The Driver in the Driverless Car, 2nd Edition

Tech experts Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever describe dozens of astonishing technological advances in this fascinating and thought-provoking book, which asks what kind of future lies ahead-Star Trek or Mad Max? Astonishing technology developments, from personalized genomics to self-driving cars to artificial intelligence, could make our lives better. On the other hand, these very same technologies could raise the specter of a frightening future-eugenics, a jobless economy, loss of privacy, and exacerbating economic inequality. Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever propose that we ask three questions about any new technology: Does it have the potential to benefit everyone equally? What are the risks and the rewards? Does the technology more strongly promote autonomy or independence? They offer a host of solutions to mitigate the harm that tech can cause but ultimately leave it to the reader to make the final decision. This revised edition includes sections on accelerating changes in genomics and the use of CRISPR to modify human embryos, reexamining driverless cars in the wake of Uber deaths, and exploring how advances in AI are enabling robots to perform tasks we naively assumed would remain the province of humans

About the Author :
Alex Salkever is vice president of marketing communications at Mozilla. He was a technology editor of BusinessWeek, a regular science contributor to the Christian Science Monitor, and a contributor to The Immigrant Exodus. Vivek Wadhwa is director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization and executive in residence at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; vice president of innovation and strategy at Singularity University; fellow at the Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; and distinguished visiting scholar, Halle Institute of Global Learning, Emory University. He is a regular columnist for the Washington Post, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and Forbes.com. In February 2012, the US government awarded him distinguished recognition as an "Outstanding American by Choice" for his "commitment to this country and to the common civic values that unite us as Americans." James A. Gillies has been a familiar voice across BBC television and radio for nearly a quarter of a century. He has worked as an actor, continuity announcer, program narrator, and newsreader, even reading the Shipping Forecast. Trained at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in the 1970s, he taught speech and drama and theater studies for much of the next decade, developing many of the country's first school examinations in the subject. Finding himself in demand as a professional voice actor along the way, he was recruited by the BBC in the early 1990s. In 2013, he left in order to concentrate on his favorite part of the job: performance and, in particular, storytelling. Since then he has been in demand worldwide, recording generally one audiobook per month, voicing television ads in the U.K., U.S., Russia, Scandinavia, and the Middle East, and providing voice tracks for television, film, gaming, and on Ulineprojects. James lives with his wife, a former orchestral violist turned book editor, and two Norwegian Forest cats in the picturesque old weaving village of Kilbarchan in the beautiful West of Scotland.