The Library has recently added the 16 books in the running for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award.
Material world : a substantial story of our past and future by
Sand, iron, salt, oil, copper and lithium. The struggle for these tiny, magical materials has razed empires, demolished civilisations, fed our greed and our ingenuity for thousands of years. But the story is not over. We are often told we now live in a weightless world of information but in fact we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. And it's getting worse. To make one bar of gold, we now have to dig 5,000 tons of earth. For every tonne of fossil fuels, we extract six tonnes of other materials - from sand to stone to wood to metal. Even as we pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we have redoubled our consumption of everything else. Why? Because these ingredients build everything. They power our computers and phones, build our homes and offices, print our books and packaging
Elon Musk by
Epic failures. An epic story.Walter Isaacson charts Elon Musk's journey from humble beginnings to one of the wealthiest people on the planet - but is Musk a genius or a jerk? From the author ofSteve Jobsand other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era - a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter. When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue and charismatic fantasist. His father's impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive. At the beginning of 2022 - after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth - Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. `I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,' he said. It was a wistful comment, not a New Year's resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world's ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.For two years, Walter Isaacson had unprecedented access. He shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress? The book includes over 100 integrated black and white images.
Power and Progress : Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by
The first hundred years of industrialization in England delivered stagnant incomes for working people. And throughout the world today, digital technologies and artificial intelligence undermine jobs and democracy through excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance. It doesn't have to be this way. Power and Progress demonstrates the path of technology was once and may again be brought under control. Cutting-edge technological advances can become empowering and democratizing tools, but not if all major decisions remain in the hands of a few hubristic tech leaders.
Billionaires' Row by
In Billionaires' Row, Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Clarke reveals the riveting inside story of how a group of New York's most legendary developers went toe-to-toe with renegade upstarts in an ego-fueled race to build the tallest and most luxurious skyscrapers the world has ever known-and to burnish their legacies in the process. The result is a real-life drama complete with broken partnerships, broken marriages, lawsuits, and, for a few, triumph
Cobalt Red: how the blood of the Congo powers our lives by
Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world's supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo--because we are all implicated.
How big things get done by
Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life's work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg. In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors that lead projects to fail, and the research-based principles that will make yours succeed:- Understand your odds. If you don't know them, you won't win.- Plan slow, act fast. Getting to the action quick feels right. But it's wrong.- Think right to left. Start with your goal, then identify the steps to get there.- Find your Lego. Big is best built from small.- Master the unknown unknowns. Most think they can't, so they fail. Flyvbjerg shows how you can.
The Case for Good Jobs by
From healthcare facilities to call centres, fulfillment centres to factories, and restaurants to retail stores, companies are struggling to find or keep workers, because the jobs they offer are low-paying, stressful, and provide little chance for growth and success. Workers want good jobs, and many leaders want to provide them. But they don't think they can offer higher pay and more motivating work without hurting the bottom line. Most business leaders want to win with customers, but their companies are hobbled by a host of service and operational problems largely driven by high employee turnover-turnover that's partly driven by low pay. It is indeed a vicious cycle, and Zeynep Ton is here to show you the way out: why good jobs combined with strong operations lead to higher productivity and increased competitiveness for the business
Unscripted : the epic battle for a Hollywood media empire by
Unscripted is the inside story of the struggle to control one of the world's great entertainment empires. It is the story of the last great Hollywood mogul, Sumner Redstone: the ninety-something founder of Paramount Global who, well into his dotage and facing a scandalous lawsuit, proves increasingly unable to run the sprawling company he has built. It is the story of his daughter, Shari Redstone: Sumner's heir apparent who, despite being groomed for power for six decades, struggles to assert her authority over the company and her family's legacy. And it is the story of her challenger, Leslie Moonves: the well-liked CEO of CBS who plots a coup to take control of the business - until news leaks that he is facing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct (allegations he has spent years trying to hush up).
The coming wave : AI, power, and the 21st century's greatest dilemma by
Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.None of us are prepared.As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side and the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia? This ground-breaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes 'the containment problem' - the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies - as the essential challenge of our age.
Beijing rules : China's quest for global influence by
he remarkable story of China's two-decade quest for global dominance.For several decades China's ascendancy has been supported by an astonishingly broad and deep portfolio of quiet coercion. Stories of the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian reach are breathtaking - the gagging of sports stars and huge Western brands; Hollywood self-censorship; infrastructure deals in exchange for political loyalty in multilateral organizations; and of course - communications firms. As we come reeling out of a global pandemic and eyes are on a new war in Europe, this revealing analysis sounds the alarm about the most significant shift in the new world order, and what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we take for granted
Your face belongs to us : the secretive start-up on a mission to end privacy by
When Kashmir Hill stumbled upon Clearview AI, a mysterious startup selling an app that claimed it could identify anyone using just a snapshot of their face, the implications were terrifying. The app could use the photo to find your name, your social media profiles, your friends and family - even your home address. But this was just the start of a story more shocking than she could have imagined. Launched by computer engineer Hoan Ton-That and politician Richard Schwartz, and assisted by a cast of controversial characters on the alt-right, Clearview AI would quickly rise to the top, sharing its app with billionaires and law enforcement. In this riveting feat of reporting Hill weaves the story of Clearview AI with an exploration of how facial recognition technology is reshaping our lives, from its use by governments and companies like Google and Facebook (who decided it was too radical to release) to the consequences of racial and gender biases baked into the AI.
Five Times Faster by
We need to act five times faster to tackle climate change before it is too late. A policy insider, Simon Sharpe provides compelling ideas on how to rethink our strategies and reorganize our efforts in the fields of science, diplomacy, and economics to speed up progress in addressing climate change
Right kind of wrong : why learning to fail can teach us to thrive by
World-leading Harvard professor reveals how these failures can lead us to happier, more successful lives - provided we know how to learn from them. We used to think of failure as a problem, to be avoided at all costs. Now, we're often told that failure is desirable - that we must 'fail fast, fail often'. The trouble is, neither approach distinguishes the good failures from the bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. Here, Amy Edmondson - the world's most influential organisational psychologist - reveals how we get failure wrong, and how to get it right. She draws on a lifetime's research into the science of 'psychological safety' to show that the most successful cultures are those in which you can fail openly, without your mistakes being held against you.
Tokens by
Platform capitalism is coming for the money in your pocket **Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year** Wherever you look, money is being re-placed by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data--the list goes on. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks? What new types of control and discrimination emerge when money is tied to specific apps or actions, politics or identities? Tokens opens up this new and expanding world. Exploring the history of extra-monetary economies, Rachel O'Dwyer shows that private and grassroots tokens have always haunted the real economy. But as the large tech platforms issue new money-like instruments, tokens are suddenly everywhere. Amazon's Turk workers are getting paid in gift cards. Online streamers trade in wishlists. Foreign remittances are sent via phone credit. Bitcoin, gift cards, NFTs, customer data, and game tokens are the new money in an evolving economy. It is a development challenging the balance of power between online empires and the state. Tokens may offer a flexible even subversive route to compensation. But for the platforms themselves they can be a means of amassing frightening new powers. An essential read for anyone concerned with digital money, inequality, and the future of the economy.
Easy Money by
In Easy Money, McKenzie enlists the help of journalist Jonathan Silverman for a caper and expos that points in shock to the climactic final days of cryptocurrency now upon us. Weaving together stories of average traders and victims, colorful crypto "visionaries," Hollywood's biggest true believers, anti-crypto whistleblowers, and government agents searching for solutions at the precipice of a major crash, Easy Money is an on-the-ground look at a perfect storm of 2008 Housing Bubble-level irresponsibility and criminal fraud potentially ten times more devastating than Bernie Madoff
Blood in the Machine by
The "gripping" (New Yorker) true story of the first time machines came for human jobs--and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today * Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines--on punishment of death--and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees. Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it? The answers lie in Blood in the Machine. Brian Merchant intertwines a lucid examination of our current age with the story of the Luddites, showing how automation changed our world--and is shaping our future.
The Library also has all of the titles listed in the FT Best Books of 2023 — Economics.
Coming soon: FT Best Books of 2023 — Politics.