Book Reviews
The Social Media Peril — Part I:
Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Siva Vaidhyanathan The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, Roger McNamee...
Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots
For those drawn to the ‘sex and robots’ topic of Kate Devlin’s new book, the large majority will come away disappointed. Why? Mostly because Devlin is an academic. Her book is a broad survey of the field (actually, of several fields), often reporting on the work of...
Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
Three economists, Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, teamed up to write Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that their book boils down to three foundational...
LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media
P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, authors of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, have a premise that is at once remarkable and patently obvious: social media rules the world — and not for good. As they put it in their introduction: “This is a book about how...
Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World
Remember when our online problems stayed there, reliably separate from our ‘real lives?’ Turns out, those were the good old days. Now we increasingly inhabit a world in which the distinction between online and offline has disappeared. More to...
Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
Tom Clancy, James Patterson, or Dan Brown probably wish they’d written the opening sentence of Paul Scharre’s book, Army of None: “On the night of September 26, 1983, the world almost ended.” From there, Scharre tells a truly terrifying tale. It was the height...