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The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (And Who Benefits)

by Maximilian Kasy  · 15 Jan 2025  · 209pp  · 63,332 words

in the secret police forces of autocratic surveillance states. One domain in which AI is deployed in society is the workplace. AI is used in robotized Amazon warehouses, in the algorithmic management of Uber drivers, and in the screening of job candidates by large companies. AI is also used in consequential domains

Gambling Man

by Lionel Barber  · 3 Oct 2024  · 424pp  · 123,730 words

. Today SoftBank’s portfolio includes China’s ride-hailing Didi and internet giant ByteDance; food-delivery services like DoorDash and Grab; as well as automated robotic warehouses like Symbotic. These were the ‘first wave’ of AI-related companies with ‘baby’ applications. In 2024 Masa invested in next-generation AI companies such as

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone  · 10 May 2021  · 569pp  · 156,139 words

, which made the Roomba-like mobile robots. Instead of pickers walking a dozen miles a day to select items from shelves spread out over giant warehouses, Kiva robots maneuvered portable containers of merchandise around the building, an orchestral symphony conducted by the invisible hand of software. The idea behind Kiva was born

spring of 2011. Mountz rejected the proposal. At the same time, Amazon began quietly evaluating other robotics companies and asking them to build a mobile warehouse robot. The effort failed though, and Amazon increased its offer for Kiva. An investment banker who represented Kiva said that the subsequent talks “were the most

position. Dave Clark, the bespectacled former middle school band teacher, had proven himself uniquely capable of developing large, complex systems, like the network of warehouses using Kiva robots and the in-house transportation division, Amazon Logistics, which was now responsible for approximately half of all Amazon deliveries globally and two-thirds in

-shopping-the-man-who-makes-it-happen (January 23, 2021). find a robot that could do a better job: Chris Welch, “Amazon’s Robot Competition Shows Why Human Warehouse Jobs Are Safe for Now,” The Verge, June 1, 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/1/8698607/amazon-robot-picking-challenge-results

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car

by Anthony M. Townsend  · 15 Jun 2020  · 362pp  · 97,288 words

shelved its human-cage plans. Instead, many of the company’s fulfillment-center workers now don a less repressive protective device to ward off warehouse droids, called the Robotic Tech Vest. By signaling a human presence to nearby machines, this ghost road armor allows more than 125,000 fulfillment-center workers to

, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/technology/amazon-robots-workers.html. 137cramming 50 percent more inventory: Ananya Bhattacharya, “Amazon Is Just Beginning to Use Robots in Its Warehouses and They’re Already Making a Huge Difference,” Quartz, June 17, 2016, https://qz.com/709541/amazon-is-just-beginning-to-use

-robots-in-its-warehouses-and-theyre-already-making-a-huge-difference/. 137bots that slide along tracks suspended: Fiona Hartley, “Over 1,000 Robots Pack Groceries in Ocado’s Online

Shopping Warehouse,” Dezeen, June 6, 2018, https://www.dezeen.com/2018/06/06/video-ocado-warehouse-shopping-robots-movie/. 137China’s JD.com employs a freakish spiderlike robot: JD.com, “Tour of the Warehouse of the Future,” YouTube video, May 11, 2017

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy

by Christopher Mims  · 13 Sep 2021  · 385pp  · 112,842 words

black save the occasional flash of a laser scanner. “People always ask if we are going to replace humans with robots, but since introducing robots to our warehouses, we’ve hired over 300,000 associates,” your tour guide is likely to say, or some variant of it, because it’s what employees

spend time waiting for the computer to tell them which pod to put it in.” (“Pods” are Amazonese for the combination of shelves and robots in a warehouse, while bins are the cubbies in a pod.) Not overmanaging where people stick things on any one mobile shelf also helps keep items flowing

the heat death of the universe, the best solution for this item must be balanced against the operation of the entire system—every robot and machine in the warehouse can’t just drop everything to prioritize a single order. Any delivery or routing algorithm must also build some flexibility into the travel

that can overwhelm you in a moment like this. There Emily sat, sobbing. No one saw her and no one came to help. Amazon warehouses that lack robots are so vast that associates rarely bump into one another. Amazon’s logistics hubs are incredibly diverse, their inner workings dependent on their functions

out of a hundred, a person who is physically present must step in to solve the problem on-site. Today, one person in a warehouse can oversee twenty robots, says Erik Nieves, Plus One’s animated, voluble founder. “But the same crew chief handling eight robots today is handling twenty robots tomorrow

per person,” he adds. Driving those potential gains in efficiency is the feedback loop between the human minders in San Antonio; the users of these robots in warehouses, which include not just MSC but FedEx and other Fortune 500 companies; and the AI that powers them. Every time a robot fails and

’s the issue, but unfortunately in supply chains, any robot you put in is their first robot,” says Erik. In terms of the evolution of warehouse robotics, “we’re in the first inning—the first at bat, really,” says Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics. “I’m a rocket scientist,” he

-on-amazonliterally-11576599910. AWS encompasses: “Cloud Products,” Amazon Web Services, https://aws.amazon.com/products. You’ve got to be crazy: Jennifer Alsever, “Robot Workers Take Over Warehouses,” CNN, November 9, 2011, https://money.cnn.com/2011/11/09/smallbusiness/kiva_robots/index.htm. pioneered by Walmart: Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart

About Warehouse Safety Issues,” PBS NewsHour, October 13, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/leaked-documents-show-how-amazon-misled-the-public-about-warehouse-safety-issues. “Before robots, it was still tough”: Will Evans, “Behind the Smiles,” Reveal (Center for Investigative Reporting), November 25, 2019, https://revealnews.org/article/behind-the

, 236; Bezosism and other management systems, 217, 218, 222; containerized shipping and, 14–15; Covid-19 pandemic affecting, 8; fully automated warehouses and, 245–48, 250; robotic delivery systems and, 260; robotic warehousing and, 165–70, 195; trucks/truck drivers and, 109, 120, 156 Edison, NJ, Amazon fulfillment center at, 197 efficiency/inefficiency

and flags of convenience, 32 Flaubert, Gustave, 274 Flinn, Craig, 49–55, 57, 61, 64 flywheel, 231 Ford, Henry, Ford Motor Company, and Fordism: Amazon warehouses and robotic warehousing, 163–64, 184; Bezosism and, 198, 207, 214–16, 219, 220, 231; scientific management (Taylorism) compared, 91, 99–101; supply chain in, 2

, 182, 183, 191 MSC (shipping company), 22, 70 MSC Industrial Supply, 241–45, 248–49 MSDs (musculoskeletal disorders), 237, 238 muda, 226 Mujin (robotics company), 246 Municipal Warehouse No. 1, Port of Los Angeles, 46 Muro, Marc, 76 Murray, Matt, 209 Musk, Elon, 79, 155 MWPVL International, 201 N95 masks, 8, 10

, Tyler, 227 Walton, Sam, 281 warehouses and warehousing: accidents and injuries from warehouse work, 233–40; truck delivery to warehouse, 139–40. See also Amazon warehouses; Bezosism; robotic warehousing “water spider,” 248 Watertown Arsenal, MA, 98, 234 Waymo, 142–43, 154 Waze, 283 Webvan, 165, 169 Weil, David, 278–81 Welch, Jack

The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound “With the elegance and efficiency of a first-rate tech journalist, Mims leads us into the nooks and crannies, robots, AI, warehouses, and ships that are highly complex so as to make our daily life simple. A must-read.” —Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything

by Martin Ford  · 13 Sep 2021  · 288pp  · 86,995 words

speed about, hurrying between destinations riding on the backs of fully autonomous robots. This wholesale reorganization began with Amazon’s $775 million acquisition of the warehouse robotics startup Kiva Systems in 2012. The robots, which look somewhat like huge orange hockey pucks and weigh in at over 300 pounds, roam within a

have competed to build robots that can perform the tasks now undertaken by the workers who pick items from the shelves in its warehouses.16 While building a robotic hand capable of reliably grasping thousands of different items—all of different sizes, weights, shapes, textures and packaging configurations—has proven to be

future, and the far more chaotic outside world, where the challenges for technologies like self-driving cars are likely to be far more daunting. A warehouse robot that can predictably handle half the items it might encounter can be highly useful. A self-driving car operating on a public road that can

is capable of processing about 65,000 online grocery orders, containing three and half million individual items, every week.19 As in Amazon’s warehouses, the robots focus on the logistics of rapidly moving materials, while the primary role for humans among all this automation is the picking and packing that continues

variety of items without any need for human intervention.23 Covariant will be working with ABB as well other major companies to imbue industrial robots deployed in warehouses and factories with intelligence that the company believes will eventually match or exceed human-level perception and dexterity. Many of the startup companies and

run. Robots have already made significant inroads in hospitals, but they are subject to the same basic limitations that we’ve seen in warehouse and retail environments. Disinfecting robots, for example, are rapidly growing in popularity. These machines are able to create a virtual map of a room in a hospital and

its input data, is referred to, among researchers, as “brittleness.” A brittle AI application may not be a huge problem if it results in a warehouse robot occasionally packing the wrong item into a box. In other applications, however, the same technical shortfall can be catastrophic. This explains, for example, why progress

COLLAR AUTOMATION… AND WHY TEACHING EVERYONE TO CODE IS NOT A SOLUTION The specter of job automation typically conjures up images of industrial robots toiling in factories or warehouses. The conventional wisdom suggests that, while lower-wage, less-educated, blue collar workers face a dire threat from technology, knowledge workers educated with

signal robot supremacy,” Wired, October 16, 2019, www.wired.com/story/why-solving-rubiks-cube-not-signal-robot-supremacy/. 9. Noam Scheiber, “Inside an Amazon warehouse, robots’ ways rub off on humans,” New York Times, July 3, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/business/economy/amazon

-warehouse-labor-robots.html. 10. Eugene Kim, “Amazon’s $775 million deal for robotics company Kiva is starting to look really smart,” Business Insider, June 15, 2016, www.

/archive/2019/11/amazon-warehouse-reports-show-worker-injuries/602530/. 12. Jason Del Ray, “How robots are transforming Amazon warehouse jobs—for better and worse,” Recode, December 11, 2019, www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/11/20982652/robots-amazon-warehouse-jobs-automation. 13. Michael Sainato, “‘I’m not a robot’: Amazon workers condemn unsafe

-replace-jobs-idUSKCN1SJ0X1. 15. Matt Simon, “Inside the Amazon warehouse where humans and machines become one,” Wired, June 5, 2019, www.wired.com/story/amazon-warehouse-robots/. 16. James Vincent, “Amazon’s latest robot champion uses deep learning to stock shelves,” The Verge, July 5, 2016, www.theverge.com/2016/7/5

-amazon-com-conference/amazons-bezos-says-robotic-hands-will-be-ready-for-commercial-use-in-next-10-years-idUSKCN1T72JB. 18. Tech Insider, “Inside a warehouse where thousands of robots pack groceries (video),” YouTube, May 9, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=4DKrcpa8Z_E. 19. James Vincent, “Welcome to the automated

adept with every task,” Wired, March 10, 2020, www.wired.com/story/these-industrial-robots-adept-every-task/. 26. Adam Satariano and Cade Metz, “A warehouse robot learns to sort out the tricky stuff,” New York Times, January 29, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/technology

/warehouse-robot.html. 27. Matthew Boyle, “Robots in aisle two: Supermarket survival means matching Amazon,” Bloomberg, December 3, 2019, www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-automated-grocery-stores/. 28. Ibid. 29. Nathaniel Meyersohn, “

The End of Work

by Jeremy Rifkin  · 28 Dec 1994  · 372pp  · 152 words

of sale, retailers can transmit shipping orders directly to manufacturers' warehouses by way of electronic data interchange (EDI). At the other end, automated warehouses staffed by computer-driven robots and remote-controlled delivery vehicles fill orders in a matter of minutes without the assistance of human physical labor. An increasing number of

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It

by Brian Dumaine  · 11 May 2020  · 411pp  · 98,128 words

that fateful meeting with Collins, Bezos ramped up his innovation engine and the flywheel spun faster. He invested heavily in speeding up deliveries, deploying robots in his warehouses, and developing devices like the Kindle and Fire TV and Alexa and services such as AWS and Prime. The flywheel encouraged his workforce to

as we saw in the previous chapter, easier for the companies that make them to collect data on our buying habits.) In the business arena, warehouse robots, scanners, and self-driving delivery vans also connect to the Internet, thanks to inexpensive sensors and smart algorithms. By 2022, there will be more than

are some of the most automated in the world. After the company bought Kiva robots for $775 million in 2012, it started filling its warehouses with robots, and now some 200,000 of these machines whir around Amazon’s facilities doing many jobs that used to be done by humans. In one

packages and bins. Large robotic arms, for instance, can lift heavy pallets laden with products from one floor to the next. Amazon’s warehouses that use these robots, according to one estimate, contain on average 50 percent more inventory per square foot than those centers without and have helped cut operating costs

of the workstations, and installed new technology to improve safety. Fulfillment center workers in certain areas now wear radio-frequency vests that signal the robots racing around the warehouse floor to avoid them. It installed light curtains around robotic arms. If anyone breaks the plane with their hand, the robot stops. If

for a job that is currently in demand. Tarot card readers need not apply. If you want to train to maintain or program the robots in the warehouse, Amazon will pay for that. Even if you want to leave Amazon and become a nurse or a truck driver at another business, Amazon

’s system can fill 65,000 grocery orders every week. In February 2019, a fire that started from an electrical fault at a robot recharging station destroyed the warehouse. Ocado is rebuilding. Ocado isn’t just an online grocery. It hopes to sell its robotic system to big retailers around the world

glimpse of what the future may look like. One of China’s largest online retailers with 310 million customers, JD.com opened a warehouse in 2017 that uses robots to pick up packages of a predictable shape and size—like a cell phone or a box of laundry soap. It’s the

days, no vacation time, no urinating in bottles. Theoretically, except for those times when JD.com’s four workers are doing maintenance on the robots, the warehouse could be run in the dark. Robots don’t need to see. The JD.com warehouse works because it handles only standard-sized packages. Amazon

, some humans will work alongside robots as “cobots”—a term to describe how humans working with robots will be more efficient than humans or robots alone. A warehouse worker who previously lifted and stacked objects could become a robot operator, monitoring the flow of work, maintaining and operating drones, and fixing things

power, more wealth will assuredly accumulate at the top of the income pyramid. The AI-fueled automation that these companies are unleashing—whether it’s warehouse picking robots, autonomous vehicles, or Alexa taking care of our shopping and health-care needs—will reduce, as this book has argued, the number of blue

: Evelyn M. Rusli, “Amazon.com to Acquire Manufacturer of Robotics,” New York Times, March 19, 2012. Amazon’s warehouses that use these robots: Ananya Bhattacharya, “Amazon Is Just Beginning to Use Robots in Its Warehouses and They’re Already Making a Huge Difference,” Quartz, June 17, 2016. Even after installing all these robots: Author

Andover Started by Electrical Fault,” BBC News, April 29, 2019. On the day the deal beacame public: Naomi Rovnick, “Ocado Profits Dip as Costs of Robot Warehouses Climb,” Financial Times, July 10, 2018. One of China’s largest online retailers: Craig Smith, “65 JD Facts and Statistics,” DMR Business Statistics, https://expandedramblings

skills and customer knowledge of, 8, 124, 270 Amazon’s competition with, 266 delivery drones used by, 178 global spheres of influence with, 188–89 warehouse with robots of, 136–38 Jentoft, Leif, 139 JetBlack delivery service, Walmart, 190–91 Jet.com, 54, 183–84, 185 jobs AI-driven tech giants and

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy

by Lawrence Ingrassia  · 28 Jan 2020  · 290pp  · 90,057 words

door, fast. Within seconds of the Bonobos order arriving electronically at the warehouse, its computer system assigns it to one of these Locus robots. Scattered throughout the warehouse are seven hundred thousand different items, but the robot doesn’t hesitate. An algorithm dispatches it on the best route to bins containing the

right size and color of trousers. When the robot arrives, a worker picks each pair of trousers and places it into a rectangular tote the robot

is carrying. At many warehouses, workers can walk five to ten miles a day, selecting orders along the way; an efficient worker might pick up to fifty items

an hour. But at this warehouse, the robots do the walking—rather, the rolling—while people are strategically stationed around the warehouse. Working in tandem with a human picker, a robot can

’ founders—with no robotics experience—scrambled to build their own, better robots under a new company called Locus Robotics. They are now selling these robots to other warehouses around the world that are also racing to automate. How Locus robots came to be built is part of a broader tale of the

on the shipment of cargo from an overseas manufacturer to a U.S. port; others, on moving goods from the dock to the warehouse; some on building robots and highly automated warehouses to provide the most efficient handling after an order is placed; others, on developing smartphone apps that help truck drivers

consulting for a few years, Welty and Johnson began hearing about a start-up named Kiva Systems, which was in the early stage of developing warehouse robots. Kiva had been founded by former executives of Webvan, an online grocer that had gone bust, in part because its warehouses weren’t sufficiently automated

. Welty’s immediate reaction was “I don’t believe you. Robots in a warehouse? Not a chance.” But as he and Johnson heard more, they became curious. Kiva robots had been installed in the mid-2000s by a

few big retail chains, such as Staples, for their company-owned warehouses. Welty persuaded a former customer to sneak him into a warehouse employing Kiva robots. “I was completely blown away. ‘This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,’” he recalls. Welty and Johnson knew that creating a new

created a new company, Quiet Logistics, which would operate warehouses for e-commerce companies, and in early 2009 it became the first independent warehouse operator to deploy Kiva robots. Quiet Logistics soon built a reputation for delivering goods quickly and inexpensively. Depending on the size, weight, and distance, it could deliver orders

town of Devens. Quiet Logistics even became a showcase for Kiva, which often asked to give prospective customers a tour of Quiet Logistics’s warehouse, to see the robots in action. It was flattering, a validation to Welty and Johnson that their vision for reengineering warehouses had been right. “We thought, This

and Johnson were unnerved. They had built their entire business model around an automated warehouse. Kiva robots were essential to their business. After starting with just ten Kiva robots initially, their warehouses now deployed two hundred. In search of an alternative, Welty flew around the world to visit companies developing robots. But even as

alone in worrying about the threat posed by Amazon’s purchase of Kiva. About a dozen other companies were racing to develop highly automated warehouses equipped with robotics to take advantage of the growth of e-commerce, and to fill the void after Amazon announced it would stop selling Kiva’s robots

’re crazy.” But Welty argued that they had advantages over many robotics companies. Having used Kiva robots in their warehouse, they knew Kiva’s limitations and the features that would make for a better next-generation warehouse robot. “Over time, we had developed a long laundry list with Kiva that we didn’t like

a separate company, funded at first with $7 million from Welty, Johnson, and their backers, and later with $59 million from venture capital investors. A warehouse robot might sound mundane, but Locus didn’t have a problem recruiting robotics scientists for their project. Mike Sussman, who had worked at Kiva and another

color-coded computer screen that displays the next item the robot will collect. In late 2015, after extensive testing, Locus deployed a few robots in Quiet Logistics’ warehouse. They performed even better than expected. In a couple of hours, robots working with just one person managed to collect as many orders as

ten having been granted—“and they rarely see so many patents from one place. They wanted a tour. Who would have thought that warehouse guys could build a robot?” Welty says. Locus has helped Quiet Logistics expand its business in the year since it was cut off by Amazon and Kiva. By

than sixty, adding brands such as the luggage start-up Away and the online mattress brand Tuft & Needle. With only about 10 percent of warehouses nationwide having installed robots, Welty and Johnson are confident that their bet on Locus will pay off. “Amazon has created an arms race in this industry, and

by building “vertical” warehouses in big cities to facilitate same-day deliveries, just like its giant rival. And, naturally, he expects the new warehouses will be filled with robots—Locus robots. * * * The cavernous warehouse in Ontario, California, about thirty miles east of Los Angeles, contains 1.6 million square feet, covering the size

rounds and focused initially on two cities, Seattle and Los Angeles, because both are major West Coast ports and transit hubs with lots of warehouses. As with Locus Robotics, what helped most, Siebrecht says, was the growing power of Amazon. “In the past few years there has been an urgency to change

, such as distribution centers operated by Amazon’s Whole Foods subsidiary. With more than two hundred thousand robots: Lauren Feiner, “Amazon Shows Off Its New Warehouse Robots That Can Automatically Sort Packages,” CNBC, June 5, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/05/amazon-shows-off-its-new

-warehouse-robots.html; Nick Wingfield, “As Amazon Pushes Forward with Robots, Workers Find New Roles,” New York Times, September 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/technology/amazon-robots-workers.html. testing new warehouse automation equipment: Jeffrey Dastin, “Amazon Rolls Out Machines That

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie  · 3 Jul 2024  · 348pp  · 119,358 words

, as the logistics industry is understaffed, as it’s not often well paid and is usually hard work. However, it’s worth noting that many warehouse robots are already in use without looking anything like humans. Britain’s Ocado Technologies uses thousands of rolling box robots to shuffle grocery orders. And though

Boston Dynamics began its work developing a warehouse robot with the bipedal Atlas, it slowly evolved from the humanoid form to Stretch, with its rolling design and AI to understand what boxes to pick

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI

by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson  · 15 Jan 2018  · 523pp  · 61,179 words

The Best Business Writing 2013

by Dean Starkman  · 1 Jan 2013  · 514pp  · 152,903 words

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America

by Alec MacGillis  · 16 Mar 2021  · 426pp  · 136,925 words

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future

by Hal Niedzviecki  · 15 Mar 2015  · 343pp  · 102,846 words

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton  · 19 Feb 2016  · 903pp  · 235,753 words

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

by Martin Ford  · 4 May 2015  · 484pp  · 104,873 words

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

by Brian Merchant  · 25 Sep 2023  · 524pp  · 154,652 words

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

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

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation

by Kevin Roose  · 9 Mar 2021  · 208pp  · 57,602 words

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield  · 29 May 2017  · 410pp  · 119,823 words

Economic Dignity

by Gene Sperling  · 14 Sep 2020  · 667pp  · 149,811 words

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World

by Scott Galloway  · 2 Oct 2017  · 305pp  · 79,303 words

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane

by Brett King  · 5 May 2016  · 385pp  · 111,113 words

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz  · 15 Mar 2021  · 414pp  · 109,622 words

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce

by Natalie Berg and Miya Knights  · 28 Jan 2019  · 404pp  · 95,163 words

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future

by Noreena Hertz  · 13 May 2020  · 506pp  · 133,134 words

Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things

by Alasdair Gilchrist  · 27 Jun 2016

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson  · 26 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 117,093 words

Aerotropolis

by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay  · 2 Jan 2009  · 603pp  · 182,781 words

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb  · 16 Apr 2018  · 345pp  · 75,660 words

The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen  · 5 Jan 2015  · 361pp  · 81,068 words

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism

by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski  · 5 Mar 2019  · 202pp  · 62,901 words

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler  · 28 Jan 2020  · 501pp  · 114,888 words

The Road to Conscious Machines

by Michael Wooldridge  · 2 Nov 2018  · 346pp  · 97,890 words

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

by John Markoff  · 24 Aug 2015  · 413pp  · 119,587 words

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

by Byron Reese  · 23 Apr 2018  · 294pp  · 96,661 words

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly  · 9 Oct 2017  · 561pp  · 157,589 words

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen  · 13 Sep 2021

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism

by Calum Chace  · 17 Jul 2016  · 477pp  · 75,408 words

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee  · 14 Sep 2018  · 307pp  · 88,180 words

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle  · 18 Jun 2018  · 301pp  · 85,263 words

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It

by Marc Goodman  · 24 Feb 2015  · 677pp  · 206,548 words

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee  · 20 Jan 2014  · 339pp  · 88,732 words

Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson  · 23 Oct 1992  · 660pp  · 213,945 words

Your Computer Is on Fire

by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip  · 9 Mar 2021  · 661pp  · 156,009 words

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age

by Roger Bootle  · 4 Sep 2019  · 374pp  · 111,284 words

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century

by Ryan Avent  · 20 Sep 2016  · 323pp  · 90,868 words

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

by Temple Grandin, Ph.d.  · 11 Oct 2022

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever

by Alex Kantrowitz  · 6 Apr 2020  · 260pp  · 67,823 words

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

by Stuart Russell  · 7 Oct 2019  · 416pp  · 112,268 words

The Smartphone Society

by Nicole Aschoff

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Robert J. Gordon  · 12 Jan 2016  · 1,104pp  · 302,176 words

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century

by Mark Walker  · 29 Nov 2015

Quarantine

by Greg Egan  · 13 Dec 1994  · 266pp  · 78,986 words

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 7 Sep 2022  · 205pp  · 61,903 words

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

by Andrew Yang  · 2 Apr 2018  · 300pp  · 76,638 words

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

by Anna Wiener  · 14 Jan 2020  · 237pp  · 74,109 words

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism

by Peter Frase  · 10 Mar 2015  · 121pp  · 36,908 words

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford  · 3 Oct 2016  · 349pp  · 95,972 words

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World

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