Coming Soon

In this fully revised and updated edition of his internationally best-selling book, pioneering theorist and entrepreneur Matthew Ball goes beyond the hype cycle to present a definitive account of the future of the internet. The Metaverse, according to Ball’s industry-shaping definition, is a persistent and interconnected network of 3D virtual worlds that will eventually serve as the gateway to most online experiences and underpin much of the physical world.

No longer an uncertain technology of the distant future, artificial intelligence is starting to shape every aspect of our daily lives, from how we think to who we love. In this urgent polemic, leading barrister Susie Alegre explores the ways in which artificial intelligence threatens our fundamental human rights—including the rights to life, liberty and fair trial; the right to private and family life; and the right to free expression—and how we protect those rights.

In a culture fraught with misinformation, Mastering AI pierces through the thicket of exaggerated claims, explaining how we arrived at this moment and mapping the likely long-term impacts on business, economics, culture and society this potent technology will have. This book will serve as a guide to those dangers — as well as highlighting the technology's transformative potential — and will pinpoint concrete steps that should be taken to regulate generative AI.

Nous vivons actuellement la révolution de l’information la plus fondamentale de notre histoire. Pour la comprendre, il nous faut étudier ce qui a précédé. Notre espèce s’est baptisée Homo sapiens, l’Homme sage – mais si nous sommes si sages, pourquoi sommes-nous si autodestructeurs ? Comment expliquer, en particulier, que nous soyons sur le point de commettre un suicide écologique et technologique ?

Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You’re not alone. AI is everywhere—and few things are surrounded by so much hype, misinformation, and misunderstanding. In AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works, why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil—products that don’t work, and probably never will.

In a world captivated yet bewildered by artificial intelligence, spiritual icon Deepak Chopra explores AI's untapped potential to unlock the mystery of consciousness, positioning AI not as a threat, but as a powerful catalyst for personal and spiritual growth. Digital Dharma shows how the most popular, freely available chatbots can serve as guides through every level of human potential – survival and safety, emotional connection, self-worth, abundance, creativity, wisdom and the infinite possibilities of cosmic consciousness.

The venture capital playbook is causing unique harms to society. And in World Eaters, Catherine Bracy offers a window into the pernicious aspects of VC and shows us how its bad practices are bleeding into all industries, undermining the labor and housing markets and posing unique dangers to the economy at large. VC’s creates a wide, powerful wake that impacts the average consumer just as much as it does investors and entrepreneurs.

It took Facebook four years to reach 100 million users. ChatGPT, released in November 2022, did it in two months. 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. Supremacy is the astonishing, 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.

Kate Conger und Ryan Mac erzählen die wahre Geschichte hinter der Übernahme von Twitter durch Elon Musk! Der Kauf von Twitter für 44 Milliarden Dollar durch den reichsten Mensch der Welt ist anders als alles, was in der Wirtschaft oder den Medien bisher geschehen ist. Ein streitbarer, launischer CEO entschied nach der Übernahme 2022 darüber, was unter freie Meinungsäußerung fiel – und was nicht.

In the spring of 2021, Hannah Brencher found herself depleted and exhausted—and she knew the culprit was her constantly plugged-in lifestyle. Like so many of us, Hannah had been turning to her phone to cope with life in a time of isolation and uncertainty. Those coping mechanisms had calcified into habits she didn't know how to break. Sound familiar? That's when the nudge happened. Turn off your phone and keep turning off your phone. In The Unplugged Hours, Hannah demonstrates how the act of powering down changed her entire life.

Imagine a technology capable of discovering new drugs in days instead of years, helping scientists map distant galaxies and decode the language of whales, and aiding the rest of us in mundane daily tasks, from drafting email responses to preparing dinner. Now consider that this same technology poses risks to our jobs and society as a whole. Artificial Intelligence is no longer science fiction; it is upending our world today.

Thanks to recent advances in AI, humans have entered a world where we are no longer the sole custodians of knowledge. A new wave of disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us - and are beginning to transform everything we do. It is vital we understand how they work. Can AI ‘think’, 'know' and ‘understand’? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence?

It is natural for us to fear artificial intelligence. But does Siri really want to kill us? Perhaps we are falling into the trap of projecting human traits onto the machines we might build. In Evolutionary Intelligence, Neuman offers a surprisingly positive vision in which computational intelligence compensates for the well-recognized limits of human judgment, improves decision making, and actually increases our agency. Neuman takes the listener on an exciting, fast-paced ride, all the while making a convincing case about a revolution in computationally augmented human intelligence.

Living today means most of us must contend with things like workplace surveillance, cyberstalking, ransomware attacks, and facial recognition. But all is not lost when it comes to our privacy, and it is definitely not too late to do something about protecting yours. Written in blunt jargon-free prose, On Privacy defines today’s privacy landscape while also reminding listeners of the joys of keeping things to ourselves—that privacy creates space for intimacy, is essential to mental health, and is a fundamental right in a free society.

From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us.

AI Valley has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

Rising star New York Times technology reporters, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, tell for the first time the full and shocking inside story of Elon Musk’s unprecedented hostile takeover of Twitter and the forty-four-billion-dollar deal’s seismic political, social, and financial fallout. This is the defining story of our time told with uncommon style and peerless rigor. In a world of viral ideas and emotion, who gets to control the narrative, who gets to be heard, and what does power really cost?

Ninguna empresa científica reciente ha resultado tan seductora, aterradora y llena de extravagantes promesas y frustrantes reveses como la IA. La galardonada científica informática Melanie Mitchell revela su turbulenta historia, la reciente oleada de aparentes éxitos, las grandes esperanzas y temores que la rodean, y las cuestiones más urgentes hoy: ¿hasta qué punto son realmente inteligentes los programas de IA? ¿Qué pueden hacer realmente? ¿Hasta qué punto esperamos que se asemejen a los humanos y cuándo debemos preocuparnos de que nos superen?

Viral Voices: From TED Talks to TikTok, Persuasive Communication Skills for the Digital Age by Carmine Gallo is a forthcoming audio-original from Macmillan Audio.

In Pacific Circuit, the award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century.