{"title":"Piero Scaruffi","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the mind of Piero Scaruffi, a polymath exploring cognitive science, art, and the universe. Discover thought-provoking insights and unique perspectives in his diverse works. Browse now!\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"history-of-silicon-valley-book-piero-scaruffi-9781490330402","title":"A History of Silicon Valley","description":"This book is the first history of Silicon Valley from 1900 to 2013. It is a comprehensive study of the greatest creation of wealth in the history of the planet. It gives a chronological narrative covering a century of innovation and entrepreneurship, from the establishment of Stanford University to the age of Google and Facebook. A group of case studies describes innovations and narratives about radio, the US defense industry, HP, microchips, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, venture capital, Xerox PARC, software, Apple Computer, and the internet. Silicon Valley did not happen in a vacuum: this book also explores the surrounding social and cultural environment of the Bay Area.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49655175250193,"sku":"GOR013440109","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50385665065233,"sku":"CIN1490330402G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51029497348369,"sku":"NIN9781490330402","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51712976191761,"sku":"CIN1490330402VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53353267691793,"sku":"GOR006299249","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1490330402.jpg?v=1751053905"},{"product_id":"history-of-rock-music-book-piero-scaruffi-9780595295654","title":"A History of Rock Music","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor the last quarter-century the question of whether democracies are inherently inclined to conduct peaceful foreign policies has been the most extensively studied and heatedly debated issue in the fields of political science and international relations. With \u003ci\u003eReliable Partners\u003c\/i\u003e Charles Lipson has produced the definitive study of the question, which summarizes, synthesizes, and goes beyond everything else written about it.\u003cb\u003e--Michael Mandelbaum, Senior Fellow, The Council on Foreign Relations, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Ideas That Conquered the World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA crucial question for our future is the truth of the claim that democracies are unlikely to fight each other. After a careful examination of alternative explanations, Charles Lipson has produced an intriguing argument about the causation behind this correlation. It is an original and important work.\u003cb\u003e--Joseph S. Nye, Dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eScholars have long debated whether democracies fight each other. Charles Lipson persuasively closes that argument and explains how and why democracies are different. With verve and wit, he gathers a carefully crafted set of propositions like snowballs rolling down a hill until they strike like an avalanche with a fully constructed 'contracting theory.' Democracies avoid war with each other, Lipson demonstrates, because they have a unique capacity to bargain and keep their commitments. \u003ci\u003eReliable Partners\u003c\/i\u003e is a lucid and compelling book for the experts and the general reader.\u003cb\u003e--Robert A. Pastor, Vice President and Director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, American University\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eComprehensive, impressively researched, and a pleasure to read, \u003ci\u003eReliable Partners\u003c\/i\u003e is a major contribution and the best single book on the subject. Lipson breaks new ground in answering why the democratic peace exists. His work will become a major reference point for future scholarship in the field.\u003cb\u003e--Robert J. Lieber, Georgetown University, editor of \u003ci\u003eEagle Rules: Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First Century\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49931858477329,"sku":"CIN0595295657G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0595295657.jpg?v=1751104605"},{"product_id":"history-of-rock-and-dance-music-vol-2-book-piero-scaruffi-9780976553168","title":"History of Rock and Dance Music Vol. 2","description":"A History of Rock and Dance Music  is the second edition of what is arguably the most comprehensive history of the genre ever published. When the first edition came out, it marked the first time that someone had written a history of rock music without paying attention to the charts. It was meant as a history of the great ideas introduced by rock musicians over 50 years of relentless innovation (regardless of how many copies they sold). The new edition continues the story to the first decade of the new century. It maintains a multidisciplinary approach, starting with the genres that existed before rock n roll and ending with the many genres that have been born since the 1990s, including dance music and electronic\/digital styles. The author's background in classical music and science gives it a unique flavor, crossing boundaries and questioning stereotypes. A History of Rock Music was the first book in a bold project to synthesize the music of the 20th century. A History of Rock Music and A History of Popular Music, by the same authors, are the complementary pieces of this project. Volume 2 covers the period from 1990 to 2008.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368678658321,"sku":"CIN0976553163G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740718395665,"sku":"NIN9780976553168","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0976553163.jpg?v=1750705674"},{"product_id":"intelligence-is-not-artificial-expanded-edition-book-piero-scaruffi-9781984101457","title":"Intelligence is not Artificial - Expanded Edition","description":"This book provides a detailed history of Artificial Intelligence, and a reality check.Themes explored in this book include: - Most of the intelligence of our machines is dueto the environment that humans structure for them.- We are building vast algorithmic bureaucracies all around us.- Automation is an effect, not a cause.- The danger is not that machines will become as intelligent as us but that we will become as dumb as them (the Turing Test in reverse).- We have always coexisted with super-human (or, better, non-human) intelligence.- The Singularity is simply a religion for the god-less 21st century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50396833284369,"sku":"CIN1984101455G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52758248554769,"sku":"NIN9781984101457","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1984101455.jpg?v=1751029783"},{"product_id":"brief-history-of-knowledge-book-piero-scaruffi-9781500526658","title":"A Brief History of Knowledge","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51031091380497,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51031093608721,"sku":"NIN9781500526658","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1500526657.jpg?v=1751373323"},{"product_id":"history-of-silicon-valley-book-piero-scaruffi-9781508758730","title":"A History of Silicon Valley","description":"This book is the first history of Silicon Valley from 1900 to the 2010s. It is a comprehensive study of the greatest creation of wealth in the history of the world, from the establishment of Stanford University to the age of social media. The underlying objective is to find the reason why it was Silicon Valley, and not some place on the East Coast or in Europe, that became the creative technological hub of the 21st century. Silicon Valley did not happen in a vacuum: the book also explores the surrounding social and cultural environment of the Bay Area. This green book follows the red book od 2012, which was the (sold out) first edition coauthored with Arun Rao, and the blue book, which was Arun's proof-edited and expanded second edition of all chapters. The 600-page blue book is still available and contains both my old chapters and Arun's chapters. This 500-page green edition contains only my chapters (basically, the chronology) updated to 2015 and with many additions to early chapters and a new chapter on Asia.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51031583359249,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51031585128721,"sku":"NIN9781508758730","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1508758735.jpg?v=1751021637"},{"product_id":"history-of-popular-music-before-rock-music-book-piero-scaruffi-9780976553120","title":"A History of Popular Music before Rock Music","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51083874337041,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51083876827409,"sku":"NIN9780976553120","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0976553120.jpg?v=1750851677"},{"product_id":"intelligence-is-not-artificial-book-piero-scaruffi-9780976553199","title":"Intelligence is not Artificial","description":"Writers, inventors and entrepreneurs, impressed by progress in several scientific fields, are debating whether we may be heading for a singularity in which machines with super-human intelligence will arise and multiply. In parallel enthusiastic coverage in the media has widely publicized machines performing sophisticated tasks, from beating the world's chess champion to driving a car, from recognizing animals in videos to beating human experts on quiz shows. These stories have reignited interest in the discipline of Artificial Intelligence, whose goal is to create machines that are as intelligent as humans. First of all, this book provides a reality check of sorts on simulating human intelligence and achieving superhuman intelligence. I show that, in a society driven by media that desperately need sensational news to make money and in an academic world increasingly driven by the desire to turn research into Silicon Valley start-ups, technological progress in general, and progress in computer science in particular, is often overrated. I wanted to dispel some notions, and my version of the facts may sound controversial until you read my explanations. For example: non-human intelligence is already among us, and is multiplying rapidly, but it is not a machine. For example: progress in Artificial Intelligence has been negligible and one reason is, ironically, that computers have become so much more powerful. For example: the program of turning machines into humans is not very successful yet, but the program of turning humans into machines (via an almost infinite repertory of rules and regulations) is very successful. The new generations missed the debates of the previous decades (the Turing test, the ghost in the machine, the Chinese room, etc) and some of us think that these new generations, trained in hyper-specialized disciplines, don't have the knowledge to understand them even if they were forced to read them. Therefore it is much easier for the new A.I. practitioners to impress the new generations. I have summarized the various philosophical arguments in favor of and against the feasibility of machine intelligence in my book The Nature of Consciousness and i won't repeat them here. I will, however, at least caution the new generations that i grew up (as far as cognitive science goes) at a time when the term intelligence was not cool at all: too vague, too unscientific, too abused in popular literature to lend itself to scientific investigation. In fact, the mother of all problems in this debate is at the very source: singularity and superhuman intelligence are non-scientific terms based on non-scientific chatting. The term intelligence itself is hardly scientific. Ask one hundred psychologists and you will get one hundred different definitions. Ask philosophers and you will get thick tomes written in a cryptic language. Ask neurobiologists and they may simply ignore you. I also feel that this discussion should be complemented with an important (more important?) discussion about the changes in human intelligence due to the increased intelligence of machines. This change in human intelligence may have a stronger impact on the future of human civilization than the improvements in machine intelligence. Finally, i am intrigued by another sociological\/anthropological aspect of this discussion: humans seem to have a genetic propensity to believe in higher forms of intelligence (gods, saints, UFOs, ...) and the myth of the Singularity could simply be its manifestation in our post-religious 21st century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740718690577,"sku":"NIN9780976553199","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780976553199.jpg?v=1763484656"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-piero-scaruffi.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}