Computers Audiobooks | Science & Technology

Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know

Artificial Intelligence is likely to greatly increase our aggregate wealth, but it will also upend our labor markets, reshuffle our social order, and strain our private and public institutions. Eventually it may alter how we see our place in the universe, as machines pursue goals independent of their creators and outperform us in domains previously believed to be the sole dominion of humans. Whether we regard them as conscious or unwitting, revere them as a new form of life or dismiss them as mere clever appliances, is beside the point. They are likely to play an increasingly critical and intimate role in many aspects of our lives. The emergence of systems capable of independent reasoning and action raises serious questions about just whose interests they are permitted to serve, and what limits our society should place on their creation and use. Deep ethical questions that have bedeviled philosophers for ages will suddenly arrive on the steps of our courthouses. And the answers may surprise you.

Jerry Kaplan (Author), John Pruden (Narrator)

Audiobook

Diary of a Minecraft Dork Steve Book 4: Pig Race (An Unofficial Minecraft Diary Book)

Something smells funny during the great pig race, and its not the pigs! The plucky Dork Steve might not crave adventure, but he sure seems to find it wherever he goes. It's time for his village's very esteemed, annual pig race and to his dismay his petulant friend Alex is dead set on bringing home the gold with her beast of a pig, Martin.Winning is not going to be easy though the competition is stiff. Namely Laura, the cocky young woman who wins every year by treating her pigs cruelly. After the first round of pig races, Laura is not happy that Alex has come into such a close second, and it seems like she will stop at nothing to keep her crown as the pig racing queen!In fact, Martin has gone missing, and Martin's trainer has gone missing as well! Worse, Alex has gotten hurt by a dirty trick Laura pulled at the second pig race. Now it's all up to Dork Steve who wasn't interested in pig racing to begin with, to save the day! Who will win the great pig races this year? Will Steve be able to save the day in time to beat mean spirited Laura? Where has Martin's trainer gone? Listen to Pig Race to find out!Hilarious and sweet, this book is an excellent holiday gift for your little Minecraft fan. They will learn about fairness and friendship, and will enjoy every page as they do so!

MC Steve (Author), MC Steve (Narrator)

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How To Use Microsoft Word 2010: Your Step By Step Guide To Using Microsoft Word 2010

If you want to learn how to use Word documents, then get the How To Use Microsoft Word 2010 step-by-step guide. The tactics and techniques in this single guide are scripted to aid the user in documenting their text material easily by using Microsoft Word 2010. With the handy step-by-step guidelines of this guide, it is easier to meet the diversified textual file documentation requirement. Undoubtedly, this study guide will assist you to make standardized formatting and content scheduling of documents in minimum possible time. This study guide offers the following substantial benefits to its booklovers: - This guide will assist you in using pre-defined and built-in document themes and templates. - You will learn standard documentation from scratch to highly professional and featured document files. - Microsoft Word 2010 equips the user with the powerful set of editing tools and commands for outlining the document. - Microsoft Word 2010 will also guide how to format a small portion of text, a whole paragraph, a full document and or an entire long document file. - You will also learn to add several illustration types such as shapes, charts, tables, etc. to organize different text contents and therefore making the document convey its main theme to the audience visually. - The guide will also help you to change the preface and formatting of your documents by employing a simple step-by-step process. - You will also learn how pictures are formatted by using the new and cool tools of Microsoft Word 2010 such as background removal, artistic effect, etc. - Microsoft Word 2010 also offers tools to customize the document file such as built-in styles, columns, and the creation of section and page breaks. - You can use header and footer to display main ideas, document titles, page numbers, etc. on each document page.

Abdul Salam, Howexpert (Author), Johnny Robinson (Narrator)

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How To Protect Your Personal Computer: Your Step By Step Guide To Protecting Your Personal Computer

If you want to know the various ways on how to protect your personal computer then, check out this 'How To Protect Your Personal Computer' guide.In this step-by-step guide, you will reap the following benefits: - Learn how to protect your PC. - Get tips on how to password protect your files and folders. - Discover how to activate windows defender. - Learn how to employ a firewall. - Learn how to adjust security settings depending on your browser. - Learn how to perform internet browsing and downloading carefully. - Get techniques on how to employ CCleaner to eradicate malware - Discover Free software downloads to protect your PC. - Be able to adjust internet explorer privacy setting. - Learn how to turn on windows automatic updates. - And much more. HowExpert publishes quick 'how to' guides on all topics from A to Z by everyday experts.

Howexpert (Author), Jared Capper (Narrator)

Audiobook

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and What It Means

A Financial Times 'Best Thing I Read This Year' 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE FT & MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD Google. Amazon. Facebook. The modern world is defined by vast digital monopolies turning ever-larger profits. Those of us who consume the content that feeds them are farmed for the purposes of being sold ever more products and advertising. Those that create the content - the artists, writers and musicians - are finding they can no longer survive in this unforgiving economic landscape. But it didn't have to be this way. In Move Fast and Break Things, Jonathan Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Larry Page who founded these all-powerful companies. Their unprecedented growth came at the heavy cost of tolerating piracy of books, music and film, while at the same time promoting opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users to create the surveillance marketing monoculture in which we now live. It is the story of a massive reallocation of revenue in which $50 billion a year has moved from the creators and owners of content to the monopoly platforms. With this reallocation of money comes a shift in power. Google, Facebook and Amazon now enjoy political power on par with Big Oil and Big Pharma, which in part explains how such a tremendous shift in revenues from creators to platforms could have been achieved and why it has gone unchallenged for so long. And if you think that's got nothing to do with you, their next move is to come after your jobs. Move Fast and Break Things is a call to arms, to say that is enough is enough and to demand that we do everything in our power to create a different future.

Jonathan Taplin (Author), Jonathan Taplin (Narrator)

Audiobook

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democra

Move Fast and Break Things tells the story of how a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs began in the 1990s to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms-Facebook, Amazon and Google-that now determine the future of the music, film, television, publishing and news industries. Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the men who founded these companies, including Peter Thiel and Larry Page: tolerating piracy of books, music and film while at the same time promoting opaque business practices and subordinating privacy of individual users to create the surveillance marketing monoculture in which we now live. The enormous profits that have come with this concentration of power tell their own story. Since 2001, newspaper and music revenues have fallen by 70%, book publishing, film and television profits have also fallen dramatically. Revenues at Google in this same period grew from $400 million to $74.5 billion. Google's YouTube today controls 60% of the streaming audio business and pays only 11% of the streaming audio revenues. More creative content is being consumed that ever before, but less revenue is flowing to creators and owners of the content. With the reallocation of money to monopoly platforms comes a shift in power. Google, Facebook and Amazon now enjoy political power on par with Big Oil and Big Pharma, which in part explains how such a tremendous shift in revenues from artists to platforms could have been achieved and why it has gone unchallenged for so long. The stakes in this story go far beyond the livelihood of any one musician or journalist. As Taplin observes, the fact that more and more Americans receive their news, music and other forms of entertainment from a small group of companies poses a real threat to democracy. Move Fast and Break Things offers a vital, forward-thinking prescription for how artists can reclaim their audiences using knowledge of the past and a determination to work together. Using his own half century career as a music and film producer and early pioneer of streaming video online, Taplin offers new ways to think about the design of the World Wide Web and specifically the way we live with the firms that dominate it.

Jonathan Taplin (Author), Jonathan Taplin (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Adventures of an IT Leader (Updated Edition)

Becoming an effective IT manager presents a host of challenges--from anticipating emerging technology to managing relationships with vendors, employees, and other managers. A good IT manager must also be a strong business leader. This book invites you to accompany new CIO Jim Barton to better understand the role of IT in your organization. You'll see Jim struggle through a challenging first year, handling (and fumbling) situations that, although fictional, are based on true events. You can read this book from beginning to end, or treat is as a series of cases. You can also skip around to address your most pressing needs. For example, need to learn about crisis management and security? Read chapters 10-12. You can formulate your own responses to a CIO's obstacles by reading the authors' regular "Reflection" questions. You'll turn to this book many times as you face IT-related issues in your own career.

Richard Austin, Richard L. Nolan, Robert D. Austin, Shannon O'Donnell, Shannon O'donnell (Author), Teri Schnaubelt (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Crowdsourceress

"Neil Young's Pono campaign was the third most successful hardware campaign of all time, and Alex deserves much of the credit, second only to Neil, of course. The Crowdsourceress will give you everything you need to make your campaign a success." -Phil Baker, COO, Pono "Owning The Crowdsourceress is like having Alex Daly's 'special sauce' right at your fingertips."--Jesse Reed, cofounder, Standards Manual In recent years, the crowdfunding industry has generated several billions in funding. But the harsh reality is that around 60 percent of Kickstarter campaigns fail. Enter Alex Daly, a crowdfunding expert who has raised over $20 million for her clients' campaigns. She has run some of Kickstarter's biggest projects-TLC's newest album, Neil Young's audio player, and Joan Didion's documentary. In this book, Daly takes readers deep inside her most successful campaigns, showing you how to Get fans and influencers excited about your launch Build an appealing and powerfully designed campaign Access proven video tips, pitching tactics, press releases, and rewards ideas Avoid the most common headaches and pitfalls Here you'll get tangible tools to run your own crowdfunding campaigns and fully connect with the crowd, get people to pay attention, and inspire them to act. **Contact Customer Service for Additional Content**

Alex Daly (Author), Alex Daly (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld

In this important and revealing book, Jamie Bartlett takes us deep into the digital underworld and presents an extraordinary look at the internet we don't know. Beginning with the rise of the internet and the conflicts and battles that defined its early years, Bartlett reports on trolls, pornographers, drug dealers, hackers, political extremists, Bitcoin programmers, and vigilantes-and puts a human face on those who have many reasons to stay anonymous. Rich with historical research and revelatory reporting, The Dark Net is an unprecedented, eye-opening look at a world that doesn't want to be known.

Jamie Bartlett (Author), Matt Bates (Narrator)

Audiobook

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing

We depend on-we believe in-algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations-the marriage vow, the shaman's curse-do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In What Algorithms Want, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm-in practical terms, "a method for solving a problem"-has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking. Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things. If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of "algorithmic reading" and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.

Ed Finn (Author), Scott Merriman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence--and Where It's Taking Us Next

When most of us think about Artificial Intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that Artificial Intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways, the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate. In Thinking Machines, technology journalist Luke Dormehl takes you through the history of AI and how it makes up the foundations of the machines that think for us today. Furthermore, Dormehl speculates on the incredible-and possibly terrifying-future that's much closer than many would imagine. This remarkable book will invite you to marvel at what now seems commonplace and to dream about a future in which the scope of humanity may need to widen to include intelligent machines.

Luke Dormehl (Author), Gus Brown (Narrator)

Audiobook

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence

Imagine a robotic stuffed animal that can read and respond to a child's emotional state or a commercial that can change based on a customer's facial expression. Heart of the Machine explores the next giant step in the relationship between humans and technology: the ability of computers to recognize, respond to, and even replicate emotions. Computers have long been integral to our lives, and their advances continue at an exponential rate. Many believe that artificial intelligence equal or superior to human intelligence will happen in the not-too-distance future. Futurist Richard Yonck argues that emotion, the first, most basic, and most natural form of communication, is at the heart of how we will soon work with and use computers. Instilling emotions into computers is the next leap in our centuries-old obsession with creating machines that replicate humans. But for every benefit this progress may bring to our lives, there is a possible pitfall. Emotion recognition could lead to advanced surveillance, and the same technology that can manipulate our feelings could become a method of mass control. Heart of the Machine is an exploration of the new and inevitable ways in which mankind and technology will interact.

Richard Yonck (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator)

Audiobook

Computers Audiobooks in Science & Technology