History & Culture

Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs....

Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living a focused life in a noisy world. Author Cal Newport introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives....

How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society, and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology....

The authors of the best-selling Bold and The Rise of Superman explore altered states of consciousness and how they can ignite passion, fuel creativity, and accelerate problem solving....

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story behind the story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly....

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

A leading artificial intelligence researcher lays out a new approach to AI that will enable us to coexist successfully with increasingly intelligent machines....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick illustrates what is happening without your knowledge - and he teaches you "the art of invisibility"....

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. It offers a reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization....

By the end of on average day in the early 21st century, human beings searching the Internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data....

From the New York Times best-selling authors of Abundance and Bold comes a practical playbook for technological convergence in our modern era....

A galvanizing critique of the forces vying for our attention - and our personal information - that redefines what we think of as productivity, reconnects us with the environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world....

From the visionary head of Google's innovative People Operations comes a groundbreaking inquiry into the philosophy of work - and a blueprint for attracting the most spectacular talent to your business and ensuring that they succeed....

A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds....

The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann....

Build is full of personal stories, practical advice and fascinating insights into some of the most impactful products and people of the 20th century....

Three of the world’s most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it is transforming human society - and what this technology means for us all....

From New York Times best-selling author Cal Newport comes a bold vision for liberating workers from the tyranny of the inbox - and unleashing a new era of productivity....

Top cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter tells the story behind the virus that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear efforts and shows how its existence has ushered in a new age of warfare....

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best....

Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us - and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases.

The best-selling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement - precision - in a superb history....

Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior....

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), credited as the inspiration for radio, robots, and even radar, has been called the patron saint of modern electricity....

Technology is our new life partner. No longer confined to the sidelines, new interactive technologies like AI therapists, avatar friends, and robot assistants are ready to transform technology's role from basic tools of convenience to intimate elements of our social and emotional lives. 

Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. 

Those of you living through the next 30 years will become the most powerful creatures that have ever existed. You will have the opportunity and the duty to create a decidedly better world. Experience and maturity alone cannot provide the required wisdom fast enough. You will need to maximize your innate potential to accelerate wisdom. The Potentialist: Your Future in the New Reality of the Next Thirty Years explains the first steps to achieve your potential and accelerate wisdom. You will discover how forces of change create a New Reality by breaking down the one we know.

Big Data is everywhere. It shapes our lives in more ways than we know and understand. This comprehensive introduction unravels the complex terabytes that will continue to shape our lives in ways imagined and unimagined. 

There is a lot of hype, hand waving, and ink being spilled about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in business. The amount of coverage of this topic in the trade press and on shareholder calls is evidence of a large change currently underway. It is awesome and terrifying. What started as an inquiry into how executives can adopt AI to harness the best of human and machine capabilities turned into a much more profound rumination on the future of humanity and enterprise. 

With Expand: Stretching the Future By Design, authors Jens Martin Skibsted, a multiple-award-winning designer, entrepreneur, and design philosopher, and Christian Bason, political scientist and CEO of the Danish Design Centre, take listeners beyond "design thinking" to challenge current habits and carve out new space for more sustainable innovation. From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas.

This audiobook coins the term "noble automation" as combining intelligent automation technology with the inspired and insightful leadership necessary to help humans become heroes. Doing so stimulates a wave of human innovation and taps into the incredible potential of people working toward inspiring goals. Companies profit, and people thrive. The benefits of implementing noble automation include freeing people to be more human by removing drudgery, providing insights, and allowing us the time and energy to feel, think, empathize, and connect.

Tony Fadell led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in over 30 years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopaedia. So that's what this book is. An advice encyclopaedia. A mentor in a box. Build is full of personal stories, practical advice and fascinating insights into some of the most impactful products and people of the 20th century.

Information is power, and the time is now for digital liberation. Access Rules mounts a strong and hopeful argument for how informational tools at present in the hands of a few could instead become empowering machines for everyone. By forcing data-hoarding companies to open access to their data, we can reinvigorate both our economy and our society. Authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge contend that if we disrupt monopoly power and create a level playing field, digital innovations can emerge to benefit us all. 

One Day at a Time explores 365 moments in human history, from the development of writing through the 21st century. These snapshots into the past capture the evolution of technology, the increasing connections between distant lands, and the individual triumphs that make history so fascinating.

In the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Enlightenment Now, and Sapiens, Michael Magoon shows us that by learning from the past, we can let go of our negative attitudes about the present, and change our world for the better. For virtually all of history, humanity was trapped in poverty by geographical constraints. Fortunately for us, a few societies invented the five keys to progress (productive agriculture, cities, decentralization of power, export industries, and fossil fuels), laying the foundations for our current progress. 

The Great Digital Convergence of all media types into one universal digital medium occurred, with little fanfare, at the recent turn of the millennium. The bit became the universal medium, and the pixel conquered the world. Henceforward, nearly every picture in the world would be composed of pixels. In A Biography of the Pixel, Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith argues that the pixel is the organizing principle of most modern media, and he presents a few simple but profound ideas that unify the dazzling varieties of digital image making.

Take an inside tour with the author to more than 30 world-class facilities to experience the most remarkable innovations and highly sophisticated robotics and automation in action. Have a front-row seat to top-brand, big-budget manufacturing in action, with complex machines communicating with other machines. However, you can also learn from small-to-medium-sized manufacturers. Discover how some simple tried-and-true, old-school low-budget manufacturing processes can be game changers for the industry.

Historian Thomas J. Misa's sweeping history of the relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years reveals how technological innovations have shaped—and have been shaped by—the cultures in which they arose. In this edition, Misa brings his acclaimed text up to date by drawing on current scholarship while retaining sharply drawn portraits of individual people, artifacts, and systems. A masterful analysis of technology and culture, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects of a technology-dependent world.

No city can survive without water, and lots of it. Today we take the stuff for granted: turn a tap and it gushes out. But it wasn't always so. For centuries London, one of the largest and richest cities in the world, struggled to supply its citizens with reliable, clean water. The Mercenary River tells the story of that struggle from the Middle Ages to the present day. Based on new research, it tells a tale of remarkable technological, scientific and organisational breakthroughs, but also a story of greed and complacency, high finance and low politics.