Books like Between Human and Machine by David A. Mindell

Erik Brynjolfsson explores how digital technologies are reshaping work, productivity, and society—highlighting both the opportunities and the disruptions—and offers strategies for education, collaboration, and policy in the emerging economy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how we work right now. Are you ready? In the past, robots were typically large pieces of machinery, sectioned off from human workers to perform precise, mechanical tasks on an assembly line. But now, bots and other AI technologies go far beyond this in augmenting human capabilities--not just robots on the factory floor of an auto plant, but algorithms in the back office of a healthcare insurer and chatbots interacting with retail customers. Unlike any software tool or service that's come before, artificial intelligence has the power to profoundly change the very nature of work itself--and this is happening in all kinds of enterprises and across all functions of the organization. There's a current and growing imperative: businesses that understand how to harness AI can surge ahead, while those who neglect it are in danger of being left behind. In Human + Machine, Accenture technology leaders H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty vividly illustrate how AI is redefining work and the economy. At the core of this paradigm shift is the transformation of business processes--all the step-by-step tasks that take place within an organization, from operations to customer service to workers' own personal productivity habits. As humans and smart machines collaborate ever more closely, work processes become more fluid and adaptive, enabling companies to change them on the fly--or completely reimagine them.--

The Closed World offers a radical alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology - and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories - the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture - through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links among the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.

A history of artificial intelligence that has remained in print for nearly two decades and is now back with an updated Afterword.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine explores how business and government, rather than just scientists, drove the invention and evolution of computers, from mainframes to the PC revolution and the rise of companies like IBM, Apple, and Microsoft.

This engaging history covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the advent of the World Wide Web. The author concentrates on four key moments of transition: the transformation of the computer in the late 1940s from a specialized scientific instrument to a commercial product; the emergence of small systems in the late 1960s; the beginnings of personal computing in the 1970s; and the spread of networking after 1985.

Legendary historian and philosopher of science George Dyson vividly re-creates the scenes of focused experimentation, incredible mathematical insight, and pure creative genius that gave us computers, digital television, modern genetics, models of stellar evolution--in other words, computer code. In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses--led by John von Neumann--gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization of the theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth by mathematician Alan Turing. This group of brilliant engineers worked in isolation, almost entirely independent from industry and the traditional academic community. But because they relied exclusively on government funding, the government wanted its share of the results: the computer that they built also led directly to the hydrogen bomb. George Dyson has uncovered a wealth of new material about this project, and in bringing the story of these men and women and their ideas to life, he shows how the crucial advancements that dominated twentieth-century technology emerged from one computer in one laboratory, where the digital universe as we know it was born.