Machine History

When the Marines decided to buy a helicopter-airplane hybrid "tiltrotor" called the V-22 Osprey, they saw it as their dream machine. The tiltrotor was the aviation equivalent of finding the Northwest Passage: an aircraft able to take off, land, and hover with the agility of a helicopter yet fly as fast and as far as an airplane. Many predicted it would reshape civilian aviation. The Marines saw it as key to their very survival. Opponents called it one of the worst boondoggles in Pentagon history.

As lives offline and online merge, it's easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine. Thomas Rid delivers a portrait of our technology-enraptured era. Springing from mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of myths about the future of machines. This vision radically transformed the postwar world, ushering in sweeping cultural change.

When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash had taken place silently over the previous year, in obscure financial markets where the SEC doesn’t bother to look: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was actually happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking.

Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us―and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER How a force that’s hard to name, but which we all feel, is reshaping what it means to be human In Against the Machine, “furiously gifted” (The Washington Post) novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a wholly original—and terrifying—account of...

Winner of the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Economist “Framed as a biography of Jensen Huang, the only CEO Nvidia has ever had, the book is also something more interesting and revealing: a window onto the intellectual, cultural, and economic...

Discover the dark, hidden history of the US Navy's WWII morale machine. The popular narrative of World War II is filled with heroic sailors, USO dances, and sanitized Hollywood romances. But behind the victory parades lies a horrific reality that the top brass deliberately buried. Flesh & Saltwater: The Toxic Logistics of WWII Navy Morale by Laurence Blake provides a groundbreaking, unvarnished look at the systemic exploitation that fueled the Allied war effort. From the sprawling, sweat-drenched "Bull Pens" of Honolulu's Hotel Street to the bombed-out rubble of Naples and the segregated ...

Tracy Kidder's "riveting" (Washington Post) story of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has become essential reading for understanding the history of the American tech industry. Computers have changed since...

For decades, history has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous political machine, shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft, crime, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt characters. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made, historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes.

This is the complete history of the synthesizer—from electromagnetic experiments in the 1870s to the software and hardware you use today. You'll discover how these instruments evolved from room-sized laboratory equipment to portable analog classics to digital dominance to the software revolution to the analog revival happening right now. Every major instrument, every breakthrough, every paradigm shift that shaped how electronic music gets made. You'll understand why the Minimoog became legendary, how the Prophet-5 changed everything with patch memory, why the DX7 killed analog synthesis ...

Under orders of the Fuhrer, the German General Staff reluctantly drew up a lackluster plan of invasion for France. Yet it was the audacious scheme of three of Hitler’s top generals that brought down France’s military force, Rather than simply move troops to engage the enemy, for the first time they would unleash the tank and drive straight into the heart of their foe.

Behind every great revolution is a vision, and behind perhaps the greatest revolution of our time, personal computing, is the vision of J.C.R. Licklider. In a simultaneously compelling personal narrative and comprehensive historical exposition, Waldrop tells the story of the man who not only instigated the work that led to the internet, but also shifted our understanding of what computers were and could be.

Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year The "rich and gripping" true story of the first time machines came for human jobs—and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today (Naomi Klein) The most urgent story in modern tech begins...

A staged street. A polished window. A child placed where a child should never have been used as evidence. The Family Camp Lie is a powerful work of Holocaust nonfiction that investigates one of the Nazi regime’s most disturbing acts of deception: the staged image of Theresienstadt and the so-called family camp connected to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This book examines how a machinery of imprisonment, deportation, propaganda, and mass murder learned to present itself as order, culture, care, and even mercy. Theresienstadt, also known as Terezín, was not the humane “model ghetto” the Nazis ...

Read by George Newbern "George Newbern provides a convincing, conversational narration of this audiobook about robot intelligence. There's a lot to digest. Much of it deals with speculation as to who will be right: those who believe in AI (artificial intelligence machines that may eventually...

Rome, 44 BC. Gaius Julius Caesar—Dictator Perpetuo, conqueror of Gaul, master of the known world—walks into the Senate on the Ides of March. He will not walk out. But he will not leave dead, either. When Casca fails the first strike and Mark Antony storms in with the guard, Caesar is left suspended between life and death. During months of convalescence, the most powerful man in the world experiences something he has never known: absolute helplessness. And in that silence, he reads. He thinks. He remembers Brutus’ gaze among the conspirators. He understands that an empire held up only ...

CASIO — THE TIME MACHINE History Of Casio Watch From Casiotron to G-Shock Nation: A Time Machine History By Siu Lun Yuen What if a watch did more than tell time? What if it calculated it, resisted it, and ultimately redefined it? In CASIO — THE TIME MACHINE, Siu Lun Yuen traces the extraordinary journey of a company that began not as a watchmaker, but as a calculator manufacturer—and went on to reshape the meaning of timekeeping for the modern world. Starting with the groundbreaking Casiotron of 1974, the world’s first digital watch with an automatic calendar, this book explores how...

An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen. How did we build large language models? How do they think, if they think? What will the world look like if we have billions of AIs that are as smart as humans, or even smarter?

In an era of exponentially evolving AI, the most important “code” we must rewrite is our own. It is up to us for love to conquer fear—the only path that leads humanity to an Age of Abundance for All. To navigate the convergence of AI, Quantum Computing, Robotics, and Brain-Computer Interfaces—the Superfecta—we must move beyond the Scarcity Mindset and embrace a new way of being.

Books preserve ideas, yes, but they also provoke new ones— they are true tools for thinking. In The Idea Machine, Joel J. Miller shows that books are one of the most important but overlooked factors in the making of our contemporary world.