotle to the modernity's utopians and dictators who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama argues that the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendants will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken with the best of intentions. In Our Posthuman Future, one of our greatest social philosophers begins to describe the potential effects of genetic exploration on the foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature.

    But how do all these things work? In this book, Sean Gerrish offers an engaging and accessible overview of the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning that have made today's machines so smart.Gerrish outlines some of the key ideas that enable intelligent machines to perceive and interact with the world. He describes the software architecture that allows self-driving cars to stay on the road and to navigate crowded urban environments; the million-dollar Netflix competition for a better recommendation engine (which had an unexpected ending); and how programmers trained computers to perform certain behaviors by offering them treats, as if they were training a dog. He explains how artificial neural networks enable computers to perceive the world—and to play Atari video games better than humans. He explains Watson's famous victory on Jeopardy, and he looks at how computers play games, describing AlphaGo and Deep Blue, which beat reigning world champions at the strategy games of Go and chess. Computers have not yet mastered everything, however; Gerrish outlines the difficulties in creating intelligent agents that can successfully play video games like StarCraft that have evaded solution—at least for now.Gerrish weaves the stories behind these breakthroughs into the narrative, introducing readers to many of the researchers involved, and keeping technical details to a minimum. Science and technology buffs will find this book an essential guide to a future in which machines can outsmart people.

    Permutation city is the tale of a man with a vision - how to create immortality - and how that vision becomes something way beyond his control. Encompassing the lives and struggles of an artificial life junkie desperate to save her dying mother, a billionaire banker scarred by a terrible crime, the lovers for whom, in their timeless virtual world, love is not enough - and much more - Permutation city is filled with the sense of wonder.

    The topic everyone in the world should be talking about.

    Mitnick claims that this socialengineering tactic was the single-most effective method in hisarsenal. This indispensable book examines a variety of maneuversthat are aimed at deceiving unsuspecting victims, while it alsoaddresses ways to prevent social engineering threats.Examines social engineering, the science of influencing atarget to perform a desired task or divulge informationArms you with invaluable information about the many methods oftrickery that hackers use in order to gather information with theintent of executing identity theft, fraud, or gaining computersystem accessReveals vital steps for preventing social engineeringthreatsSocial Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking does itspart to prepare you against nefarious hackers--now you can doyour part by putting to good use the critical information withinits pages.

    Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.

    From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy.Throughout the text are clear technical and mathematical explanations, and portraits of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world’s most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history and what drives it. It will also make you wonder how private that e-mail you just sent really is.

    This fast-moving narrative starts at ground zero, with the dramatic incubation of open-source software by Linux and its enigmatic creator, Linus Torvalds. With firsthand accounts, it describes how a motley group of programmers managed to shake up the computing universe and cause a radical shift in thinking for the post-Microsoft era. A powerful and engaging tale of innovation versus big business, Rebel Code chronicles the race to create and perfect open-source software, and provides the ideal perch from which to explore the changes that cyberculture has engendered in our society. Based on over fifty interviews with open-source protagonists such as Torvalds and open source guru Richard Stallman, Rebel Code captures the voice and the drama behind one of the most significant business trends in recent memory.

    Life remains the only way to make life. Are we still missing a vital ingredient in its creation?      Like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which provided a new perspective on how evolution works, Life on the Edge alters our understanding of our world's fundamental dynamics. Bringing together first-hand experience at the cutting edge of science with unparalleled gifts of explanation, Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe Macfadden reveal that missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics; the phenomena that lie at the heart of this most mysterious of sciences. Drawing on recent ground-breaking experiments around the world, each chapter in Life on the Edge engages by illustrating one of life's puzzles: How do migrating birds know where to go? How do we really smell the scent of a rose? How do our genes copy themselves with such precision? Life on the Edge accessibly reveals how quantum mechanics can answer these probing questions of the universe. Guiding the reader through the rapidly unfolding discoveries of the last few years, Al-Khalili and McFadden communicate the excitement of the explosive new field of quantum biology and its potentially revolutionary applications, while offering insights into the biggest puzzle of all: what is life? As they brilliantly demonstrate in these groundbreaking pages, life exists on the quantum edge.