IN3: Bookstore

The Journal of the International Informatics Institute

Books
in associate with Amazon.com

Converging ideas in science, technology, management and culture define the broad territory of these books chosen by IN3 analysts, researchers, friends and family.

Technology and
Culture

Artificial Intelligence

Internet Everywhere

Cyber Ethics

Publishing Technology

Click on a book cover to read more and buy it through Amazon.com.

TECHNOLOGY & CULTURE

Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize our World. George Gilder's influential analysis of the impact of cheap and abundant connectivity has some of the frenzy of the 1998-2000 Internet Boom about it -- he spotlights JDS Uniphase, Lucent, Nortel and other companies that have since lost hugely chasing the Net. But this excellent overview of the telecom dream with its fabulous opinionated glossary is an essential text for understanding the Internet.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

After the Internet: Alien Intelligence. IT guru James Martin blows past the Pinnochio arguments of academic AI by outlining how intelligent machines will be smart but very different from humans, artificial and alien to the way people think. His section on genetic algorithms, neural networks and cellular automata, "Machines That Breed," is worth the price of the whole book.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. From slime mold to the develop- life of great cities, Steven Johnson describes how individual elements pursuing simple tasks organize themselves into intelligent systems that adapt and grow to become much more than the sum of their parts. A well-written and thought-provoking look at the fascinating field of emergence with important implications for AI.

INTERNET EVERYWHERE

Being Digital. In this landmark 1995 book, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT famously described the evolution of Western society from one based on atoms to one based on bits. While some of the focus on media transformations ignores the commercial reality in favor of the technical possibilities, the scope of Negroponte's vision and the relentlessly optimistic tone make this an important book for students of the future.

CYBER ETHICS

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Sci-fi great David Brin describes the fast-approaching world of pervasive surveillance and proposes that we get over outdated ideas about privacy and get used to a world of "reciprocal transparency" where everybody knows everything about everybody else.

The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. Law professor and legal affairs reporter Jeffrey Rosen uses the Monica Lewinsky scandal as the springboard for an analysis of the legal threats to traditional privacy rights and describes the value of "opacity" in civil society. Unlike Brin, he wants more and better privacy customs and regulations both in real life and on the Internet.

PUBLISHING TECHNOLOGY

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Literary critic Sven Birkerts doesn't like what emerging information technologies like the World Wide Web, CD-ROMs and hypertext are doing to us. He argues that reading a book is physically, philosophically and culturally better than viewing a computer screen, and he worries that electronic media culture is destroying oru individuality and making wisdom obsolete.