Best Reads 2023 at BCIT Library: Technology & Engineering

"The big question in the public mind about Elon Musk, as a London cabbie once put it to me, is whether he’s “a pillock or a genius”. The quick answer is that he’s both; a better answer is that there’s a lot of detail between those two extremes – so much so, in fact, that it takes Walter Isaacson 688 pages to cram it all in. But cram it in he does." From The Guardian

Covering rockets and spies, Tom Stoppard plays and Alan Turing, von Neuman and vocoders, Smith ranges widely over the history of science and technology (and cinema). That's because he's not just exploring the background of display technology: he's also explaining information theory and a theory of his own. This is that significant developments in technology usually involve not just individuals with ideas that turn into breakthroughs, but also disruptive chaos that fuels the need for the breakthrough, plus a tyrant (anyone from Napoleon to Walt Disney) who deliberately or accidentally makes the space in which the breakthrough can happen (be that exile to a provincial town or providing funding and making demands). - from https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-biography-of-the-pixel-book-review/

You get a peculiar feeling when reading a history of events that took place when you were a 30-plus-year-old adult trying to earn a living. You recall some of them, but then you discover that not only were there many gaps in your knowledge at the time but there were significant things happening in these gaps. Laine Nooney’s The Apple II age is a masterful history of contemporary events. This book is fun to read--great stories told well. - from Anthony J. Duben, ACM https://www.computingreviews.com/review/review_review.cfm?review_id=147601&listname=todaysissuebook

Lamdan’s extensive background with US law and legal resources make her an ideal figure to discuss the problems that can occur when just a few major players monopolize a market and when the US government is slow to react. The comparison of these companies to monopolies
and cartels could also be applied to scholarly publishers who charge exorbitant costs for journals. Existing laws are not a good fit for these new problems. The first step toward addressing this is a broader awareness that personal data collection is ongoing. Lamdan’s book does an excellent job in alerting us to the issues posed by new data technology. - Kelly Blessinger, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication https://www.proquest.com/publiccontent/scholarly-journals/data-cartels-companies-that-control-monopolize/docview/2878683571/sem-2?accountid=26389

"Award-winning Shard engineer and broadcaster Roma Agrawal deconstructs our most complex feats of engineering into seven fundamental inventions: the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump. Each of these objects is itself a wonder of design, the result of many iterations and refinements. Together, they have enabled humanity to see the invisible, build the spectacular, communicate across vast distances, and even escape our planet." From Royal Society

Over the last year, we've seen the first signs this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies is breaking. These tools will help address global challenges and create vast wealth—but also upheaval on a once unimaginable scale. Understand this wave, and you will begin to understand the future. - from the book's webstie: https://www.the-coming-wave.com/

What are the implications of the use of artificial intelligence in democratic and authoritarian states? Paul Scharre’s clear primer on AI addresses the race to lead AI in determining the rules of the next century. He raises the possibility that AI in war accelerates past human control, undermining democracy and freedom. He urges democratic nations to shape the future of AI, arguing that the U.S. has struggled to develop an identifiable strategy for AI, unlike China, which views it as a key to national success. - from Edith Chapin, senior vice president and editor in chief at NPR

"The Near-Death of the Author: Authorship in the Internet Age includes a history of authorship, tracing the changes in the status of the author from ancient cultures to the present. The book proposes that if there is a contemporary threat to the social role of the author, it derives not from the post-structuralist theory of Roland Barthes in 'The Death of the Author', but from the disruptive practices associated with the internet and digital technology." - from publisher