Computers Audiobooks | Science & Technology

MoneyGPT: How ChatGPT is Attacking Markets and What You Can Do to Protect Your Wealth

Audiobook

Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI

Brought to you by Penguin. Machine-learning systems are making life-altering decisions for us: approving mortgage loans, determining whether a tumour is cancerous, or deciding whether someone gets bail. They now influence discoveries in chemistry, biology and physics - the study of genomes, extra-solar planets, even the intricacies of quantum systems. We are living through a revolution in artificial intelligence that is not slowing down. This major shift is based on simple mathematics, some of which goes back centuries: linear algebra and calculus, the stuff of eighteenth-century mathematics. Indeed by the mid-1850s, a lot of the groundwork was all done. It took the development of computer science and the kindling of 1990s computer chips designed for video games to ignite the explosion of AI that we see all around us today. In this enlightening book, Anil Ananthaswamy explains the fundamental maths behind AI, which suggests that the basics of natural and artificial intelligence might follow the same mathematical rules. As Ananthaswamy resonantly concludes, to make the most of our most wondrous technologies we need to understand their profound limitations - the clues lie in the maths that makes AI possible. ©2024 Anil Ananthaswamy (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Anil Ananthaswamy (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that Could Break the World

It took Facebook four years to reach 100 million users. ChatGPT, released in November 2022, did it in two months. The simple text box was unlike anything experienced before. It could craft poems, write screenplays and letters of condolence, and tell jokes. It told one writer that it was in love with him and another that it had spied on Microsoft's programmers through their webcams. But this is just the beginning. Things are going to get much, much worse, as Google and Microsoft compete to monetize this rapidly evolving technology. The danger isn't that humanity is going to be eliminated as in Terminator or The Matrix; no, the danger is that these untested, rapidly evolving technologies will undermine our way of life more insidiously, sucking value out of our economy, replacing high-level creative jobs and enabling a new, terrifying era of disinformation. It was never meant to be this way. The founders of the two companies behind the most advanced AIs in existence - San Francisco-based OpenAI and London-based DeepMind - started their journeys determined to solve humanity's greatest problems. But they couldn't develop their technologies without huge amounts of money and that much money comes with obligations - the kind that Google and Microsoft plan to make back a hundred-fold. Supremacy is the astonishing, untold, behind-the-scenes story of the battle between these two AI companies, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the dangerous direction that they're now going in. It's a story of manipulation, exploitation, secrecy and perhaps the greatest invention in technological history - but, above all, it's a story of ruthless, relentless human progress, and how it will impact all of us for years to come.

Parmy Olson (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Trolls of Wall Street: How the Outcasts and Insurgents Are Hacking the Markets

From renowned financial and technology journalist Nathaniel Popper, the dramatic story of a new generation of financial strivers, living online and playing the stock and crypto markets by a new set of rules. Following a cast of young, all male characters, who went from the fringes of the internet to the front pages of newspapers, The Trolls of Wall Street tells the tale of how social media and startups like Robinhood and Reddit allowed for the formation of a powerful online movement in which the most unlikely participants took on the old guard—and each other. In The Trolls of Wall Street, journalist Nathaniel Popper charts the evolution from the idealism of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to the anarchic chaos of online outrage leading to the market crash of 2022, showing how a combination of new technology and broader cultural and economic forces created an online revolution led by bands of predominantly young men, who gathered on Reddit and proudly referred to themselves as “degenerates.” This unlikely online gang took their frustration at the current economic system and social climate and created a powerful cultural movement that upended global financial markets and set in motion far reaching changes to how money flows through the economy—all of this just a decade after a financial crisis that most people assumed would forever kill interest in the stock markets. A character-driven, human story of kids who made and lost millions, battled with each and with Wall Street for power, and ultimately upended the economy, The Trolls of Wall Street is a fast moving, suspenseful, and sobering account of how millions of young Americans became obsessed with money and the markets and how that has affected politics, popular culture, finance and more.

Nathaniel Popper (Author), Robert Fass, Tbd (Narrator)

Audiobook

Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World

Brought to you by Penguin. A sweeping intellectual history of games and their importance to human progress. We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to make predictions about the future. They're also a lot of fun. But what happens when we mistake games for reality? WIN OR LOSE explores the riveting history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, biology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the future of democracy. As neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy shows us, games have been deeply intertwined with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory warped our understanding of human behavior and brought us to the brink of annihilation-yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics, and technology. We used games to teach computers how to learn for themselves, and now we are designing games that will determine the shape of society and future of democracy. Lucid, thought-provoking, and masterfully told, WIN OR LOSE makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature. ©2024 Kelly Clancy (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Kelly Clancy (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Death of Truth

A best-selling author documents how facts-shared truths-have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, globally, and how belief in "alternative facts" and conspiracy theories has destroyed trust in institutions, leaders, and legitimate experts. Drawing on the front-row seat he has had as the cofounder of a company that uses journalists to track online misinformation, Steven Brill takes us inside the decisions made by executives in Silicon Valley to code the algorithms embedded in their social media platforms to maximize profits by pushing divisive content. He unravels the ingenious creation of automated advertising buying systems that reward that eye-attracting content, and describes the exploitation of that ad-driven machinery by politicians, hucksters, and conspiracy theorists. He also explains how the most powerful adversaries of America have used these American-made social media and advertising tools against us with massive disinformation campaigns. Brill explains how with the development of generative artificial intelligence everything could get exponentially worse-unless we act. Apropos of that, in The Death of Truth, he offers thoughtful, provocative but realistic prescriptions for how we can act and reverse course-proposals that are certain to stir debate, and even action. Finally, Brill chillingly recounts how his company's role in exposing Russian disinformation operations resulted in a Russian agent targeting him and his family.

Steven Brill (Author), Dan Woren, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI

Brought to you by Penguin. A vital perspective is missing from the discussions we're having about Artificial Intelligence: what does it mean for our identity? Our fascination with AI stems from the perceived uniqueness of human intelligence. We believe it's what differentiates us. Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displaces us from our position at the centre of the world. Neil D. Lawrence's visionary book shows why these fears may be misplaced. Atomism, proposed by Democritus, suggested it was impossible to continue dividing matter down into ever smaller components: eventually we reach a point where a cut cannot be made (the Greek for uncuttable is 'atom'). In the same way, by slicing away at the facets of human intelligence that can be replaced by machines, AI uncovers what is left: an indivisible core that is the essence of humanity. By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, The Atomic Human reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded. Not just by the experts, but ordinary people. Either AI is a tool for us, or we become a tool of AI. Understanding this will enable readers to choose the future we want. ©2024 Neil D. Lawrence (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Neil D. Lawrence (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever

This cat-and-mouse story of a vast FBI sting operation reveals how the criminal underworld has become a globalized economy in its own right--one that can't be policed without crossing complicated ethical boundaries. Beginning in 2018, a powerful app for secure communications, called Anom, began to take root among drug dealers and other criminals. It had extraordinary safeguards to keep out prying eyes--the power to quickly wipe data, voice-masking technology, and more. It was better than other apps popular among organized crime syndicates, except for one thing: it was secretly run by law enforcement. Over the next few years, the FBI, along with law enforcement partners in Australia and parts of Europe, got a front row seat to the global criminal underworld. They watched drug deals and hits being planned in real time, making arrests where they could without blowing their cover. For a period of years, some one hundred thousand criminals worldwide, including members of South American drug cartels, the Calabrian mafia, and the Chinese Triad, did their business in full view of the officers they were trying to evade. It was a sprawling global economy as efficient and interconnected as the legal one. But a surveillance operation like this couldn't last. It was too dangerous, too ethically fraught, too large. And it all ended in spectacular fashion. Dark Wire is more than the story of this enormous sting operation--it shows the fundamental problems of policing in such a vast and high-speed economy. This is a caper for our modern world, where everyone is connected and no one is completely free.

Joseph Cox (Author), Peter Ganim, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The AI-Savvy Leader: Nine Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work

Leaders, don't let AI get the best of you. AI is coming fast and will affect every part of a business, including the role of the leader. And up until now, leaders have largely ceded their role in the transformation-pushing determination of strategy out to tech teams and leaving investment decisions with groups that don't have a full view of the organization. Just when responsible leadership is more imperative than ever, leaders are not stepping up to understand and execute in the new world of human-machine collaboration. A generation of AI transformation failures awaits if leaders don't connect their use of AI to their strategies. This book helps leaders retake control of the wildly rapid deployment of AI across organizations. It outlines cleanly and concisely nine actions leaders need to take to successfully steward a transition to a more AI-centric future that will lead to growth for all-companies and workers-and avoid the kinds of mistakes that author David De Cremer has seen many early adopters already make. This is not a book about AI technology itself or the latest developments in machine learning but rather a clarion call for leaders to take their rightful place at the front of the AI revolution and lead their organization into the new world.

David De Cremer (Author), David Marantz (Narrator)

Audiobook

Zero Trust Networks: Building Secure Systems in Untrusted Network (2nd Edition)

Perimeter defenses guarding your network aren't as secure as you might think. Hosts behind the firewall have no defenses of their own, so when a host in the 'trusted' zone is breached, access to your data center is not far behind. This practical book introduces you to the zero trust model, a method that treats all hosts as if they're internet-facing, and considers the entire network to be compromised and hostile. In this updated edition, the authors show you how zero trust lets you focus on building strong authentication, authorization, and encryption throughout, while providing compartmentalized access and better operational agility. You'll learn the architecture of a zero trust network, including how to build one using currently available technology. You'll also explore fundamental concepts of a zero trust network, including trust engine, policy engine, and context aware agents; discover how this model embeds security within the system's operation, rather than layering it on top; use existing technology to establish trust among the actors in a network; migrate from a perimeter-based network to a zero trust network in production; examine case studies that provide insights into various organizations' zero trust journeys; and learn about the various zero trust architectures, standards, and frameworks.

Christina Morillo, Doug Barth, Evan Gilman, Razi Rais (Author), Mike Chamberlain (Narrator)

Audiobook

Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational, and Cultural Challenges

Microservices can be a very effective approach for delivering value to your organization and to your customers. If you get them right, microservices help you to move fast, making changes to small parts of your system hundreds of times a day. But get them wrong and microservices just make everything more complicated. In this book, technical strategist Sarah Wells provides practical, in-depth advice for moving to microservices. Having built her first microservices architecture in 2013 for the Financial Times, Sarah discusses the approaches you need to take from the start, and explains the potential traps most likely to trip you up. You'll also learn how to maintain the architecture as your systems mature while minimizing the time you spend on support and maintenance. With this book, you will: - Learn the impact of microservices on software development patterns and practices - Identify the organizational changes you need to make to successfully build and operate this architecture - Determine the steps you must take before you move to microservices - Understand the traps to avoid when you create a microservices architecture-and learn how to recover if you fall into one

Sarah Wells (Author), Zura Johnson (Narrator)

Audiobook

Threshold: How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out

Smart homes are here-domestic spaces bristling with networked technologies that appear to enhance work, entertainment, logistics, health, and security. But these technologies may also extract a cost in attention, money, and privacy. In Threshold, communication and technology expert Heather Suzanne Woods applies rhetorical theory to answer the urgent question of how swiftly proliferating smart homes alter those who inhabit them. Building on research into smart homes in the United States, Woods recounts how smart homes arose and predicts the trajectory of their future form. She pulls back the curtain on the technology, probes who is in control, and questions whether a home can be too smart. Woods suggests a dynamic cultural framework for understanding smart homes that takes into account sociotechnical variables through which smart homes shape human life. Woods's framework reveals how smart homes both reflect social norms about technology as well as whet consumer appetites. Written for homeowners, policymakers, technology enthusiasts, and scholars, Threshold interweaves critical analysis with matter-of-fact graphics that map relationships between digital tools and social life.

Heather Suzanne Woods (Author), April Doty (Narrator)

Audiobook

Computers Audiobooks in Science & Technology