Explore some of our most anticipated new books for August 2024
This month: a timely, practical guide to AI; a collection of interviews with workers in America’s growing security state; the latest title in our Radium Age series of proto-science fiction novels; and more. Explore these books and a selection of our other new and soon-to-be-released titles below.
The AI Conundrum: Harnessing the Power of AI for Your Organization—Profitably and Safely by Caleb Briggs and Rex Briggs
Artificial intelligence, or AI, can recognize a pattern from any set of data it is given, which is what makes it such an extraordinarily powerful tool. But because not all patterns are authentic or reliable, AI’s pattern-finding superpower can lead to spurious patterns—and to disastrous results for business and government entities that rely on them. Hence the conundrum at the heart of AI: its greatest strength can also be its greatest weakness. Targeting the businessperson who needs to know how to use AI profitably and responsibly, Caleb Briggs and Rex Briggs offer in this book a foundational understanding of AI that is easy to grasp yet thorough enough to be used effectively.
You might also like Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI by Alan F. Blackwell
Job/Security: A Composite Portrait of the Expanding American Security Industry by Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild
In a world increasingly under surveillance, this cutting-edge documentary collaboration turns the camera on the ever-expanding American security state. Job/Security bears photographic and narrative witness to the people tasked with safeguarding our modern world. In these uniquely revealing interviews and photographs, authors Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild assemble a multifaceted portrait of the labor of security. They offer a close-up, in-depth look at what the near-ubiquitous business of monitoring, guarding, and protecting life and property in the United States means for the individuals who do the work, and for the society they ostensibly serve.
You might also like Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat by Sofya Aptekar
The People of the Ruins by Edward Shanks
In The People of the Ruins, Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neomedieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Jeremy Tuft is a physics instructor and former artillery officer who is cryogenically frozen in his laboratory only to emerge after a century and a half to a disquieting new era. Though at first Tuft is disconcerted by the failure of his own era’s smug doctrine of Progress, he eventually decides that he prefers the postcivilized life. But, when the northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.
You might also like The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In The Cities We Need, photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani’s evocative images illuminate what’s at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities.
You might also like Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City edited by Kian Goh, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Vinit Mukhija
Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers by Rebekah Rutkoff
Double Vision is a beautifully written work of biography and criticism that tells the inside story of Robert Beavers (b. 1949), a major American avant-garde filmmaker. Until now, Beavers’s dramatic life of itinerancy and resistance to commercial circulation has obscured his recognition as one of today’s most significant living filmmakers. In Double Vision, Rebekah Rutkoff, the first scholar to have full access to Beavers’s writing archive, sheds light on this deeply original underground figure and reveals the way Beavers’s films explore nonoptical seeing—awareness itself—as an outcome of cinematic sight.
You might also like Devotion by Garrett Bradley
Dream Machine: A Portrait of Artificial Intelligence by Appupen and Laurent Daudet
Hugo, a Parisian entrepreneur, has launched his startup on Large Language Model technology at the heart of the revolution embodied by ChatGPT. On the verge of securing the deal of the century with the digital giant REAL, he wonders about the latter’s real motivations: is this the making of a dream or a nightmare? Could Hugo’s developments be used for social and political control? REAL’s plans for the international launch of their “immortality game” seem to be increasingly opaque, and as useful and efficient AI promises to be, he begins to realize it may also be a potential source of catastrophic outcomes and indecent concentrations of wealth.
You might also like The Phantom Scientist by Robin Cousin
Galaxies by Or Graur
In Galaxies, Or Graur offers a brief and fascinating overview of the history, physics, and astrophysical uses of galaxies. Starting with the history of the last two thousand years of galaxy studies, Graur discusses the types of galaxies we observe and the physics that drive them; the myths and physical structure of the Milky Way; how galaxies were used to discover and study the mysterious phenomena of dark matter and dark energy; and how scientists think galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang and evolved to their present forms.
You might also like Supernova by Or Graur
Peter Weibel: Art as an Act of Cognition edited by Jens Lutz and Philipp Ziegler
Peter Weibel: Art as an Act of Cognition presents the first comprehensive overview of the work of Peter Weibel (1944–2023), an influential artist who anticipated key developments in the art of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and evolved new utopian visions of a free society and individual freedom. As one of the first artists to create VR installations, Weibel was also a leading figure in the expansion of the arts into other modes of reality. His work revealed the perceptual mechanisms by which reality is constructed not only socially, but also neurologically. This publication, insightfully edited by Jens Lutz and Philipp Ziegler, covers over half a century of his artistic expression, and traces his groundbreaking migration from material to machines to media.
You might also like The Future Is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image by Philip Glahn and Cary Levine