Non-fiction

The Age of Intelligent Machines is upon us, and we are at a reflection point. The proliferation of fast-moving technologies, including forms of art...

New technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines. In the past, such fears have been misplaced, and many economi...

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the comput...

In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has...

Language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways tha...

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, ec...

Most of us feel at home in front of a computer; we own smartphones, tablets, and laptops; we look things up online and check social media to see wh...

Developing video games--hero's journey or fool's errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today's hottest games can be mo...

Why cloud computing represents a paradigm shift for business, and how business users can best take advantage of cloud services. Most of the informa...

Facebook's algorithms shaping the news. Self-driving cars roaming the streets. Revolution on Twitter and romance on Tinder. We live in a world cons...

How networked technology enables the emergence of a new collaborative society. Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of com...

A compact and accessible history, from punch cards and calculators to UNIVAC and ENIAC, the personal computer, Silicon Valley, and the Internet. Th...

A concise introduction to crowdsourcing that goes beyond social media buzzwords to explain what crowdsourcing really is and how it works. Ever sinc...

An unsparing analysis of class power and computerisation, Cyber-Proletariat shows us the dark-side of the information revolution. From Coltan mines...

In the era of big data, it is easy to imagine that we have all the information we need to make good decisions. But in fact the data we have are nev...

Virtual Reality has long been one of the dominant clichés of science fiction. Now Virtual Reality is a reality: those big headsets that make people...

Bitcoin may appear to be a revolutionary form of digital cash without precedent or prehistory. In fact, it is only the best-known recent experiment...

The urge to pick up our phones every few minutes has become a nervous twitch that shatters our time into shards too small to be present. Our addict...

Today Google and Facebook receive 90% of the world's news ad-spending. Amazon takes half of all ecommerce in the US. Google and Apple operating sys...

A concise and accessible guide to techniques for detecting doctored and fake images in photographs and digital media. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolin...

'Shanzhai' from Cantonese slang, refers to the production of fake goods in China, which enjoy an anti-authoritarian-like dissemination across the g...

An accessible introduction to the history, fundamental concepts, challenges, and controversies of the fMRI by one of the pioneers in the field. The...

As digital transformations continue to accelerate in the world, discourses of big data have come to dominate in a number of fields, from politics a...

What impact does our relentless fixation on gadgets have on the struggle for new kinds of solidarity, political articulation and intelligence? In t...

A concise history of GPS, from its military origins to its commercial applications and ubiquity in everyday life. GPS is ubiquitous in everyday lif...

An accessible, nontechnical overview of active touch sensing, from sensory receptors in the skin to tactile surfaces on flat screen displays. Hapti...

A short, informal account of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. We live in an info...

Conflict over information has become a central part of modern politics and culture. The sites of struggle are numerous, the actors beyond count. Cu...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen major advances in recent years. While machines were always central to the Marxist analysis of capitalism, AI ...

AI is the future - but what will that future look like? Will superhuman intelligence be our slave, or become our god? Taking us to the heart of the...

When Pete Etchells was 14, his father died from motor neurone disease. In order to cope, he immersed himself in a virtual world - first as an escap...

A concise overview of machine learning-computer programs that learn from data-which underlies applications that include recommendation systems, fac...

A concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and major player...

Taking "Gangnam Style" seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture. In December 2012, the exuberant video "Gangnam Style" beca...

Everything we need to know about metadata, the usually invisible infrastructure for information with which we interact every day. When "metadata" b...

Everything you always wanted to know about MOOCs: an account of massive open online courses and what they might mean for the future of higher educa...

In just ten years, Instagram has gone from being a simple photo app to a $100-billion company. The journey has involved ground-breaking innovations...

The creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time has produced an astounding new theory about the future of lif...

When did creative work become so boring? How did 'digital-first' come to dominate everything? ...and why is nobody talking about it? Part insider e...

A concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is (and isn't) and showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and b...

The many books on globalization published over the past few years range from claims that the world is flat to an unlikely rehabilitation of Genghis...

A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we thin...

An accessible and engaging account of robots, covering the current state of the field, the fantasies of popular culture, and implications for life ...

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping ...

What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking. Peop...

Key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions of both drawbacks and benefits ...

A concise history of spaceflight, from military rocketry through Sputnik, Apollo, robots in space, space culture, and human spaceflight today. Spac...