David Chalmers

Bryan Appleyard

Uziel Awret

Could Artificial Intelligence Really Out-Think Us ?

Singularity

The Rise and Fall of the Machine That Made the Modern World

A dazzling, funny, alarming, entertaining and thought-provoking look at immortality and how some believe it will soon be within our reach.

On the New Immortality

How to Live Forever Or Die Trying

A brand-new book from the award-winning SUNDAY TIMES journalist Brian Appleyard. Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be 'machine readable'. From telephone call trees that simplify us into a series of 'options' to social networks that reduce us to our purchases and preferences, we are deluged with propaganda urging us to abandon our irreducibly complex selves. At the same time, scientists tell us we are 'simply' the products of evolution, nothing more than our genes. Brain scanners have inspired neuroscientists to claim they are close to cracking the problem of the human mind. 'Human equivalent' computers are being designed that, we are told, will do our thinking for us. Humans are being simplified out of existence. It is time, says Bryan Appleyard, to resist, and to reclaim the full depth of human experience. We are, he argues, naturally complex creatures, we are only ever at home in complexity. Through art and literature we see ourselves in ways that machines never can. He makes an impassioned plea for the voices of art to be heard before those of the technocrats. Part memoir, part reportage, part cultural analysis, THE BRAIN IS WIDER THAN THE SKY is a dire warning about what we may become and a lyrical evocation of what humans can be. For the brain is indeed wider than the sky.

Why Simple Solutions Don't Work in a Complex World

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky

More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings. This book celebrates the immense drama and beauty of the car, of the genius embodied in the Ford Model T, of the glory of the brilliant-red Mercedes Benz S-Class made by workers for Nelson Mandela on his release from prison, of Kanye West's 'chopped' Maybach, of the salvation of the Volkswagen Beetle by Major Ivan Hirst, of Elvis Presley's 100 Cadillacs, of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and the BMC Mini and even of that harbinger of the end - the Tesla Model S and its creator Elon Musk. As the age of the car as we know it comes to an end, Bryan Appleyard's brilliantly insightful book tells the story of the rise and fall of the incredible machine that made the modern world what it is today.

The rise and fall of the machine that made the modern world

The Car

A 'cultural history' of the alien phenomenon, this book looks at our fascination with all things alien, as well as explaining what this says about us in the post-religious age.

Why They are Here

Aliens

In this exploration of the human condition, the central role of science in shaping our lives and beliefs is discussed. The health fads, environmentalism, mass communications and the politics of today are analysed and explained as the outcome of how science changes our perspective of ourselves and the universe.

Bryan Appleyard

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