Title: Artificial Intelligence and Its Impact on Society: Understand how AI works, how it has evolved and how AI works, how it has evolved and how it is trsnsforming our society
Author: Omar Arias Zurita
Publisher: Independently published
ISBN-13: 979-8296366344
This is the essential, clear and accessible guide to understanding the technology that is currently changing the world. From its fundamentals to its most advanced applications, AI is redefining education, employment, the economy, politics, and our human relationships. This is not just an informative book. It is a call to reflection. Can we regulate a technology that is advancing at an unprecedented speed? Who will decide how it is used? Are we ready to live alongside intelligences that learn, create, and make decisions?
Title: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
Author: Melanie Mitchell
Publisher: Picador
ISBN-13: 978-1250404855
With a new preface placing the book in the context of AI’s rapid progress, Artificial Intelligence offers an essential account of AI’s turbulent history and an accessible explanation of the different kinds of AI: how they work, and compare to human intelligence. Mitchell introduces the dominant models of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge programs, their inventors, and the ideas behind recent achievements. Raising key questions about intelligence itself, she explores the disconnect between the hype and AI’s actual accomplishments, providing a clear sense of what the field has achieved and how much further it has to go.
Title: The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
Author: Brian Christian
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13: 978-0393868333
Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us―and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not do what we want or expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem. In best-selling author Brian Christian’s riveting account, we meet the alignment problem’s “first-responders,” and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before our hands are completely off the wheel.
Title: Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
Author: Stuart Russell
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN-13: 978-0525558637
In the popular imagination, superhuman artificial intelligence is an approaching tidal wave threatening not just jobs and human relationships, but civilization itself. In this groundbreaking book, distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we rethink AI from the ground up. Russell explores intelligence in humans and in machines, describes the near-term benefits we can expect, and outlines the breakthroughs still needed before reaching superhuman AI. Russell suggests rebuilding AI on a new foundation, This new foundation would allow us to create machines that are provably deferential and provably beneficial.
Title: Life without Lead
Author: Daniel Renfrew
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN-13: 9780520295476
This volume examines the social, political, and environmental dimensions of a lead poisoning epidemic. Drawing from a political ecology of health perspective, it situates the Uruguayan lead contamination crisis in relation to neoliberal reform, globalization, and the resurgence of the Left in Latin America. The author traces the rise of an environmental social justice movement and the local and transnational circulation of ideologies and contested science. Through ethnographic analysis, this book shows how combating contamination intersected with class politics, explores the relationship of lead poisoning to poverty, and debates how to identify and manage an unprecedented environmental health problem.
Title: Worlds of Gray and Green
Authors: Sebastián Ureta and Patricio Flores
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN-13: 9780520386297
The Anthropocene has arrived riding a wave of pollution. From "forever chemicals" to oceanic garbage patches, human-made chemical compounds are seemingly everywhere. Concerned about how these compounds disrupt multiple lives and ecologies, environmental scholars, activists, and affected communities have sought to curb the causes of pollution, focusing especially on the extractive industries. In Wolds of Gray and Green, authors Sebastián Ureta and Patricio Flores challenge us to rethink extraction as ecological practice. Adopting an environmental humanities analytic lens, Ureta and Flores offer a rich ethnographic exploration of the waste produced by Chile's El Teniente, the world's largest underground mine.
Title: Insatiable Appetite
Author: Richard P. Tucker
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN-13: 9780520220874
In the late 1800s American entrepreneurs became participants in the 400-year history of European economic and ecological hegemony in the tropics. This book is a rich history of the transformation of the tropics in modern times, pointing to the declining biodiversity resulting from the domestication of varied natural systems. Richard P. Tucker illustrates his study with six major crops, each a virtual empire in itself—sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, beef, and timber. He concludes that as long as corporate-dominated free trade is ascendant, paying little heed to its long-term ecological consequences, the health of the tropical world is endangered.
Title: Extracting the Future
Author: Mark Goodale
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN-13: 9780520402799
Bolivia's lithium accounts for a significant percentage of the world's known reserve. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Mark Goodale traces the development of Bolivia's closely guarded lithium project through the perspectives of a wide array of people and institutions, including workers at the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat; the state lithium company in La Paz; Latin America's first electric vehicle company; and energy entrepreneurs in Bolivia, the United States, and Germany. He points to a fundamental contradiction: a so-called green energy transition dependent on the ever-greater extraction of yet another nonrenewable resource.
