Other books that might interest you

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  The AI Mirror - How to Reclaim...

  Shannon Vallor

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  For many, technology offers hope for the future—that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome—not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today's powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time.To meet today's grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves.Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.

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  Cosmic Impact - Understanding...

  Andrew May

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  As end-of-the-world scenarios go, an apocalyptic collision with an
  
  asteroid or comet is the new kid on the block, gaining respectability only in
  
  the last decade of the 20th century with the realisation that the dinosaurs had
  
  been wiped out by just such an impact.
  
   
  
  Now the science community is making up for lost time, with
  
  worldwide efforts to track the thousands of potentially hazardous near-Earth
  
  objects, and plans for high-tech hardware that could deflect an incoming object
  
  from a collision course – a procedure depicted, with little regard for
  
  scientific accuracy, in several Hollywood movies.
  
   
  
  Astrophysicist and science writer Andrew May disentangles
  
  fact from fiction in this fast-moving and entertaining account, covering the
  
  nature and history of comets and asteroids, the reason why some orbits are more
  
  hazardous than others, the devastating local and global effects that an impact
  
  event would produce, and – more optimistically – the way future space missions
  
  could avert a catastrophe.

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  Unruly Places - Lost Spaces...

  Alastair Bonnett

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  At a time when Google Maps can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite's remotest trails and cell phones double as navigational systems, it's hard to imagine there's any uncharted ground left on the planet. In Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination.Bonnett's remarkable tour includes moving villages, secret cities, no man's lands, and floating islands. He explores places as disorienting as Sandy Island, an island included on maps until just two years ago despite the fact that it never existed.An intrepid guide down the road much less traveled, Bonnett reveals that the most extraordinary places on earth might be hidden in plain sight. Perfect for urban explorers, wilderness ramblers, and armchair travelers struck by wanderlust, Unruly Places will change the way you see the places you inhabit.

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  The Science of Orphan Black -...

  Casey Griffin, Nina Nesseth,...

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  An official guide to the crazy science of Orphan Black—from cloning to chimerism and much more. Delve deeper into the scientific terms and theories at the core of the Peabody-winning cult-favorite show. With exclusive insights from the show’s co-creator Graeme Manson and science consultant Cosima Herter, The Science of Orphan Blacktakes you behind the closed doors of the Dyad Institute and inside Neolution, with color photos included.   Authors Casey Griffin and Nina Nesseth decode the mysteries of Orphan Black—from the history of cloning, epigenetics, synthetic biology, chimerism, the real diseases on which the clone disease is based, and the transhumanist philosophies of Neolution, to what exactly happens when a projectile pencil is shot through a person’s eye and into their brain.

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  Dogfight - The Supermarine...

  David Owen

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  Innumerable books have been published on the two most famous fighter aircraft of all time, the Supermarine Spitfire and the Messerschmitt Bf109. But books setting out to tell the story of both aircraft are very much rarer - probably fewer than the fingers of one hand. Yet their joint story is one which bears retelling since both were essential to the air campaigns of World War Two.Incredibly, the men who designed them lacked any experience of designing a modern fighter. R J Mitchell had begun his career working on industrial steam locomotives, Willy Messerschmitt had cut his aeronautical teeth on light and fragile gliders and sporting planes. Yet both men not only managed to devise aircraft which could hold their own in a world where other designs went from state-of-the-art to obsolete in a staggeringly short time, but their fighters remained competitive over six years of front-line combat. Despite the different ways their creators approached their daunting tasks and the obstacles each faced in acceptance by the services for which they were designed, they proved to be so closely matched that neither side gained a decisive advantage in a titanic struggle. Had either of them not matched up to its opponent so well, then the air war would have been a one-sided catastrophe ending in a quick defeat for the Allies or the Axis powers, and the course of twentieth century history would have been changed beyond recognition.

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  Cradle to Cradle - Remaking the...

  Michael Braungart, William...

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  "Reduce, reuse, recycle," urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world? they ask. In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are). Elaborating their principles from experience redesigning everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change.

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