1. Weapons of Math Destruction
In this book, data scientist Cathy O'Neil explores the age of the algorithm, questioning its impact on humans and society in general. Surely logically designed algorithms should bring about calm, certainty and fairness - this is not the case. It seems that policy brought about by 'fair' algorithms are penalising some those most at need, creating vicious cycles and highlighting the 'dark side of big data'.
2. Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley money machine
Stripping the Silicon Valley bubble bare, Chaos Monkeys offers a guide to the high-powered tech elite living a life of excess in the Californian tech hub. In this book, author Antonio GarcÃa MartÃnez (previously Facebook and Twitter advisor) looks at how tech innovators can disrupt every sector of modern life, just like how Uber revolutionised the on-demand transport industry.
3. Rise of the Machines: the lost history of cybernetics
The rise of the machines as a futuristic theory has been well covered in TV, films and books, but what got us to this point? Why is there a constant need to explore a post-apocalyptic world where we have super intelligent overlords? This book offers an insightful history of cybernetics, offering a guide to the recent past and how this could impact the future of, well, everything.
4. The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly
In this book, Kevin Kelly guides readers through the next 30 years of our lives, calling on 12 technological imperatives that will transform the way we live. From virtual reality, AI and the digital economy, this book aims to provide an understanding of the tech that will change the future of the planet
5. The Open Organisation by Jim Whitehurst
In this book, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst reveals how creating an engaged and passionate workforce will result in a performance and revenue boost in both a work setting and in the greater world. Whitehurst focuses on the greater community, demonstrating how building a strong collective will inevitably lead to success.
6. The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
A brave attempt to sum up how computers and the internet came to be, from Ada Countess of Lovelace in the 1830s and the era of search at the other, with plenty in between. Covering the work of 60 ‘innovators’, it turns out it was all about teamwork rather than the simplistic idea of genius or maverick behaviour. He could have started earlier with the Mechanical Turk.
7. The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
A wide-ranging musing on the future of nearly everything shaped by technology from Google’s thinkers in situ, chairman Eric Schmidt and head of ideas, Jared Cohen. In essence technology creates disruption and discontinuity and that is having an impact on nation-states, religion, gender, knowledge and power in ways that are hard to predict.
8. From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet
In many ways an update to John Naughton's earlier book on the internet, A Brief History of the Future, covering many of the same themes. In this book the internet has moved on from being a pile of connected wires into something resembling an information system. And yet people are still incurious about the implications of something rivalling the appearance of printed books.
9. The Information by James Gleick
The author of the famous 1990’s tome Chaos explores the ways in which the digital computers of today are part of a surprisingly long tradition across cultures to capture, manipulate and transmit information from African drums to the Victorian Babbage. Information is not a quality of the computer world – in fact it has always been with us.
10. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
The best-selling tech book of all time, this authorised account of Job’s life had the publishing luck to appear weeks after his death in October 2011. Jobs’s fame was sealed after his return to Apple in 1997 but in many ways his remarkable life was connected to the formative years at Apple and conceiving of the NeXT computer that so influenced him.
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