K. Eric Drexler is the founding father of nanotechnology -- the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to change our world. Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and environment.Already, scientists have constructed prototypes for circuit boa...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bold futurist and renowned author of The Singularity Is Near explores the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brain.“This book is a Rosetta Stone for the mystery of human thought.”—Martine Rothblatt, chairman and CEO, United Therapeutics, and creator of Sirius XM Satellite Radio“Kurzweil’s vision of our super-enhanced future is completely sane and calmly reasoned, an...

In this classic work, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century explores the analogies between computing machines and the living human brain. John von Neumann, whose many contributions to science, mathematics, and engineering include the basic organizational framework at the heart of today's computers, concludes that the brain operates both digitally and analogically, but also has its own peculiar statistical language.In his foreword to this new edition, Ray Kurzw...

A reasoned yet urgent call to embrace and protect the essential, practical human quality that has been drummed out of our lives: wisdom.It's in our nature to want to succeed. It's also human nature to want to do right. But we've lost how to balance the two. How do we get it back?Practical Wisdom can help. "Practical wisdom" is the essential human quality that combines the fruits of our individual experiences with our empathy and intellect-an aim th...

'Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.' Bill GatesIn How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil offers a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilisation: reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines. Kurzweil explores how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the im...

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our...

'Startling in scope and bravado.' The New York TimesA radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the bestselling author of How to Create a Mind and who Bill Gates calls 'the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.'For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age...

From the ‘Wired’ and ‘New York Times Magazine’ contributor, a brilliant examination into how the internet is profoundly changing the way we think.In this groundbreaking book, Clive Thompson argues that the internet is boosting our brainpower, encouraging new ways of thinking, and making us more – not less – intelligent as is so often claimed.Our lives have been changed irrevocably by the rise of the internet. But as we rely more and more on machines to help us think, our th...

Twenty years after Stephen Hawking's 9-million-copy selling A Brief History of Time, pioneering theoretical physicist Sean Carroll takes our investigation into the nature of time to the next level. You can't unscramble an egg and you can't remember the future. But what if time doesn't (or didn't!) always go in the same direction? Carroll's paradigm-shifting research suggests that other universes experience time running in the opposite direction to our own. Exploring subjects from ...

Throw out your fossils—the best evidence for evolution is now found in DNA.DNA is the genetic blueprint of all creatures. Scientists have only recently discovered that it is also a living chronicle of evolution. In this book, leading biologist and writer Sean B. Carroll takes us on an exhilarating tour of the exquisite evolutionary record. The DNA record of evolution is filled with surprises. Immortal genes and evolution repeating itself are two of the stunners that await the lucky...

A New York Times Bestseller. A “fascinating” (Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times) look at how digital technology is transforming our work and our lives.In recent years, Google’s autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM’s Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies—with hardware, software, and networks at their core—will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than ...

The “brilliant” and “daringly original” (The New York Times) critique of digital networks from the “David Foster Wallace of tech” (London Evening Standard)—asserting that to fix our economy, we must fix our information economy.Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers. Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous ...