prompt engineering

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late

by Cory Doctorow  · 22 Jun 2026  · 175pp  · 51,295 words

do worse than taking it as a given that you’ll have discount access to a lot of parallel computation, applied statisticians, data labelers, and “prompt engineers.” This isn’t nothing. Maybe in fifteen years we’ll all marvel at the massive breakthroughs made in, say, weather simulation, when all those GPUs

Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships

by James Muldoon  · 7 Sep 2026  · 217pp  · 71,182 words

is very sparse real-world data that has been heavily anonymised.’ Due to these barriers, most companies take existing models and use fine-tuning and prompt engineering to improve their performance and increase their domain-specific knowledge. Elomia, for example, claims it has the largest mental health dataset suitable for LLMs in

Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind

by Paul Stob  · 13 Apr 2026  · 332pp  · 101,368 words

, a British engineer named Richard Trevithick designed the first steam–powered locomotive, although he was never able to produce a viable prototype. The idea, however, prompted engineers in other countries, including the United States, to devise their own engines. In 1814, the first successful steam locomotive made its debut thanks to the

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver  · 12 Aug 2024  · 848pp  · 227,015 words

for length. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT some deliberate randomization: Eric Glover, “Controlled Randomness in LLMs/ChatGPT with Zero Temperature: A Game Changer for Prompt Engineering,” AppliedIngenuity.ai: Practical AI Solutions (blog), May 12, 2023, appliedingenuity.substack.com/p/controlled-randomness-in-llmschatgpt. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT it’s

The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters

by Diane Coyle  · 15 Apr 2025  · 321pp  · 112,477 words

s­ ervices, including digital-­related work. Th ­ ere are multiple categories of ­painter, for example, but none to rec­ord specific digital jobs, such as prompt engineer. Chapters 3 to 5 discuss further t­ hese aspects of the increasing digitalisation and weightlessness of the economy. One inherent challenge in interpreting standard statistics

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

by Tom Standage  · 16 Aug 2021  · 290pp  · 85,847 words

in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1895, it was sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald and offered a $5,000 prize. All these competitions prompted engineers and drivers to try to outdo one another, advancing the state of the automotive art and providing publicity for manufacturers, in a motor-racing tradition

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma

by Mustafa Suleyman  · 4 Sep 2023  · 444pp  · 117,770 words

be created. Who would have thought that “influencer” would become a highly sought-after role? Or imagined that in 2023 people would be working as “prompt engineers”—nontechnical programmers of large language models who become adept at coaxing out specific responses? Demand for masseurs, cellists, and baseball pitchers won’t go away

A Pipeline Runs Through It: The Story of Oil From Ancient Times to the First World War

by Keith Fisher  · 3 Aug 2022

seek outside investment to enable it to continue its exploratory drilling – the French Rothschilds and Standard Oil were among the possible candidates – the British government promptly engineered a rescue of the company. The Admiralty, for its part, was anxious to keep this potential source of fuel oil in British hands. The Foreign

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety

by Eric Schlosser  · 16 Sep 2013  · 956pp  · 267,746 words

written and concise. John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974) not only has great literary merit, it also prompted engineers at Sandia to confront the possibility that terrorists might try to steal a nuclear weapon. Martin J. Sherwin and John McPhee were both professors of

These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means

by Christopher Summerfield  · 11 Mar 2025  · 412pp  · 122,298 words

.ai/. *6 Lewis et al., 2021. *7 Scheurer et al., 2022. *8 https://medium.com/@lucasantinelli3/analysing-the-effects-of-politeness-on-gpt-4-soft-prompt-engineering-70089358f5fa. 33. The Perils of Personalization Relationships between people are built on trust. As we spend time with others, we learn about their hopes, desires

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

by Joanna Walsh  · 22 Sep 2025  · 255pp  · 80,203 words

AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications

by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt  · 31 Dec 2023  · 321pp  · 113,564 words

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI

by Ethan Mollick  · 2 Apr 2024  · 189pp  · 58,076 words