Machine World

In the fourth book of the series, James McGill is up for promotion. Not everyone is happy about that, and McGill must prove he's worth his stripes. Deployed to a strange alien planet outside the boundaries of the Galactic Empire, he's caught up in warfare and political intrigue. Earth expands, the Cephalopod Kingdom launches ships to stop us, and a grand conspiracy emerges among the upper ranks of the Hegemony military.

In this “spectacularly smart space opera” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) set in the same universe as the critically acclaimed White Space series and perfect for fans of Karen Traviss and Ada Hoffman, a space station begins to unravel when a routine search-and-rescue mission returns...

Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen.

"The Machine Stops" is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a "cell", with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own.

The breathtaking vision and incomparable storytelling of Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson's Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, a prequel to Frank Herbert's classic Dune, propelled it to the ranks of speculative fiction's classics in its own right. Now, with all the color, scope, and fascination of the...

Colonel Sthykar Karwyk never imagined that he would be ordered to take his Mountain Division deep behind enemy lines for a secret rescue operation. Narducat Imperial Fleet has invaded Karaln Nation – whose scientists alone had mastered the deep mysteries of Atom – and now The Empire commands the sole Atomic arsenal in the world. But there are rumors of a secret base of Karaln scientists, hidden inside the territory occupied by the fearsome Imperial Special Army. Colonel Sthykar and Starfire Kingdom’s Mountain Troopers must find and rescue the atomic scientists even as they battle an ...

From the king of modern space opera comes a new adventure in the Prefect Dreyfus series—Machine Vendetta is a thrilling tale of deadly conspiracies and old enemies that refuse to die. Panoply is a small, efficient police force, dedicated to maintaining the rule of democracy among the ten...

Today, a vast majority of us live under the economic system called capitalism―it touches almost every aspect of our lives, and most people alive have never known another. Yet, a cursory look at the world around us reveals that things can't stay this way forever: an economy built on infinite...

Chatbots such as the infamous ChatGPT, robotic warehouses, computerized call centres and patient diagnosis. These are just a few of the areas where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning are being used to boost revenues, cut costs, save lives and improve customer experiences. As a result, organizations that understand these tools and know how to use them are benefiting at the expense of their rivals. This book cuts through the hype and technical jargon that one often finds when talking about AI and Machine Learning. It delivers a short, concise and non-technical guide for ...

The classic, nationally bestselling book that first articulated the principles of lean production, with a new foreword and afterword by the authors. When The Machine That Changed the World was first published in 1990, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Twenty years later Toyota passed...

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...

Machine learning systems are both complex and unique. Complex because they consist of many different components and involve many different stakeholders. Unique because they're data dependent, with data varying wildly from one use case to the next. In this book, you'll learn a holistic approach to designing ML systems that are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and adaptive to changing environments and business requirements. Author Chip Huyen, cofounder of Claypot AI, considers each design decision in the context of how it can help your system as a whole achieve its objectives.

Liam Chapman thought he scored the deal of a lifetime when he bought a real, working time machine for just three dollars. Sure, it came labeled as the “World’s Worst Time Machine,” but how bad could it be? Buckle up for a wild ride with Liam and his friend Elsa as they travel through...

Zero Dark Thirty meets The Social Network in this “clever…gritty” (Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings) science fiction thriller about artificial intelligence, sentience, and labor rights in a near future dominated by the gig economy—from Hugo Award nominee S.B. Divya. Welga Ramirez...

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...

Generative AI Hands-On: A Practical Guide to Model Development and Real-World Applications is a hands-on resource designed to equip readers with the skills and knowledge needed to build and apply generative AI models effectively. This comprehensive guide covers the entire process, from foundational concepts to advanced techniques, offering practical insights into real-world applications. The book begins with an introduction to generative AI, explaining core concepts and its evolution. It outlines how generative models differ from other AI approaches and explores their diverse applications ...

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.

Coffee has started revolutions, fueled wars, inspired smugglers, terrified rulers, powered armies, created fortunes, destroyed sleep schedules, and convinced otherwise reasonable people to spend fifteen minutes preparing one cup before sunrise. STRANGE BUT TRUE: THE WEIRD HISTORY OF COFFEE follows the world’s favorite caffeine delivery system from legendary dancing goats in Ethiopia to the coffeehouses of the Ottoman Empire, Europe’s suspicious first encounters with the “devil’s drink,” colonial plantations, cowboy campfires, wartime instant coffee, espresso machines, decaf ...

The electrical grid is the most complex machine humanity has ever built—a continent-spanning network that must balance supply and demand in real time, every second, at exactly 60 hertz. We inhabit a 21st-century digital civilization powered by a 19th-century thermal machine jury-rigged to stay alive. In 'The Grid', systems expert Thomas Keel pulls back the curtain on the terrifying physics of our daily existence. From the nine seconds that plunged 55 million people into the 2003 Northeast blackout to the thermodynamic collapse of the 2021 Texas freeze, Keel explains the 'engineering veto'...

What if artificial intelligence is not something outside God’s creation, but one of the newest ways creation is expressing itself? In AI as God’s Will: Causation and the Rise of Machine Intelligence, George Ortega explores a bold philosophical and theological idea: if God is the totality of reality, and if nothing can exist or act outside that reality, then artificial intelligence—like every other causal process—must exist and operate within God. Beginning with the nature of AI itself, the book examines causation, free will, creativity, scientific explanation, error, autonomy, and ...