{"title":"Blaise Aguera Y Arcas","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"who-are-we-now-book-blaise-aguera-y-arcas-9781955125307","title":"Who Are We Now?","description":"From leading AI researcher Blaise Aguera y Arcas comes an exploration of how biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic 'us' that can neither be called natural nor artificial. Identity politics occupies the front line in today's culture wars, pitting generations against each other, and progressive cities against the rural traditions of our past. Rich in data and detail, Who Are We Now? goes beyond today's headlines to connect our current reality to a larger more-than-human story. At the heart of the book is a set of surveys conducted between 2016 and 2021, asking thousands of anonymous respondents all over the United States questions about their behaviour and identity, and especially about gender and sexuality. The resulting window into people's lives is a bit like that of the Kinsey Reports, which scandalized postwar America more than 70 years ago. Today, the landscape is - in every sense - even queerer. Twentieth century heterosexual 'normalcy' is on the wane, especially among young and urban people. The landscape outside has changed too. After millennia of being fruitful and multiplying, we've strained, and exceeded, planetary limits. Domesticated animals far outweigh wildlife, and many species are in catastrophic decline. Yet curiously, our own population is poised to begin collapsing this century too, our fertility now curbed by choice rather than by premature death. Is this the end of humanity - or the beginning?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50395224572177,"sku":"CIN1955125309VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51060454457617,"sku":"NIN9781955125307","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52107640340753,"sku":"CIN1955125309G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52469990523153,"sku":"GOR014533113","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1955125309.jpg?v=1750727329"},{"product_id":"ubi-sunt-book-blaise-arcas-9781955125130","title":"Ubi Sunt","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAre we living in reality? Is this the past, or the future? And is there a human on the other side of this screen?\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese questions rear up and twist back on themselves in \u003ci\u003eUbi Sunt\u003c\/i\u003e, a genre-breaking imaginative work by Blaise Ag era y Arcas. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title, borrowed from Latin and Medieval poetics, describes elegiac verses modeled on the formula Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning Where are those who were before us? Such was the mood of the anonymous early English poets who spun stories of giants and ancient battles amid the tumbled Roman masonry of 8th century Europe. Fragments of our own digital civilization stand like ruined columns throughout Ubi Sunt--transcribed lectures and drone footage, recorded cab rides and text messages. In a parallel present, an engineer is caught in the solipsistic first-person loop of a life in tech during COVID lockdown. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIs this book fiction or nonfiction? Though speculative, its historical material is accurate, and its present tense is drawn from life; some of its AI dialogs, too, are generated by interaction with a real large neural language model. Postmodern in the spirit of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturnand Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, Ubi Sunt is an erudite, compulsively readable, all-terrain joyride across the uncanny valley between yesterday and tomorrow. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50406662996241,"sku":"CIN1955125139G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51061922562321,"sku":"NIN9781955125130","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51878119801105,"sku":"CIN1955125139VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1955125139.jpg?v=1751125615"},{"product_id":"what-is-life-book-blaise-aguera-y-arcas-9780262554091","title":"What Is Life?","description":"\u003cb\u003eWhat life is, and how its essence can be understood as computation that grows more complex over time in symbiotic relationships.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In 1944, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote a slim but influential volume, \u003ci\u003eWhat Is Life?\u003c\/i\u003e, posing the primary question that rendered biology so mysterious to a physicist. How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time?\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e This small book, richly illustrated and written for a general audience, offers a deep and surprising answer, drawing on decades of theory and existing literature as well as recent experiments in artificial life. Beginning with ideas developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann in the mid-twentieth century, Agüera y Arcas shows how self-reproduction, hence life, is inherently computational. Life evolves spontaneously in environments capable of supporting computation, like our own universe, and grows more complex over time as it enters symbiotic relationships with itself.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eWhat Is Life?\u003c\/i\u003e is also the first part of Agüera y Arcas's larger book \u003ci\u003eWhat Is Intelligence?\u003c\/i\u003e, which further develops a computational and symbiotic perspective on intelligence, from simple organisms to brains and societies to AI.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51202370109713,"sku":"NGR9780262554091","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51301830000913,"sku":"NIN9780262554091","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53102429569297,"sku":"CIN0262554097VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262554097.jpg?v=1751037825"},{"product_id":"what-is-intelligence-book-blaise-aguera-y-arcas-9780262049955","title":"What Is Intelligence?","description":"What intelligence really is, and how AI s emergence is a natural consequence of evolution.   It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future the  predictive brain  hypothesis.   In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Aguera y Arcas takes up this idea that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain, but to life itself and explores the wide-ranging implications. These include radical new perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, entropy and the nature of time, the meaning of free will, the problem of consciousness, and the ethics of machine intelligence.   The book offers a unified picture of intelligence from molecules to organisms, societies, and AI, drawing from a wide array of literature in many fields, including computer science and machine learning, biology, physics, and neuroscience. It also adds recent and novel findings from the author, his research team, and colleagues. Combining technical rigor and deep up-to-the-minute knowledge about AI development, the natural sciences (especially neuroscience), and philosophical literacy, What Is Intelligence? argues quite against the grain that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51627199594769,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51627199824145,"sku":"NGR9780262049955","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52076496290065,"sku":"GOR014479864","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52508721217809,"sku":"NIN9780262049955","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53455901884689,"sku":"CIN0262049953VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262049953.jpg?v=1769682466"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-blaise-aguera-y-arcas.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}