Books with category 📱 Technology
Displaying 6 books

The Future

2023

by Naomi Alderman

Naomi Alderman, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Power, delivers a dazzling tour de force with The Future. This novel is a thrilling tale where a handful of friends plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.

When Martha Einkorn fled her father's isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, Martha must confront technological prophecies and apocalyptic warnings that once seemed like mere parables.

Meanwhile, across the world, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, finds herself fleeing from an assassin in a mall in Singapore. As she's cornered and desperate, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone, guiding her escape. The origins of this software and its ultimate purpose become the burning questions that could define their very survival.

Martha and Zhen's worlds are on a collision course, setting off an explosive chain of events. While a few billionaires assure their own safety, leading the world to destruction, Martha's relentless drive and Zhen's insatiable curiosity might just lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.

By turns thrilling, hilarious, tender, and always piercingly brilliant, The Future unfolds at breakneck speed, highlighting the corrupting power of the few and the courage required to stand up to them. The future is coming. The Future is here.

The Maniac

From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI.

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. In The Maniac, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programmable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata.

Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. The Maniac places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The Maniac confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

Doppelganger

2023

by Naomi Klein

From the award-winning, bestselling author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein presents a revelatory analysis of the collapsed meanings, blurred identities, and uncertain realities of the mirror world.

Naomi Klein takes a more personal turn, braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, as she dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere.

Klein begins this richly nuanced intellectual adventure story by grappling with her own doppelganger—a fellow author and public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years. From there, she turns her gaze both inward to our psychic landscapes—drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks—and outward, to our intersecting economic, environmental, medical, and political crises.

Ultimately seeking to escape the Mirror World and chart a path beyond confusion and despair, Klein delivers a treatment of the way many of us think and feel now, offering an intellectual adventure story for our times.

Much Ado about Nada

2023

by Uzma Jalaluddin

A sparkling second-chance romance inspired by Jane Austen's Persuasion...

Nada Syed is stuck. On the cusp of thirty, she's still living at home with her brothers and parents in the Golden Crescent neighbourhood of Toronto, resolutely ignoring her mother's unsubtle pleas to get married already. While Nada has a good job as an engineer, it's a far cry from realizing her start-up dreams for her tech baby, Ask Apa, the app that launched with a whimper instead of a bang because of a double-crossing business partner. Nothing in her life has turned out the way it was supposed to, and Nada feels like a failure. Something needs to change, but the past is holding on too tightly to let her move forward.

Nada's best friend Haleema is determined to pry her from her shell...and what better place than at the giant annual Muslim conference held downtown, where Nada can finally meet Haleema's fiancé, Zayn. And did Haleema mention Zayn's brother Baz will be there?

What Haleema doesn't know is that Nada and Baz have a past—some of it good, some of it bad and all of it secret. At the conference, that past all comes hurtling at Nada, bringing new complications and a moment of reckoning. Can Nada truly say goodbye to once was or should she hold tight to her dreams and find their new beginnings?

Cappitalismo

Con un par de golpecitos en la pantalla, tu smartphone puede colocar delante de ti un automóvil. Esta sencilla operación pone en funcionamiento toda una maquinaria extractiva que se aprovecha de la infraestructura urbana, de los bienes y recursos de los trabajadores e incluso de los datos personales de los usuarios, para poner en contacto a un conductor marginado del mercado laboral formal y a un viajero deseoso de escapar de las penurias del transporte público. Esta plataformización del trabajo revela una nueva lógica empresarial, en la que se enhebran la innovación informática y el abuso patronal, la reinvención de los servicios urbanos y el canto de las sirenas del autoempleo. ¡Bienvenidos todos al cappitalismo!

Con las sutiles herramientas de la antropología contemporánea, tanto de gabinete como de campo, Natalia Radetich se lanzó a la jungla de concreto para conocer desde dentro la mecánica por la que Uber, quizá la más emblemática de las aplicaciones para el transporte de pasajeros, crea sus mensajes para convencer —y mantener enganchados— a conductores y usuarios, y para, con total descaro, eludir su responsabilidad fiscal y patronal. Escrito con rigor y sagacidad, ricamente documentado y nutrido de observaciones en el terreno, este libro desmenuza los elementos de un novedoso fenómeno que está ocurriendo delante de nosotros, lo mismo en la movilidad, el reparto de alimentos o la mensajería: la uberización del trabajo. En ese escenario despiadado ha surgido, sin embargo, un ánimo solidario entre quienes sufren la precarización laboral.

Este libro resultará clave para entender la actual etapa del capitalismo y los mecanismos de la apropiación empresarial.

The Battle for Your Brain

Imagine a world where your brain can be interrogated to learn your political beliefs, thought crimes are punishable by law, and your own feelings can be used against you. Where perfumers create customized fragrances to perfectly suit your emotions, and social media titans bypass your conscious mind to hook you to their products. A world where people who suffer from epilepsy receive alerts moments before a seizure, and the average person can peer into their own mind to eliminate painful memories or cure addictions.

Neuroscience has already made all of the above possible today, and neurotechnology will soon become the universal controller for all of our interactions with technology. This can benefit humanity immensely, but without safeguards, it can severely threaten our fundamental human rights to privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination. Companies, governments, and militaries are all in: from contemplative neuroscience to consumer-based EEG technology, there have never been more ways to hack and track our brains.

The Battle for Your Brain by Nita A. Farahany dives deeply into the promises and perils of the coming dawn of brain access and alteration. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on neuroscience as it intersects with law and ethics, this highly original book offers a pathway forward to navigate the complex ethical dilemmas that neurotechnology presents, which will fundamentally impact our freedom to understand, shape, and define ourselves.

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