Black Swan — Nassim Taleb
Nassim Taleb examines the role of the unexpected–the Black Swan–in both life and human history, explaining how the phenomenon and its applications affect every aspect of the world in which we live, why humans are unable to anticipate a Black Swan, and how we rationalize the phenomenon to make it appear less random. A black <a...
The Entrepreneurial State — Mariana Mazzucato
Superb … At a time when government action of any kind is ideologically suspect, and entrepreneurship is unquestioningly lionized, the book’s importance cannot be understated. —The Guardian According to conventional wisdom, innovation is best left to the dynamic entrepreneurs of the private sector, and government should...
Rebooting AI. Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust — Gary Marcus
Two leaders in the field offer a compelling analysis of the current state of the art and reveal the steps we must take to achieve a truly robust artificial intelligence. Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. <a...
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict — Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan
For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent...
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power — Soshana Zuboff
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling...
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television — Jerry Mander
A total departure from previous writing about television, this book is the first ever to advocate that the medium is not reformable. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself and are so dangerous — to personal health and sanity, to the environment, and to democratic processes — that TV ought to be eliminated forever....
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty — Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson
Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2012. Why are some nations more prosperous than others? Why Nations Fail sets out to answer this question, with a compelling and elegantly argued new theory: that it is not down to climate, geography or culture, but because of institutions. Drawing <a...
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism — Fred Turner
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a...