We Were Promised Flying Cars

The debut poetry collection from Arab-American poet Kareem Rahma-formerly of VICE and The New York Times-shows us the future in haiku. What awaits us is not the future we had hoped for or what we were promised, but the terrible consequences of we've done to ourselves. Managing to be both a hopeful prayer for change and direct warning to the reader, New York-based author Kareem Rahma makes masterful work of the haiku form to build a very possible future world dominated by corporations, an earth depleted of natural resources and humans turned into zombies, glued to their screens. Elegant but caustically humorous, even in the darkness, Rahma remains hopeful that we can still keep the promises we made in the past. Paired with Jean-Marc Côté's 19th-century illustrations of an imagined year 2000, We Were Promised Flying Cars is not just for poetry and science fiction fans, but anyone interested in what tomorrow might look like.

From an engineer and futurist, an impassioned account of technological stagnation since the 1970s and an imaginative blueprint for a richer, more abundant future The science fiction of the 1960s promised us a future remade by technological innovation: we’d vacation in geodesic domes on Mars, have meaningful conversations with computers, and drop our children off at school in flying cars. Fast-forward 60 years, and we’re still stuck in traffic in gas-guzzling sedans and boarding the same types of planes we flew in over half a century ago. What happened to the future we were promised? In Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall sets out to answer this deceptively simple question. What starts as an examination of the technical limitations of building flying cars evolves into an investigation of the scientific, technological, and social roots of the economic stagnation that started in the 1970s. From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion technology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution. Hall then outlines a framework for a future powered by exponential progress—one in which we build as much in the world of atoms as we do in the world of bits, one rich in abundance and wonder. Drawing on years of original research and personal engineering experience, Where Is My Flying Car?, originally published in 2018, is an urgent, timely analysis of technological progress over the last 50 years and a bold vision for a better future.

The science of AI was born a little over 60 years ago, but for most of that time its achievements were modest. In 2012 it experienced a big bang, when a branch of statistics called Machine Learning (and a sub-branch called Deep Learning) was applied to it. Now machines have surpassed humans in image recognition, and they are catching up with us at speech recognition and natural language processing. Every day, the media reports the launch of a new service, a new product, and a new demonstration powered by AI. When will it end? The surprising truth is, the AI revolution has only just begun. Artificial Intelligence and the Two Singularities argues that in the course of this century, the exponential growth in the capability of AI is likely to bring about two "singularities" - points at which conditions are so extreme that the normal rules break down. The first is the economic singularity, when machine skill reaches a level that renders many of us unemployable and requires an overhaul of our current economic and social systems. The second is the technological singularity, when machine intelligence reaches and then surpasses the cognitive abilities of an adult human, relegating us to the second smartest species on the planet. These singularities will present huge challenges, but this book argues that we can meet these challenges and overcome them. If we do, the rewards could be almost unimaginable. This book covers: • Recent developments in AI and its future potential • The economic singularity and the technological singularity in depth • The risks and opportunities presented by AI • What actions we should take Artificial intelligence can turn out to be the best thing ever to happen to humanity, making our future wonderful almost beyond imagination. But only if we address head-on the challenges that it will raise. Calum Chace is a best-selling author of fiction and non-fiction books and articles, focusing on the subject of artificial intelligence. He is a regular speaker on artificial intelligence and related technologies, and runs a blog on the subject at www.pandoras-brain. com. Prior to becoming a full-time writer and speaker, he spent 30 years in business as a marketer, a strategy consultant, and a CEO. He studied philosophy at Oxford University, where he discovered that the science fiction he had been reading since boyhood was simply philosophy in fancy dress.

Transform your entire organization, not just a part of it. Take a modern look now that the world is focusing on business agility rather than thinking about team-level or even scaled Agile. Many people and businesses believe that “doing Agile” will solve all their business and organizational problems. The truth is that “doing Agile”, especially team-level agility, is not the same as being an agile organization. Authors Doug Dockery and Laureen Knudsen share their years of experience in transforming corporations and organizations to successfully compete and win in today’s fast-paced markets. Using proven techniques and stories of actual experiences in a multitude of organizations, Doug and Laureen relate what it takes to successfully transform your organization, as well as how to tell if your transformation is working. Modern Business Management details what you need to know to transform your business to deliver value and thrive. Coverage includes: What Agile means to an executive and the benefits you should be seeing The top failure modes and why so many transformations fail A framework for success, including an operational framework and a transformation framework How big data internal to a company is needed to successfully run a world-wide corporation today The definition of a modern business and what it looks like What You’ll learn Understand why businesses are not getting the benefits out of their current Agile transformation Follow the process that organizations need to go through to succeed See how C-level executives can benefit from Agile practices Know how to succeed where others are failing Discover how to keep up with a constantly disrupted and ever-changing market Who This Book Is For Management and executives in corporations from the director level to the C-level

Science and innovation have the power to transform our lives and the world we live in - for better or worse – in ways that often transcend borders and generations: from the innovation of complex financial products that played such an important role in the recent financial crisis to current proposals to intentionally engineer our Earth’s climate. The promise of science and innovation brings with it ethical dilemmas and impacts which are often uncertain and unpredictable: it is often only once these have emerged that we feel able to control them. How do we undertake science and innovation responsibly under such conditions, towards not only socially acceptable, but socially desirable goals and in a way that is democratic, equitable and sustainable? Responsible innovation challenges us all to think about our responsibilities for the future, as scientists, innovators and citizens, and to act upon these. This book begins with a description of the current landscape of innovation and in subsequent chapters offers perspectives on the emerging concept of responsible innovation and its historical foundations, including key elements of a responsible innovation approach and examples of practical implementation. Written in a constructive and accessible way, Responsible Innovation includes chapters on: Innovation and its management in the 21st century A vision and framework for responsible innovation Concepts of future-oriented responsibility as an underpinning philosophy Values – sensitive design Key themes of anticipation, reflection, deliberation and responsiveness Multi – level governance and regulation Perspectives on responsible innovation in finance, ICT, geoengineering and nanotechnology Essentially multidisciplinary in nature, this landmark text combines research from the fields of science and technology studies, philosophy, innovation governance, business studies and beyond to address the question, “How do we ensure the responsible emergence of science and innovation in society?”

Britain is beset by a crisis of purpose. For a generation we have been told the route to universal well-being is to abandon the expense of justice and equity and so allow the judgments of the market to go unobstructed. What has been created is not an innovative, productive economy but instead a capitalism that extracts value rather than creates it, massive inequality, shrinking opportunity and a society organised to benefit the top 1%. The capacity to create new jobs and start-ups should not disguise that in the main the new world is one of throw away people working in throw away companies. The British are at a loss. The warnings of The State We're In have been amply justified. Will Hutton observes that the trends that so disturbed him twenty years ago have become more marked. Rather than take refuge in nativism and virulent euro-scepticism, Britain must recognize that its problems are largely made at home - and act to change them. With technological possibilities multiplying, a wholesale makeover of the state, business and the financial system is needed to seize the opportunities by being both fairer and more innovative. The aim must be to create an economy, society and democracy in which the mass of citizens flourish. In this compelling and vital new book Hutton spells out how.

A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 What if David Bowie really was holding the fabric of the universe together? The death of David Bowie in January 2016 was a bad start to a year that got a lot worse: war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit vote—and the election of Donald Trump. The end-of-year wraps declared 2016 “the worst … ever.” Four even more troubling years later, the question of our apocalypse had devolved into a tired social media cliché. But when COVID-19 hit, journalist and professor of public policy Andrew Potter started to wonder: what if The End isn’t one big event, but a long series of smaller ones? In On Decline, Potter surveys the current problems and likely future of Western civilization (spoiler: it’s not great). Economic stagnation and the slowing of scientific innovation. Falling birth rates and environmental degradation. The devastating effects of cultural nostalgia and the havoc wreaked by social media on public discourse. Most acutely, the various failures of Western governments in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. If the legacy of the Enlightenment and its virtues—reason, logic, science, evidence—has run its course, how and why has it happened? And where do we go from here?

Rick and his friends got their hands on the most exclusive invite of their generation: an invite to beta test the new tabletop RPG, Mantidom, the most immersive game ever created. Skimming over the introduction and warnings they dove right in and found themselves in a whole new world, one that was threatened by a goblin invasion and a malevolent entity that was as ancient as it was evil. A world that expected them to save it… or die trying. Topics: Portal Fantasy, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Clean, Action Adventure,