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Author: Charles-Edouard Bouée
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472971795
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
Machines that are smarter than people? A utopian dream of science-fiction novelists and Hollywood screenwriters perhaps, but one which technological progress is turning into reality. Two trends are coming together: exponential growth in the processing power of supercomputers, and new software which can copy the way neurons in the human brain work and give machines the ability to learn. Smart systems will soon be commonplace in homes, businesses, factories, administrations, hospitals and the armed forces. How autonomous will they be? How free to make decisions? What place will human beings still have in a world controlled by robots? After the atom bomb, is artificial intelligence the second lethal weapon capable of destroying mankind, its inventor? The Fall of the Human Empire traces the little-known history of artificial intelligence from the standpoint of a robot called Lucy. She – or it? – recounts her adventures and reveals the mysteries of her long journey with humans, and provides a thought-provoking storyline of what developments in A.I. may mean for both humans and robots.
Author: Charles-Edouard Bouée
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472971795
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Get Book Here
Book Description
Machines that are smarter than people? A utopian dream of science-fiction novelists and Hollywood screenwriters perhaps, but one which technological progress is turning into reality. Two trends are coming together: exponential growth in the processing power of supercomputers, and new software which can copy the way neurons in the human brain work and give machines the ability to learn. Smart systems will soon be commonplace in homes, businesses, factories, administrations, hospitals and the armed forces. How autonomous will they be? How free to make decisions? What place will human beings still have in a world controlled by robots? After the atom bomb, is artificial intelligence the second lethal weapon capable of destroying mankind, its inventor? The Fall of the Human Empire traces the little-known history of artificial intelligence from the standpoint of a robot called Lucy. She – or it? – recounts her adventures and reveals the mysteries of her long journey with humans, and provides a thought-provoking storyline of what developments in A.I. may mean for both humans and robots.
Author: Rosalind Williams
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226899586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
In the early 1600s, in a haunting tale titled New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon imagined the discovery of an uncharted island. This island was home to the descendants of the lost realm of Atlantis, who had organized themselves to seek “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” Bacon’s make-believe island was not an empire in the usual sense, marked by territorial control; instead, it was the center of a vast general expansion of human knowledge and power. Rosalind Williams uses Bacon’s island as a jumping-off point to explore the overarching historical event of our time: the rise and triumph of human empire, the apotheosis of the modern ambition to increase knowledge and power in order to achieve world domination. Confronting an intensely humanized world was a singular event of consciousness, which Williams explores through the lives and works of three writers of the late nineteenth century: Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson. As the century drew to a close, these writers were unhappy with the direction in which their world seemed to be headed and worried that organized humanity would use knowledge and power for unworthy ends. In response, Williams shows, each engaged in a lifelong quest to make a home in the midst of human empire, to transcend it, and most of all to understand it. They accomplished this first by taking to the water: in life and in art, the transition from land to water offered them release from the condition of human domination. At the same time, each writer transformed his world by exploring the literary boundary between realism and romance. Williams shows how Verne, Morris, and Stevenson experimented with romance and fantasy and how these traditions allowed them to express their growing awareness of the need for a new relationship between humans and Earth. The Triumph of Human Empire shows that for these writers and their readers romance was an exceptionally powerful way of grappling with the political, technical, and environmental situations of modernity. As environmental consciousness rises in our time, along with evidence that our seeming control over nature is pathological and unpredictable, Williams’s history is one that speaks very much to the present.
Author: Doug MacLeod
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Author: Henry Gee
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250325587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
By the award-winning author of A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: a history of humanity on the brink of decline. We are living through a period that is unique in human history. For the first time in more than ten thousand years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. In the middle of this century population growth will stop, and the number of people on Earth will start to decline - fast. In this provocative book, award-winning science writer Henry Gee offers a concise, brilliantly-told history of our species--and argues that we are on a rapid, one-way trip to extinction. The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire narrates the dramatic rise of humanity, how a scattered range of small groups across several continents eventually inbred, interacted, fought, established stable communities and food supplies, and began the process of dominating the planet. The human story is relatively brief—the oldest fossils of H. Sapiens date to approximately 300,000 years ago—yet the spread of our species has been unstoppable...until recently. As Gee demonstrates, our population has peaked, and is declining; our environment is becoming inimical to human life in many locations; our core resources of water, arable land, and air are diminishing; and new diseases, simmering conflicts, and ambiguous technologies threaten our collective health. Can we still change our course? Or is our own extinction inevitable? There could be a way out, but the launch window is narrow. Unless Homo sapiens establishes successful colonies in space within the next two centuries, our species is likely to stay earthbound and will have vanished entirely within another ten thousand years, bringing the seven-million-year story of the human lineage to an end. With assured narration, dramatic stories, and his signature sprightly humor, Henry Gee envisions new opportunities for the future of humanity—a future that will reward facing challenges with ingenuity, foresight, and cooperation.
Author: George R. Stewart
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0899683703
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Author: T K Martin
Publisher: United P.C. Verlag
ISBN: 9783710331602
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 656
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Book Description
Mike Turnball and Marcie Harris. One a test pilot for the RAF, the other a mother grieving for her murdered infant. How can they hope to gather the remains of humanity and fight against an alien race of savage carnivores?
Author: Michael Kulikowski
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674242718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
A sweeping political history of the turbulent two centuries that led to the demise of the Roman Empire. The Tragedy of Empire begins in the late fourth century with the reign of Julian, the last non-Christian Roman emperor, and takes readers to the final years of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the sixth century. One hundred years before Julian’s rule, Emperor Diocletian had resolved that an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and from the Rhine and Tyne to the Sahara, could not effectively be governed by one man. He had devised a system of governance, called the tetrarchy by modern scholars, to respond to the vastness of the empire, its new rivals, and the changing face of its citizenry. Powerful enemies like the barbarian coalitions of the Franks and the Alamanni threatened the imperial frontiers. The new Sasanian dynasty had come into power in Persia. This was the political climate of the Roman world that Julian inherited. Kulikowski traces two hundred years of Roman history during which the Western Empire ceased to exist while the Eastern Empire remained politically strong and culturally vibrant. The changing structure of imperial rule, the rise of new elites, foreign invasions, the erosion of Roman and Greek religions, and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion mark these last two centuries of the Empire.
Author: Kyle Harper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400888913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civilizations of the ancient world Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome’s power—a story of nature’s triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes readers from Rome’s pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted. Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a “little ice age” and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague. A poignant reflection on humanity’s intimate relationship with the environment, The Fate of Rome provides a sweeping account of how one of history’s greatest civilizations encountered and endured, yet ultimately succumbed to the cumulative burden of nature’s violence. The example of Rome is a timely reminder that climate change and germ evolution have shaped the world we inhabit—in ways that are surprising and profound.
Author: Murray Charles Macdonald
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781514111024
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Until recently the history of civilization has been entirely written, edited and printed by Europeans. This obviously would create a bias in their favor. They tend to paint quite an extraordinary picture of themselves, despite all of the incredibly brutal, barbaric actions that have occurred. Follow the author through the history of civilization, viewed from a previously unseen, hopefully less biased perspective, from Mesopotamia, to Ancient Greece, Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the Barbarian invasions, Dark Ages, Medieval Europe, Enlightenment, Philosophy, Colonialism, The New World, the Mayans, discovery of Evolution, World Wars, right up to present day, the intelligence of non-human species, and see fifty years into the future.
Author: Walter Scheidel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216738
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 698
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Book Description
The gripping story of how the end of the Roman Empire was the beginning of the modern world The fall of the Roman Empire has long been considered one of the greatest disasters in history. But in this groundbreaking book, Walter Scheidel argues that Rome's dramatic collapse was actually the best thing that ever happened, clearing the path for Europe's economic rise and the creation of the modern age. Ranging across the entire premodern world, Escape from Rome offers new answers to some of the biggest questions in history: Why did the Roman Empire appear? Why did nothing like it ever return to Europe? And, above all, why did Europeans come to dominate the world? In an absorbing narrative that begins with ancient Rome but stretches far beyond it, from Byzantium to China and from Genghis Khan to Napoleon, Scheidel shows how the demise of Rome and the enduring failure of empire-building on European soil launched an economic transformation that changed the continent and ultimately the world.
