13 results for "Technology"

What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?

Stephen Wolfram
Nobody expected this-not even its creators: ChatGPT has burst onto the scene as an AI capable of writing at a convincingly human level. But how does it really work? What's going on inside its "AI mind"? In this short book, prominent scientist and computation pioneer Stephen Wolfram provides a readable and engaging explanation that draws on his decades-long unique experience at the frontiers of science and technology. Find out how the success of ChatGPT brings together the latest neural net technology with foundational questions about language and human thought posed by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago.
Repro India Limited 2023-05-24 112 pages

The Singularity Is Nearer

Kurzweil, Ray
"This successor volume to The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will refashion the human race in the decades to come. In this entirely new book, Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances in the singularity-assessing the progress of many of his predictions and examining the novel advancements that, in the near future, will bring a revolution in knowledge and an expansion of human potential. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding the world atom by atom with devices like nanobots; radical life extension beyond the current age limit of 120; reinventing intelligence by expanding biological capacity with nonbiological intelligence in the cloud; how life is improving with declines in poverty and violence; and the growth of technologies that can be applied to everything from clothes to building materials to growing human organs. He also considers the potential perils of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, including such topics as how AI will impact unemployment and the safety of autonomous cars, and "After Life" technology, which will reanimate people who have passed away through a combination of data and DNA"--
Penguin USA 2025-06-03 432 pages

Deep thinking: where machine intelligence ends and human creativity begins

Kasparov, G. K.
In May 1997, the world watched as Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, was defeated for the first time by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. It was a watershed moment in the history of technology: machine intelligence had arrived at the point where it could best human intellect. It wasn't a coincidence that Kasparov became the symbol of man's fight against the machines. Chess has long been the fulcrum in development of machine intelligence; the hoax automaton 'The Turk' in the 18th century and Alan Turing's first chess program in 1952 were two early examples of the quest for machines to think like humans -- a talent we measured by their ability to beat their creators at chess. As the pre-eminent chessmaster of the 80s and 90s, it was Kasparov's blessing and his curse to play against each generation's strongest computer champions, contributing to their development and advancing the field. Like all passionate competitors, Kasparov has taken his defeat and learned from it. He has devoted much energy to devising ways in which humans can partner with machines in order to produce results better than either can achieve alone. During the twenty years since playing Deep Blue, he's played both with and against machines, learning a great deal about our vital relationship with our most remarkable creations. Ultimately, he's become convinced that by embracing the competition between human and machine intelligence, we can spend less time worrying about being replaced and more thinking of new challenges to conquer. In this breakthrough book, Kasparov tells his side of the story of Deep Blue for the first time -- what it was like to strategize against an implacable, untiring opponent -- the mistakes he made and the reasons the odds were against him. But more than that, he tells his story of AI more generally, and how he's evolved to embrace it, taking part in an urgent debate with philosophers worried about human values, programmers creating self-learning neural networks, and engineers of cutting edge robotics.
John Murray 2017-06 287 pages

The age of AI: and our human future

Kissinger, Henry,Schmidt, Eric,Huttenlocher, Daniel P.
"Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming human society in fundamental and profound ways. Not since the Age of Reason have we changed how we approach security, economics, order, and even knowledge itself. In the Age of AI, three deep and accomplished thinkers come together to consider what AI will mean for us all."
Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company 2022 266 pages

The big nine: how the tech titans and their thinking machines could warp humanity

Webb, Amy
In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI - the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself - is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.
PublicAffairs 2020-03-03 324 pages

The age of intelligent machines

Kurzweil, Ray
Winner, 1990, category of Computer Science, Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. In The Age of Intelligent Machines, inventor and visionary computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil probes the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence, from its earliest philosophical and mathematical roots to tantalizing glimpses of 21st-century machines with superior intelligence and truly prodigious speed and memory. Generously illustrated and easily accessible to the nonspecialist, this book provides the background needed for a full understanding of the enormous scientific potential represented by intelligent machines as well as their equally profound philosophic, economic, and social implications. Running alongside Kurzweil's historical and scientific narrative are 23 articles examining contemporary issues in artificial intelligence. Raymond Kurzweil is the founder and chairman of Kurzweil Applied Intelligence and the Kurzweil Reading Machine division of Xerox. He was the principal developer of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and other significant advances in artificial intelligence technology. Articles by: Charles Ames. Margaret A. Boden. Harold Cohen. Daniel C. Dennett. Edward A. Feigenbaum. K. Fuchi. George Gilder. Douglas R. Hofstadter. Michael Lebowitz. Margaret Litven. Blaine Mathieu. Marvin Minsky. Allen Newell. Brian W. Oakley. Seymour Papert. Jeff Pepper. Roger Schank and Christopher Owens. Sherry Turkle. Mitchell Waldrop.
MIT Press 1992 565 pages

Understanding computers and cognition: a new foundation for design

Winograd, Terry
Understanding Computers and Cognition presents an important and controversial new approach to understanding what computers do and how their functioning is related to human language, thought, and action. While it is a book about computers, Understanding Computers and Cognition goes beyond the specific issues of what computers can or can't do. It is a broad-ranging discussion exploring the background of understanding in which the discourse about computers and technology takes place. Understanding Computers and Cognition is written for a wide audience, not just those professionals involved in computer design or artificial intelligence. It represents an important contribution to the ongoing discussion about what it means to be a machine, and what it means to be human. Book jacket.
Ablex 1986 207 pages

Virtually human: the promise - and the peril - of digital immortality

Rothblatt, Martine Aliana
"Virtually Human explores what the not-too-distant future will look like when cyberconsciousness--simulation of the human brain via software and computer technology--becomes part of our daily lives. Meet Bina48, the world's most sentient robot, commissioned by Martine Rothblatt and created by Hanson Robotics. Bina48 is a nascent Mindclone of Martine's wife that can engage in conversation, answer questions, and even have spontaneous thoughts that are derived from multimedia data in a Mindfile created by the real Bina. If you're active on Twitter or Facebook, share photos through Instagram, or blogging regularly, you're already on your way to creating a Mindfile--a digital database of your thoughts, memories, feelings, and opinions that is essentially a back-up copy of your mind. Soon, this Mindfile can be made conscious with special software--Mindware--that mimics the way human brains organize information, create emotions and achieve self-awareness. This may sound like science-fiction, but the nascent technology already exists. Thousands of software engineers across the globe are working to create cyberconsciousness based on human consciousness and the Obama administration recently announced plans to invest in a decade-long Brain Activity Map project. Virtually Human is the only book to examine the ethical issues relating to cyberconsciousness and Rothblatt, with a Ph. D. in medical ethics, is uniquely qualified to lead the dialogue"--
Picador 2015-10-06 350 pages

Understanding Understanding Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition

Heinz von Foerster
In these essays Heinz von Foerster discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge. Included are path- breaking articles concerning the principles of computation in neural nets (1967), the definition of self-organizing systems (1960), the nature of cognition (1970), as well as recent expansions on these themes (e.g. "How recursive is communication," 1993). Working with Norbert Wiener, Warren McCullough, and others in the 1960s and 1970s, von Foerster was one of the founders of the science of cybernetics, which has had profound effects both on modern systems theory and on the philosophy of cognition. At the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois he produced the first parallel computers and contributed to many other developments in the theory of computation and cognition.
Springer New York 2010-10-15 362 pages

Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today

Alderman, Naomi
What’s the most useful thing you could know about your own life? In this era-defining book, developed from her groundbreaking Radio 4 essay series, Naomi Alderman turns her boundless curiosity and incisive thinking to a question that affects us all: how do we understand, and navigate, the epoch we’re living through? She calls this epoch the Information Crisis. The internet has flooded us with more knowledge, opinions, ideas, opportunities, as well as verbal attacks and misinformation, than ever before. It lets us learn more quickly and also spread falsehood more quickly, it brings us together and also divides us in new ways, it is now the lens through which we perceive and understand the world. There is no going back. But we have been here before. In fact, this is humanity’s third information crisis. The first, the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, and the second, the invention of the printing press 600 years ago, drastically reshaped our perceptions, interactions and mental landscapes in ways that feel acutely familiar. Overwhelmed by information, people become afraid and angry, unsettled and distressed, as well as more knowledgeable, educated and curious. By looking at those previous information crises, both the turmoil and the advances, Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better understand our present, and prepare for our future. Drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today explores how new technology opens up new ways of being and helps us chart a way forward (once again), through the turbulent seas of information overload.[Bokinfo]
Penguin 2026-05-07 224 pages

Electromagnetic Field Computation by Network Methods

Leopold B. Felsen,Mauro Mongiardo,Peter Russer
In this monograph, the authors propose a systematic and rigorous treatment of electromagnetic field representations in complex structures. The architecture suggested in this book accommodates use of different numerical methods as well as alternative Green's function representations in each of the subdomains resulting from a partitioning of the overall problem. The subdomains are regions of space where electromagnetic energy is stored and are described in terms of equivalent circuit representations based either on lumped element circuits or on transmission lines. Connection networks connect the subcircuits representing the subdomains. The connection networks are lossless, don't store energy and represent the overall problem topology. This is similar to what is done in circuit theory and permits a phrasing of the solution of EM field problems in complex structures by Network-oriented methods.
Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2010-10-19 214 pages