by Daniel Rasmus | Jan 30, 2019 | Book Review
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...
by Tim Weinhold | Oct 31, 2018 | Book Review
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 insights: New developments in...
by Tim Weinhold | Oct 27, 2018 | Book Review
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...
by Tim Weinhold | Oct 27, 2018 | Book Review
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 the point, now online...
by Tim Weinhold | Oct 22, 2018 | Book Review
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...
by Tim Weinhold | Oct 14, 2018 | Book Review
The title for Byron Reese’s book comes from his contention that, up to now, there have been only three truly transformational technological changes in all of human history. Our first age was defined by the discovery of fire and our development of language. The next...
