Download or read book Silicon From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness written by Federico Faggin and published by Waterside Productions. This book was released on 2021-02-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As soon as she heard me enter, Elvia awoke from a light sleep that had overcome her as she anxiously waited: 'How did it go?' Excited, I exclaimed: 'It works!' We embraced, almost overwhelmed with feelings of euphoria and happiness, aware that something epochal had happened. On that cold January night of 1971, the world's first microprocessor was born!" The creation of the microprocessor launched the digital age. The key technology allowing unprecedented integration, and the design of the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, were the achievement of Federico Faggin. Shrinking an entire computer onto a tiny and inexpensive piece of silicon would come to define our daily lives, imbuing myriad devices and everyday objects with computational intelligence. In Silicon, internationally recognized inventor and entrepreneur Federico Faggin chronicles his "four lives" his formative years in war-torn Northern Italy; his pioneering work in American microelectronics; his successful career as a high-tech entrepreneur; and his more recent explorations into the mysteries of consciousness. In this heartfelt memoir, Faggin paints vivid anecdotes, steps readers through society-changing technological breakthroughs, and shares personal insights, as each of his lives propels the next.

Download or read book After On written by Rob Reid and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive novel of today’s Silicon Valley, After On flash-captures our cultural and technological moment with up-to-the-instant savvy. Matters of privacy and government intrusion, post-Tinder romance, nihilistic terrorism, artificial consciousness, synthetic biology, and much more are tackled with authority and brash playfulness by New York Times bestselling author Rob Reid. Meet Phluttr—a diabolically addictive new social network and a villainess, heroine, enemy, and/or bestie to millions. Phluttr has ingested every fact and message ever sent to, from, and about her innumerable users. Her capabilities astound her makers—and they don’t even know the tenth of it. But what’s the purpose of this stunning creation? Is it a front for something even darker and more powerful than the NSA? A bid to create a trillion-dollar market by becoming “The UberX of Sex”? Or a reckless experiment that could spawn the digital equivalent of a middle-school mean girl with enough charisma, dirt, and cunning to bend the entire planet to her will? Phluttr has it in her to become the greatest gossip, flirt, or matchmaker in history. Or she could cure cancer, bring back Seinfeld, then start a nuclear war. Whatever she does, it’s not up to us. But a motley band of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and engineers might be able to influence her. After On achieves the literary singularity—fusing speculative satire and astonishing reality into a sharp-witted, ferociously believable, IMAX-wide view of our digital age. Praise for After On “Rob Reid’s mind is like no other known thing in the universe, and this book is a truly spectacular way to discover it.”—Chris Anderson, head of TED “An extended philosophy seminar run by a dozen insane Cold War heads-of-station, three millennial COOs and that guy you went to college with who always had the best weed but never did his laundry.”—NPR “An epic cyberthriller peppered with pop-culture references, metadata, and Silicon Valley in-jokes.”—Kirkus Reviews “It’s rare to find a book that combines laugh-out-loud humor and cutting-edge science with profound philosophical speculation. This is that book.”—Analog “[Rob Reid] writes in a humorous and sarcastic style while unveiling a terrifying and frightening scenario that seems all too real.”—Associated Press

Download or read book Silver Nanoparticles written by Audrey E. Welles and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silver nanoparticles are nanoparticles of silver, of between 1 nm and 100 nm in size. While frequently described as being 'silver' some are composed of a large percentage of silver oxide due to their large ratio of surface to bulk silver atoms. This book explores the properties, characterisation and application of silver nanoparticles on topics such as low and high-order nonlinearities of silver nanoparticles; the synthesis, growth mechanisms and tuneable optical and catalytic properties of silver nanoparticles; laser-induced shape transformation of silver nanoparticles embedded in glass and others.

Download or read book The Universal Machine written by Ian Watson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The computer unlike other inventions is universal; you can use a computer for many tasks: writing, composing music, designing buildings, creating movies, inhabiting virtual worlds, communicating... This popular science history isn't just about technology but introduces the pioneers: Babbage, Turing, Apple's Wozniak and Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg. This story is about people and the changes computers have caused. In the future ubiquitous computing, AI, quantum and molecular computing could even make us immortal. The computer has been a radical invention. In less than a single human life computers are transforming economies and societies like no human invention before.

Download or read book Out Of Control written by Kevin Kelly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

Download or read book On Intelligence written by Jeff Hawkins and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the inventor of the PalmPilot comes a new and compelling theory of intelligence, brain function, and the future of intelligent machines Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself. Hawkins develops a powerful theory of how the human brain works, explaining why computers are not intelligent and how, based on this new theory, we can finally build intelligent machines. The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships and making predictions based on those memories. It is this memory-prediction system that forms the basis of intelligence, perception, creativity, and even consciousness. In an engaging style that will captivate audiences from the merely curious to the professional scientist, Hawkins shows how a clear understanding of how the brain works will make it possible for us to build intelligent machines, in silicon, that will exceed our human ability in surprising ways. Written with acclaimed science writer Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence promises to completely transfigure the possibilities of the technology age. It is a landmark book in its scope and clarity.

Download or read book The Cybernetics Moment written by Ronald R. Kline and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choice Outstanding Academic Title Cybernetics—the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans—originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of “information,” “feedback,” and “control” transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of information technologies, and laid the conceptual foundation for what we now call the Information Age. Kline argues that, for about twenty years after 1950, the growth of cybernetics and information theory and ever-more-powerful computers produced a utopian information narrative—an enthusiasm for information science that influenced natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, humanists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and journalists, all of whom struggled to come to grips with new relationships between humans and intelligent machines. Kline traces the relationship between the invention of computers and communication systems and the rise, decline, and transformation of cybernetics by analyzing the lives and work of such notables as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Simon. Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment—when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences—in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies. "Nowhere in the burgeoning secondary literature on cybernetics in the last two decades is there a concise history of cybernetics, the science of communication and control that helped usher in the current information age in America. Nowhere, that is, until now . . . Readers have in The Cybernetics Moment the first authoritative history of American cybernetics."—Information & Culture "[A]n extremely interesting and stimulating history of the concepts of cybernetics . . . This is a book for everyone to read, relish, and think about."—Choice "As a whole, the book presents a comprehensive in-depth retrospective analysis of the contribution of the American scientific school to the making, formation, and development of cybernetics and information theory. An unquestionable advantage of the book is the skillful use of numerous bibliographic sources by the author that reflect the scientific, engineering, and social significance of the questions being considered, competition of ideas and developments, and also interrelations between scientists."—Cybernetics and System Analysis "Dr. Kline is perhaps uniquely situated to take on so large and complicated [a] topic as cybernetics . . . Readers unfamiliar with Wiener and his work are well advised to start with this well-written and thorough book. Those who are already familiar will still find much that is new and informative in the thorough research and reasoned interpretations."—IEEE History Center "The most comprehensive intellectual history of cybernetics in Cold War America."—Journal of American History "The book will be most valuable as historical background for the large number of disciplines that were involved in the cybernetics moment: computer science, communications engineering, information theory, and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology."—IEEE Technology and Society Magazine "Ronald Kline’s chronicle of cybernetics certainly does what an excellent history of science should do. It takes you there—to the golden age of a new, exciting field. You will almost smell that cigar."—Second-Order Cybernetics "Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment tracks the rise and fall of the cybernetics movement in more detail than any historical account to date."—Los Angeles Review of Books

Download or read book The Age of Em written by Robin Hanson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks. Some say we can't know the future, especially following such a disruptive new technology, but Professor Robin Hanson sets out to prove them wrong. Applying decades of expertise in physics, computer science, and economics, he uses standard theories to paint a detailed picture of a world dominated by ems. While human lives don't change greatly in the em era, em lives are as different from ours as our lives are from those of our farmer and forager ancestors. Ems make us question common assumptions of moral progress, because they reject many of the values we hold dear. Read about em mind speeds, body sizes, job training and career paths, energy use and cooling infrastructure, virtual reality, aging and retirement, death and immortality, security, wealth inequality, religion, teleportation, identity, cities, politics, law, war, status, friendship and love. This book shows you just how strange your descendants may be, though ems are no stranger than we would appear to our ancestors. To most ems, it seems good to be an em.

Download or read book The Innovators written by Walter Isaacson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It's also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen"--

Download or read book The Pattern On The Stone written by W. Daniel Hillis and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people are baffled by how computers work and assume that they will never understand them. What they don't realize -- and what Daniel Hillis's short book brilliantly demonstrates -- is that computers' seemingly complex operations can be broken down into a few simple parts that perform the same simple procedures over and over again. Computer wizard Hillis offers an easy-to-follow explanation of how data is processed that makes the operations of a computer seem as straightforward as those of a bicycle. Avoiding technobabble or discussions of advanced hardware, the lucid explanations and colorful anecdotes in The Pattern on the Stone go straight to the heart of what computers really do. Hillis proceeds from an outline of basic logic to clear descriptions of programming languages, algorithms, and memory. He then takes readers in simple steps up to the most exciting developments in computing today -- quantum computing, parallel computing, neural networks, and self-organizing systems. Written clearly and succinctly by one of the world's leading computer scientists, The Pattern on the Stone is an indispensable guide to understanding the workings of that most ubiquitous and important of machines: the computer.

Download or read book Digital Rubbish written by Jennifer Gabrys and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies. In the course of her book, she explores five interrelated "spaces" where electronics fall apart: from Silicon Valley to Nasdaq, from containers bound for China to museums and archives that preserve obsolete electronics as cultural artifacts, to the landfill as material repository. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics describes the materiality of electronics from a unique perspective, examining the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Jennifer Gabrys draws together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.

Download or read book The Precipice written by Toby Ord and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker

Download or read book Complexity written by M. Mitchell Waldrop and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book The Quest for Artificial Intelligence written by Nils J. Nilsson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-30 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field within computer science that is attempting to build enhanced intelligence into computer systems. This book traces the history of the subject, from the early dreams of eighteenth-century (and earlier) pioneers to the more successful work of today's AI engineers. AI is becoming more and more a part of everyone's life. The technology is already embedded in face-recognizing cameras, speech-recognition software, Internet search engines, and health-care robots, among other applications. The book's many diagrams and easy-to-understand descriptions of AI programs will help the casual reader gain an understanding of how these and other AI systems actually work. Its thorough (but unobtrusive) end-of-chapter notes containing citations to important source materials will be of great use to AI scholars and researchers. This book promises to be the definitive history of a field that has captivated the imaginations of scientists, philosophers, and writers for centuries.

Download or read book The Mystery of Consciousness written by John R. Searle and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body? In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain. Only when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings.

Download or read book Made to Break written by Giles Slade and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives, we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.

Download or read book Comprehensive Functional Verification written by Bruce Wile and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2005-05-26 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the biggest challenges in chip and system design is determining whether the hardware works correctly. That is the job of functional verification engineers and they are the audience for this comprehensive text from three top industry professionals.As designs increase in complexity, so has the value of verification engineers within the hardware design team. In fact, the need for skilled verification engineers has grown dramatically--functional verification now consumes between 40 and 70% of a project's labor, and about half its cost. Currently there are very few books on verification for engineers, and none that cover the subject as comprehensively as this text. A key strength of this book is that it describes the entire verification cycle and details each stage. The organization of the book follows the cycle, demonstrating how functional verification engages all aspects of the overall design effort and how individual cycle stages relate to the larger design process. Throughout the text, the authors leverage their 35 plus years experience in functional verification, providing examples and case studies, and focusing on the skills, methods, and tools needed to complete each verification task. Comprehensive overview of the complete verification cycle Combines industry experience with a strong emphasis on functional verification fundamentals Includes real-world case studies