Rage Against the Machine

With apocalypse permanently lingering on the horizon, this collection explores the new age of anxiety in five poetic sequences, from predators and prey to technology that changes the essence of what it means to be human.

Yay! You're an online video sensation! But thanks to a chip in your brain your every thought is out there for all to see…

Robots are increasingly integrated into modern society—on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health—Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff searches for an answer to one of the most important questions of our age: will these machines help us, or will they replace us?

Driverless cars, personal assistant in our pockets, predictive texting… no doubt artificial intelligence is integral to our lives. So will they act on their own? Markoff chronicles the history of automation, from the birth of the artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation communities in the 1950s, to the modern day brain trusts at Google and Apple in Silicon Valley, and on to the expanding tech corridor between Boston and New York, he traces the different ways developers have addressed this fundamental problem and urges them to carefully consider the consequences of their work.

Your guide to the 21st Century! The Ware Tetralogy is a four part series that begins innocently with rebel robots bring immortality to their human creator by eating his brain. Keepin' it real casual. By the fourth part, the robots have evolved into soft plastic slugs called moldies —and some human “cheeseballs” want to have sex with them. It's all very strange, but The Ware Tetralogy is an extremely fun read if you don't take everything about it too seriously, or try to find real teachings about what the future is or will be.

Just read it, be consumed with nightmares of robot sex and wake up to find that life is all good, and it all goes on.

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, this breakout science-fiction debut set in Thailand is the refreshing dystopia and future we've been waiting for for a while.

Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. But she is not human; she is an engineered being, grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as devils by some, soulless by others, these new people are the toys of the rich and famous So what happens when to them? And on the flipside, we have a bounty hunter who's foraging foodstuffs thought to be extinct. Why? Because calories are now the currency of the world. Bacigalupi delivers one of the most highly-acclaimed science fiction novels of the twenty-first century, and this book is a step away from the usual automated terror of futures.

What would you do if your best robots—children of your own brain—walked up and said “We want union scale”? This 1950s sci-fi may not be anything new seeing as how the ideas of future have changed so rapidly. But Mari Wolf's novel is great in forecasting the big question: what happens if and when computers and artificial intelligence develop sentience? This might have been written more than 50 years ago, but it's not bogged by outdated science or ridiculous predictions.

Well, you can't have a sci-fi shelf without the works of Philip K. Dick right?

Gallegher is a binge-drinking scientist who's a genius when drunk and totally clueless sober. But he wakes from each bender to discover a new invention designed to solve all his problems—if only he knew how it worked.

This collection of stories are part hilarious, part horrifying, and part entertaining. It's a great look into what the future was predicted to be though.

You watched the movie right? The one with Will Smith? Well this is not the book adaptation — Cory Doctrow's one is a completely different story. So now that the confusion's all sorted out…. The story is set in the type of police state needed to ensure that only one company is allowed to make robots, and only one type of robot is allowed. But will this backfire?

Let's forget fiction for a bit. And think about the real world. So… can computers really think? Or can they ever get to that level?

This book presents an introduction to the science of reasoning processes in computers, and the research approaches and results of the past two decades. You'll find examples of how robots and computers solved games, problems and logic problems, and see how far it has come in specific artificial-intelligence accomplishments. In other words, maybe it's time to be afraid.

Now here's something completely unprecedented: 3D printing. How will this change the world? And how will it make manufacturing and life easier?

Fabricated describes our emerging world of printable products, where people design and 3D print their own creations as easily as they edit an online document. But that's not the whole story, however. The magic happens when you plug a 3D printer into today’s mind-boggling digital technologies. Add to that the Internet, tiny, low cost electronic circuitry, radical advances in materials science and biotech and voila!

We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code. Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012, The Information tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know.

Where does your internet come from and where does it go to? The magic that makes pages appear and gifs load is more than just abstract airy-fairy ideas. Instead, the Internet can be represented by miles and miles of cables and acres and acres of storage space. In any case, Andrew Blum gives a very good insight into the world of the Internet, and helps us visualise what the Internet is in very real terms.

This short story is more than a hundred years old now, but it never fails to be fascinating and horrifying at the same time. In this short story, humanity is now living in pods and entertained by machines. So when the machine stops, what happens? Do they die helpless? Or is it time for humanity to break through? Fantastic writing and foresight by E.M. Forster.

Now this novel is somewhat special. War of the Worlds is technically no horror story about the future of automation and technology, since it's really about an invasion. But what's amazing about this is the radio reading behind it. People thought it was a real news bulletin and that the alien invasion was real! Think that says a lot about how we ingest information, and how technology assists that.