{"title":"Machine Books","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"empire-of-ai-by-karen-hao","title":"Empire of AI by Karen Hao","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eA \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e Notable Book • Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction • A \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e Bestseller • Named a Best Book of the Year by \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eSmithsonian\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eScientific American, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eand \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eElle •\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e Winner of the \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e Book Prize, NYPL Helen Bernstein Award, Whiting Award, Nautilus Book Award, and Porchlight Business Book Award\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world . . . With \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eEmpire of AI, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eHao is fundamentally shaping many people’s perceptions and understanding of the company at the center of the AI revolution.” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003e—TIME Magazine\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e, “TIME100 AI 2025”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu,\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003e The New York Times\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” —\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eVulture\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eFrom a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSpoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eEmpire of AI\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"seekers coffee","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54243300606236,"sku":null,"price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0823\/3022\/2876\/files\/image3.jpg?v=1782483851"},{"product_id":"100-things-weve-lost-to-the-internet-by-pamela-paul","title":"100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eThe acclaimed editor of \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e takes readers on a nostalgic tour of the pre-Internet age, offering powerful insights into both the profound and the seemingly trivial things we've lost.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eCHICAGO TRIBUNE \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eAND \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eTHE DALLAS MORNING NEWS\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e • “A deft blend of nostalgia, humor and devastating insights.”—\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003ePeople\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRemember all those ingrained habits, cherished ideas, beloved objects, and stubborn preferences from the pre-Internet age? They’re gone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo some of those things we can say good riddance. But many we miss terribly. Whatever our emotional response to this departed realm, we are faced with the fact that nearly every aspect of modern life now takes place in filtered, isolated corners of cyberspace—a space that has slowly subsumed our physical habitats, replacing or transforming the office, our local library, a favorite bar, the movie theater, and the coffee shop where people met one another’s gaze from across the room. Even as we’ve gained the ability to gather without leaving our house, many of the fundamentally human experiences that have sustained us have disappeared.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn one hundred glimpses of that pre-Internet world, Pamela Paul, editor of \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eThe New York Times Book Review,\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e presents a captivating record, enlivened with illustrations, of the world before cyberspace—from voicemails to blind dates to punctuation to civility. There are the small losses: postcards, the blessings of an adolescence largely spared of documentation, the Rolodex, and the genuine surprises at high school reunions. But there are larger repercussions, too: weaker memories, the inability to entertain oneself, and the utter demolition of privacy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003e100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is at once an evocative swan song for a disappearing era and, perhaps, a guide to reclaiming just a little bit more of the world IRL.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"seekers coffee","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54243310567708,"sku":null,"price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0823\/3022\/2876\/files\/image2.jpg?v=1782483787"},{"product_id":"the-attention-merchants-by-tim-wu","title":"The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eFrom the author of the award-winning \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eThe Master Switch,\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e who coined the term \"net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e\"Dazzling.\" —\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOurs is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention. This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWu’s narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new medium—from radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook—has attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of “attention merchants” has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFull of lively, unexpected storytelling and piercing insight, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eThe Attention Merchants\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003elays bare the true nature of a ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"seekers coffee","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54243320660252,"sku":null,"price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0823\/3022\/2876\/files\/image1.jpg?v=1782484004"},{"product_id":"the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-by-shoshana-zuboff","title":"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eAn exposé of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming.” – \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe heady optimism of the Internet’s early days has turned dark. Surveillance capitalism has deepened inequality, sown societal chaos, and undermined democracy.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe fight for a human future has never been more urgent. Shoshana Zuboff argues that we still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in: Will we allow surveillance capitalism to wrap us in its iron cage as it enriches the few and subjugates the many? Or will we demand the rights and laws that place this rogue power under the democratic rule of law? Only democracy can ensure that the vast new capabilities of the digital era are harnessed to the advancement of humanity. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is a deeply original, exquisitely reasoned, and spell binding examination of our emerging information civilization and the life and death choices we face.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"seekers coffee","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54243327639836,"sku":null,"price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0823\/3022\/2876\/files\/image0.jpg?v=1782484124"},{"product_id":"amusing-ourselves-to-death-by-neil-postman","title":"Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eWhat happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? As our world begins to look more and more like Orwell's \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold a-text-italic\"\u003e1984\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003e, Neil's Postman's essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\"It's unlikely that Trump has ever read \u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eAmusing Ourselves to Death\u003c\/span\u003e, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.” -\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eCNN\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media—from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs—it has taken on even greater significance. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eAmusing Ourselves to Death\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of  entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A brilliant, powerful, and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.” –Jonathan Yardley, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"seekers coffee","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54243330392348,"sku":null,"price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0823\/3022\/2876\/files\/image4.jpg?v=1782484268"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.seekers.coffee\/collections\/machine-books.oembed","provider":"seekers coffee","version":"1.0","type":"link"}