A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 • One of the best books of the year by The New York Times, LA Times, and NPR

Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence.
Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and...

"An Oxford economics professor, Susskind has a patient delivery that benefits from his authoritative voice and scholarly view of this speculative subject...an important and eye-opening audiobook." — AudioFile Magazine

This program is read by the author.
From an Oxford economist, a visionary account of how technology will transform the world of work, and what we should do about it.
From mechanical looms to

...

"A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter . . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world." — New York Times

From the creation of the first

...

"You look like a thing and I love you" is one of the best pickup lines ever... according to an artificial intelligence trained by scientist Janelle Shane, creator of the popular blog AI Weirdness. She creates silly AIs that learn how to name paint colors, create the best recipes, and even flirt (badly) with humans--all to understand the technology that governs so much of our daily lives. We rely on AI every day for recommendations, for translations,...

Screen time is important for learning and can be helpful and fun, but it's also fun to be done! This active, encouraging book offers little ones enjoyable ways to spend their tme without screens, such as jumping, running, singing, swinging, and playing pretend. Young children will learn that "screens are for a little downtime, a not-too-long time," and what's important is spending time together. "A board book that offers young children and their...

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has always been ahead of her time. Her seminal book In the Age of the Smart Machine foresaw the consequences of a then-unfolding era of computer technology. Now, three decades later she asks why the once-celebrated miracle of digital is turning into a nightmare. Zuboff tackles the social, political, business, personal, and technological meaning of "surveillance...

"Combining a journalist's investigative eye with her unborn second child as an experimental guinea pig, Baby, Unplugged draws on Sophie Brickman's own experiences as a journalist and parent to try to discover what aspects of technology are actually helpful, which are making us crazy, and most importantly, how we might learn to trust ourselves and our instincts again when it comes to raising children." --

Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as...

Makes recommendations for meeting four major challenges currently facing the United States, including globalization, the information technology revolution, chronic deficits, and unbalanced energy consumption.

"Axelrod spins his personal philosophy out into the wider world, where technology is changing the nature of human consciousness faster than we can see it happening. He draws a parallel between the environmental crisis and a lesser-known, but equally pressing issue: as we lose the world around us, he argues, we are losing our interior worlds, too. We can't navigate without a GPS, we can't pay attention unless our attention is DEMANDED in all caps and...