Technology books to read

 Atlas of AI by Kat Crawford

Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth to the labor pulled from low-wage information workers to the data taken from every action and expression. This book reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased inequity. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us material and political perspectives on what it takes to make AI and how it centralizes power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.

The planet remade: how geoengineering could change the world by Oliver Morton

The Planet Remade explores the science, history, and politics behind these strategies. It looks at who might want to see geoengineering put to use - and why others would be dead set against it. In the last two centuries, changes to the planet - to the clouds and soils, to the winds and the seas, to the great cycles of nitrogen and carbon - have been far more profound than most of us realize. Appreciating the scale of that change compels us to rethink not just our responses to global warming, but our relationship with nature. With sensitivity, insight, and expert science, Oliver Morton unpicks the moral implications of climate change, our fear that people have become a force of nature, and what it might mean to try and use that force for good. The Planet Remade is about imagining a world where people take care instead of taking control.

Learning by doing: the real connection between innovation, wages, and wealth by James Bessen

James Bessen discusses why these remarkable advances have, so far, benefited only a select few. He argues the need for unique policies to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to implement rapidly evolving technologies. Currently, this technical knowledge is mostly unstandardized and difficult to acquire, learned through job experience rather than in classrooms, but labor markets rarely provide strong incentives for learning on the job. Basing his analysis on intensive research into economic history as well as today’s labor markets, Bessen explores why the benefits of technology can take decades to emerge. Although the right policies can hasten the process, the policy has moved in the wrong direction, protecting politically influential interests to the detriment of emerging technologies and broadly shared prosperity. This is a thoughtful look at what leaders need to do to ensure success not only for the next quarter but for society in the long term.

The ministry for the future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson comes with a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined. Told entirely through fictional eyewitness accounts, The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face. It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.

How solar energy became cheap: a model for low-carbon innovation by Gregory Nemet

Despite the large literature on solar, including analyses of increasingly detailed datasets, the question as to how solar became inexpensive and why it took so long still remains unanswered. Drawing on developments in the US, Japan, Germany, Australia, and China, this book provides a truly comprehensive and international explanation for how solar has become inexpensive. Understanding the reasons for solar’s success enables us to take full advantage of solar’s potential. It can also teach us how to support other low-carbon technologies with analogous properties, including small modular nuclear reactors and direct air capture. However, the urgency of addressing climate change means that a key challenge in applying the solar model is in finding ways to speed up innovation. Offering suggestions and policy recommendations for accelerated innovation is another key contribution of this book.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy technology and innovation, climate change and energy analysis and policy, as well as practitioners and policymakers working in the existing and emerging energy industries.