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.

This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers -- those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers. Levy profiles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. They had a shared sense of values, known as "the hacker ethic," that still thrives today. Hackers captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world, from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II.

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]