Get the Summary of Kashmir Hill's Your Face Belongs to Us in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Hoan Ton-That, a Vietnamese-Australian tech enthusiast, found his passion in computers and music after facing bullying in Melbourne. His tech ventures in San Francisco caught investor Naval Ravikant's eye, leading to a move to the Bay Area. Despite a scandal with ViddyHo, Ton-That continued developing apps and became interested in politics, aligning with the alt-right. He met Charles Johnson at the Republican National Convention, and they shared an interest in physiognomy and technology's potential to "fix" America...
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2024* *LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2023* 'A parable for our times' FINANCIAL TIMES, Best Books of 2023 'Gripping' THE TIMES, Best Technology Books of 2023 ______________________________________________________________________ What if you could be identified by anyone with just a blurry photo? When Kashmir Hill stumbled upon Clearview AI in 2019, a facial recognition platform with an alleged 98.6% accuracy rate, the implications were terrifying. But that was just the beginning. Clearview AI would quickly rise to the top, sharing its app with billionaires, law enforcement and even Hollywood actors. In this gripping true story, Hill dives deep into its shadowy journey, and explores how facial recognition technology is already a part of our everyday lives – and where it’s going next. ______________________________________________________________________ ‘The dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon us. Kashmir Hill’s fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new reality’ JOHN CARREYROU, author of Bad Blood 'I loved this. A dark and gripping story, meticulously researched and stylishly told' JENNY KLEEMAN, author of Sex Robots & Vegan Meat 'A walk down the street will not quite feel the same again' THE ECONOMIST
We once idolized tech entrepreneurs for creating innovations that seemed like modern miracles. Yet our faith has been shattered. We now blame them for spreading lies, breaking laws, and causing chaos. Yesterday’s Silicon Valley darlings have become today’s Big Tech villains. Which is it? Are they superheroes or scoundrels? Or is it more complicated, some blend of both? In The Venture Alchemists, Rob Lalka demystifies how tech entrepreneurs built empires that made trillions. Meta started as a cruel Halloween prank, Alphabet began as a master’s thesis that warned against corporate deception, and Palantir came from a campus controversy over hateful speech. These largely forgotten origin stories show how ordinary fears and youthful ambitions shaped their ventures—making each tech tale relatable, both wonderfully and tragically human. Readers learn about the adversities tech entrepreneurs overcame, the troubling tradeoffs they made, and the tremendous power they now wield. Using leaked documents and previously unpublished archival material, Lalka takes readers inside Big Tech’s worst exploitations and abuses, alongside many good intentions and moral compromises. But this story remains unfinished, and The Venture Alchemists ultimately offers hope from the people who, decades ago, warned about the risks of the emerging Internet. Their insights illuminate a path toward more responsible innovations, so that technologies aren’t dangerous weapons but valuable tools that ensure progress, improve society, and enhance our daily lives.
An exclusive behind-the-scenes look at one of America's most controversial experiments in police surveillance. In 2020, the Baltimore Police Department had an aerial surveillance plane that could supposedly photograph and track every person in public view. Spy Plane reveals what happened with this controversial policing experiment. Drawing from incredible access and direct observations inside the for-profit tech startup that ran the program for Baltimore detectives, sociologist Benjamin H. Snyder recounts real criminal cases as they were worked by police using this untested tool. Deploying aircraft with powerful cameras built by a small company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, the spy plane program promised to help police "solve otherwise unsolvable crimes" by tracking the whereabouts of suspects in violent crime cases. Created for the battlefields of Iraq, it had never been adapted on so large a scale in a U.S. city. This riveting book gives an unprecedented look inside the shadowy world of for-profit law enforcement technology experiments, explaining why police and community leaders place so much faith in unproven technology to fix the problem of urban violence but continually come up short.
Over the last three decades, Kashmir has been ravaged by insurgency. While reams have been written on it - in human rights documents, academic theses, non-fiction accounts of the turmoil, and government and military reports - the effects of the violence on its inhabitants have rarely been rendered in fiction. Feroz Rather's The Night of Broken Glass corrects that anomaly. Through a series of interconnected stories, within which the same characters move in and out, the author weaves a tapestry of the horror Kashmir has come to represent. His visceral imagery explores the psychological impact of the turmoil on its natives - Showkat, who is made to wipe off graffiti on the wall of his shop with his tongue; Rosy, a progressive, jeans-wearing 'upper-caste' girl who is in love with 'lower-caste' Jamshid; Jamshid's father Gulam, a cobbler by profession who never finds his son's bullet-riddled body; the ineffectual Nadim 'Pasture', who proclaims himself a full-fledged rebel; even the barbaric and tyrannical Major S, who has to contend with his own nightmares. Grappling with a society brutalized by the oppression of the state, and fissured by the tensions of caste and gender, Feroz Rather's remarkable debut is as much a paean to the beauty of Kashmir and the courage of its people as it is a dirge to a paradise lost.
From two of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, what you need to know about AI—and how to defend yourself against bogus AI claims and products Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You’re not alone. AI is everywhere—and few things are surrounded by so much hype, misinformation, and misunderstanding. In AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works and why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil—products that don’t work, and probably never will. While acknowledging the potential of some AI, such as ChatGPT, AI Snake Oil uncovers rampant misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and describes the serious harms AI is already causing in how it’s being built, marketed, and used in areas such as education, medicine, hiring, banking, insurance, and criminal justice. The book explains the crucial differences between types of AI, why organizations are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, why AI isn’t an existential risk, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. The book also warns of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies. By revealing AI’s limits and real risks, AI Snake Oil will help you make better decisions about whether and how to use AI at work and home.
Authors researched public perceptions of government use of facial recognition technology and other artificial intelligence technologies, including through a nationally representative survey.
A lively and thought-provoking tour of the intertwined histories of art and walking "A broad-ranging book [that] has something for every rambler."--Benjamin Riley, New Criterion What does a walk look like? In the first book to trace the history of walking images from cave art to contemporary performance, William Chapman Sharpe reveals that a depicted walk is always more than a matter of simple steps. Whether sculpted in stone, painted on a wall, or captured on film, each detail of gait and dress, each stride and gesture has a story to tell, for every aspect of walking is shaped by social practices and environmental conditions. From classical statues to the origins of cinema, from medieval pilgrimages to public parks and the first footsteps on the moon, walking has engendered a vast visual legacy intertwined with the path of Western art. The path includes Romantic nature-walkers and urban flâneurs, as well as protest marchers and cell-phone zombies. It features works by artists such as Botticelli, Raphael, Claude Monet, Norman Rockwell, Agnès Varda, Maya Lin, and Pope.L. In 100 chronologically arranged images, this book shows how new ways of walking have spurred new means of representation, and how walking has permeated our visual culture ever since humans began to depict themselves in art.
