Who does not enjoy receiving a good book as a Christmas present? If you are looking for an idea to surprise that “technological” friend, relative or acquaintance, or if you are actually that “geek” who is passionate about reading about how technology is changing (for better and for worse) the world in ways unexpected, you are in luck.
At MCPRO we have selected no less than seven titles with which to continue feeding your love of reading and of course, you can leave them under the Christmas tree this year. Titles that speak on this occasion of that “war” less and less hidden by technological resources and semiconductors, of how algorithms are shaping the way in which decisions are made in democracy or how they have impressed some of the most important startups. promising Silicon Valley. Let’s start!
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology – Chris Miller
Award winner “Business of the year book” From the Financial Times, the latest from Chris Miller shows how semiconductors have become to today’s technological age what railways were to the industrial age. A scarce economic resource that has become one of the axes of the geopolitical conflict that currently confronts the United States and China. An essential reading to understand what is happening at the moment and how from globalization, we move to a more “national” world.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley StartUp – John Carreyrou
In 2014 Elizabeth Holmes was billed as the woman Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose magical new venture promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier.
Backed by major investors, Theranos sold shares in a raising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion. There was only one problem: the technology didn’t work. For years, Holmes had hooked investors, FDA officials and their employees. When John Carreyrou uncovered the scandal in 2015 in the Wall Street Journal, they were threatened with lawsuits. In 2017 the company’s value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and investors. An ideal reading to complete with “The Dropout” one of the best series of this year and which is largely inspired by the revelations of this book.
The Automation of Inequality – Virginia Eubanks
Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health, and services has undergone a revolutionary shift: automated systems, rather than humans, control which neighborhoods get policed, which families get needed resources, or who is being investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new data regime, the most invasive and punitive systems are targeting the poor.
Eubanks investigates the impact of data mining, algorithm policies, and predictive risk models applied to poor and working-class people in the United States. Digital monitoring and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the state the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane decisions: which families get food and which starve, who gets housing and who remains homeless. and to which families the State divides. In the process, they undermine democracy and betray cherished national values.
Reality+: Virtual Words and the problems of Philosophy – David J. Chalmers
Virtual reality can become a new field of study for philosophy, a way of observing ourselves as a species again. In Reality+, New York University professor of neural science philosophy David J. Chalmers re-examines some of the big philosophical and scientific questions from this new perspective.
If there comes a time when we spend a good part of our lives in the metaverse… how do we know that there is an external world? Is there a god? What is the nature of reality? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? A twist on the paradigm that “Matrix” established at the time, but with the certainty that on this occasion, it is not science fiction that we are talking about.
Humiliation in the networks – Jon Ronson
For the past three years, Jon Ronson has traveled non-stop to meet with people who have been exposed to public ridicule. The humiliated are people like any of us who one day, through social networks, made an unfortunate comment or a joke that was misinterpreted. Once their blunder comes to light, general outrage, on those same social networks, falls on them with the violence of a hurricane and, in less than a rooster crows, an enraged mob destroys them, mocks them and He demonizes them until they lose their jobs and completely change their lives.
Public derision has been reborn and travels the world. “Justice” has been democratized. The silent minority is beginning to speak out, but what does it all say about us? We relentlessly highlight the flaws of others, define the boundaries of normality by spoiling the lives of those who don’t play by the rules. A great reflection on the current world and what awaits us
The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion – Eliot Brown Maureen Farrell
In 2001, Adam Neumann arrived in New York after five years in the Israeli Navy. Just over fifteen years later, he had become the charismatic CEO of a $47 billion company: WeWork.
WeWork wasn’t just a provider of office and coworking spaces: it would build schools, create cities, and even “colonize Mars.” Pursuing its founder’s vision, the company spent money faster than it passed funding rounds. From his private jet, an increasingly messianic CEO traveled the world in search of more capital, but at the end of 2019, just weeks before the company’s IPO, everything fell apart and Neumann was expelled from his company. . The extraordinary rise and astonishing implosion of WeWork is evidence of the failure of the way many Silicon Valley startups work and the end of a culture of investment “pitch”.
The filter bubble: How the web decides what we read and what we think – Eli Parisier
In December 2009, Google began to personalize search results for all its users, and thus began a new era in which the websites we visit adapt to us as if by magic. The bubble filter, a fascinating and visionary book, reveals what is behind this ubiquitous personalization, from Facebook to Google through any news portal, and explains the consequences it has on us, on the information that reaches us and, ultimately instance, on the functioning of democracy.
The struggle to collect personal data (from political orientation to the latest sneakers we’ve searched for) and adjust our browsing based on it is the new battleground of the internet giants. Each one of us lives in a universe of personalized information, a bubble that only accesses the news that matches our interests and preferences, limiting exposure to ideas, opinions, and other people’s realities.
The Internet, which was born to facilitate the flow of ideas and information, is closing in on itself under the pressure of commerce and monetization. But it is not too late to correct course. Pariser exposes a new vision that exploits the benefits of technology without falling into its worst effects.
