Best summer books of 2024: Technology

Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher (Little, Brown)

As a blogger, columnist and podcaster, Swisher is one of the most readable and best-connected critics of our digital age. Here she gets up close and personal with the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Long on anecdote, short on analysis, Burn Book is “a book-length version of a tweet storm,” the FT review concluded.

The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking by Shannon Vallor (OUP)

There has been a deluge of books on AI this year. The AI Mirror by the philosopher Vallor is among the most thought-provoking. The “utopian priests” who currently run our tech world are using AI as a means to reinforce flawed human power structures. AI’s great promise, Vallor argues, is to help reinvent them.

Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever by Joseph Cox (PublicAffairs)

An investigative reporter recounts the extraordinary tale of how the FBI secretly launched its own encrypted communications app to expose and entrap the world’s smugglers, money launderers and hitmen. But this true techno-thriller also raises some unnerving questions about privacy, deception and accountability in our digital age.

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The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI by Neil D Lawrence (Allen Lane)

As a Cambridge computer science professor and a former Amazon director, Lawrence understands both the theory and practice of AI. His clear-eyed book expertly explains the capabilities — and limitations — of machine intelligence. Ignore the doomsayers: human intelligence still has a lot going for it, he argues.

There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America’s Biggest Catfish by Anna Akbari (Grand Central Publishing)

Ethan Schuman is a witty and seductive, but somewhat elusive, figure who separately captivates three highly intelligent women online. But is he all he seems? In this real-life, page-turning exploration of human relationships mediated by technology, Akbari reveals Ethan to be a catfish, or fake identity, concealing a shocking reality.

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