In the autumn of 1960, twenty-year-old humanities student Pamela McCorduck encountered both the fringe science of early artificial intelligence, and C. P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture on the chasm between the sciences and the humanities. Each encounter shaped her life. Decades later her lifelong intuition was realized: AI and the humanities are profoundly connected. During that time, she wrote the first modern history of artificial intelligence, Machines Who Think, and spent much time pulling on the sleeves of public intellectuals, trying in futility to suggest that artificial intelligence could be important. Memoir, social history, group biography of the founding fathers of AI, This Could Be Important follows the personal story of one AI spectator, from her early enthusiasms to her mature, more nuanced observations of the field.

As recently as 1968, computer scientists were uncertain how best to interconnect even two computers. The notion that within a few decades the challenge would be how to interconnect millions of computers around the globe was too far-fetched to contemplate. Yet, by 1988, that is precisely what was happening. The products and devices developed in the intervening years—such as modems, multiplexers, local area networks, and routers—became the linchpins of the global digital society. How did such revolutionary innovation occur? This book tells the story of the entrepreneurs who were able to harness and join two factors: the energy of computer science researchers supported by governments and universities, and the tremendous commercial demand for Internetworking computers. The centerpiece of this history comes from unpublished interviews from the late 1980s with over 80 computing industry pioneers, including Paul Baran, J.C.R. Licklider, Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn, Larry Roberts, and Robert Metcalfe. These individuals give us unique insights into the creation of multi-billion dollar markets for computer-communications equipment, and they reveal how entrepreneurs struggled with failure, uncertainty, and the limits of knowledge.

AI isn’t magic. How AI Works demystifies the explosion of artificial intelligence by explaining—without a single mathematical equation—what happened, when it happened, why it happened, how it happened, and what AI is actually doing "under the hood." Artificial intelligence is everywhere—from self-driving cars, to image generation from text, to the unexpected power of language systems like ChatGPT—yet few people seem to know how it all really works. How AI Works unravels the mysteries of artificial intelligence, without the complex math and unnecessary jargon. You’ll learn: The relationship between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning The history behind AI and why the artificial intelligence revolution is happening now How decades of work in symbolic AI failed and opened the door for the emergence of neural networks What neural networks are, how they are trained, and why all the wonder of modern AI boils down to a simple, repeated unit that knows how to multiply input numbers to produce an output number. The implications of large language models, like ChatGPT and Bard, on our society—nothing will be the same again AI isn’t magic. If you’ve ever wondered how it works, what it can do, or why there’s so much hype, How AI Works will teach you everything you want to know.

AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 2021 STONEWALL HONOR BOOK Meet Kimberly, a regular suburban housewife and mother, whose discovery later in life that she was born intersex fuelled her to become an international human rights defender and globally-recognised activist. Charting her intersex discovery and her journey to self-acceptance, this book movingly portrays how being intersex impacted Kimberly's personal and family life, as well as her career. From uncovering a secret that was intentionally kept from her, to coming out to her family and friends and fighting for intersex rights, her candid and empowering story helps breakdown barriers and misconceptions of intersex people and brings to light the trauma and harmful impact medical intervention continues to have on the intersex community. Written from a non-queer perspective, and filled with much-needed, straightforward information and advice about what it means to be intersex, this is a vital and timely resource for intersex people and their families, as well as the general reader.

This book explores the dynamic intersection of quantum computing and management strategy, offering an exploration of this cutting-edge technology's potential impact. From its inception to its current state, the book traces the evolution of quantum computing, providing readers with a contextual understanding of its development. It illuminates the transformative power of quantum computing and its implications for business and management practices. Through case studies and expert analysis, readers gain insights into how quantum computing can revolutionize data analysis, optimization, and cybersecurity. The chapters in this book equip managers and entrepreneurs with the knowledge and foresight needed to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the quantum computing era. Unlocking Quantum Information Technology will be beneficial to a mixed audience of specialists, analysts, scholars, researchers, academics and students in fields of business and management, especially those interested in quantum computing and technology, machine learning and artificial technology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Technology Analysis & Strategic Management.

Decades ago in Brooklyn, three girls demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and each followed a distinct path into adulthood. Helen became a violent revolutionary. Val wrote a controversial book, essentially a novelization of Helen’s all-too-short but vibrant life. And Olive became an editor and writer, now comfortably settled with her husband, Griff, in New Haven. When Olive is asked to write an essay about Val’s book, doing so brings back to the forefront Olive and Griff’s tangled histories and their complicated reflections on that tumultuous time in their young lives.Conscience, the dazzling new novel from award-winning author Alice Mattison, paints the nuanced relationships between characters with her signature wit and precision. And as Mattison explores the ways in which women make a difference—for good or ill—in the world, she elegantly weaves together the past and the present, and the political and the personal.

From a "maestra of invention" (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. Women's voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.

A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award For fans of Aleksandar Hemon's fiction, The Book of My Lives is simply indispensable; for the uninitiated, it is the perfect introduction to one of the great writers of our time. Aleksandar Hemon's lives begin in Sarajevo, a small, blissful city where a young boy's life is consumed with street soccer with the neighborhood kids, resentment of his younger sister, and trips abroad with his engineer-cum-beekeeper father. Here, a young man's life is about poking at the pretensions of the city's elders with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. And then, his life in Chicago: watching from afar as war breaks out in Sarajevo and the city comes under siege, no way to return home; his parents and sister fleeing Sarajevo with the family dog, leaving behind all else they had ever known; and Hemon himself starting a new life, his own family, in this new city. And yet this is not really a memoir. The Bookof My Lives, Hemon's first book of nonfiction, defies convention and expectation. It is a love song to two different cities; it is a heartbreaking paean to the bonds of family; it is a stirring exhortation to go out and play soccer—and not for the exercise. It is a book driven by passions but built on fierce intelligence, devastating experience, and sharp insight. And like the best narratives, it is a book that will leave you a different reader—a different person, with a new way of looking at the world—when you've finished. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

The autobiography of the early radical leader and her participation in communist, anarchist, and feminist activities