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A brand-new book from the award-winning SUNDAY TIMES journalist Brian Appleyard. Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be 'machine readable'. From telephone call trees that simplify us into a series of 'options' to social networks that reduce us to our purchases and preferences, we are deluged with propaganda urging us to abandon our irreducibly complex selves. At the same time, scientists tell us we are 'simply' the products of evolution, nothing more than our genes. Brain scanners have inspired neuroscientists to claim they are close to cracking the problem of the human mind. 'Human equival...
More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings. This book celebrates the immense drama and beauty of the car, of the genius embodied in the Ford ...
A 'cultural history' of the alien phenomenon, this book looks at our fascination with all things alien, as well as explaining what this says about us in the post-religious age.
An evocative historical thriller based in one of London's original suburbs. Set in 1912, Bedford Park is not just a London suburb: it is a crucible for enlightenment and modernity inhabited by people who wish to better themselves - and those who should know better. It is a singular place, architecturally sidestepping the modern whilst encouraging those with new ideas to take up residence. Into this mix sails Cal Kidd from America. In a coffee-house he makes the acquaintance of Binks, a man whose occupation in the City is vague but he seems to know everybody. And so Cal meets real-life characters like Maud Gonne and Frank Harris, while Ford Madox Ford, W.B. Yeats and Joseph Conrad appear also...
When a Gothic cathedral appears, almost in his back garden, Stephen Rix becomes obsessed by it.
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This volume represents the combination of two special issues of the Journal of Consciousness Studies on the topic of the technological singularity. Could artificial intelligence really out-think us, and what would be the likely repercussions if it could? Leading authors contribute to the debate, which takes the form of a target chapter by philosopher David Chalmers, plus commentaries from the likes of Daniel Dennett, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, Ben Goertzel, Frank Tipler, among many others. Chalmers then responds to the commentators to round off the discussion.
The first book to deal with all the arguments against religion and, equally important, to put forward an alternative - humanism
A razor-sharp and achingly funny memoir of the men and movies that shaped one woman’s life...
A fascinating new study from the originator of the Gaia Theory, “who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin” (Independent) One of the world’s leading scientific thinkers offers a vision of a future epoch in which humans and artificial intelligence unite to save the Earth. James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the Anthropocene—the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies—is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age—the Novacene—has already begun. In the Novacene, new bein...