How science fiction has been a tool for understanding and living through rapid technological change.The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us,
An overview of recycling as an activity and a process, following different materials through the waste stream. Is there a point to recycling? Is recycling even good for the environment? In this volu
The story of citizenship as a tale not of liberation, dignity, and nationhood but of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination. The glorification of citizenship is a given in today's world, part of a c
An accessible introduction to the artificial intelligence technology that enables computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, and driverless cars.Deep learning is an artificial intellige
An examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters. When someone is labeled a nihilist, it's not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with
A concise and accessible guide to techniques for detecting doctored and fake images in photographs and digital media.Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, and other dictators routinely doctored photographs
A comprehensive overview of developments in augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality-and how they could affect every part of our lives. After years of hype, extended reality-augmented r
A consumer's guide to the food system, from local to global: our part as citizens in the interconnected networks, institutions, and organizations that enable our food choices.Everybody eats. We may ev
An introduction to computational thinking that traces a genealogy beginning centuries before the digital computer.A few decades into the digital era, scientists discovered that thinking in terms of co
An introduction to issues of sexual consent, covering key strands of feminist thought, how sexual consent is negotiated in practice, the influence of popular culture, and more.The #MeToo movement has
An accessible introduction to 3D printing that outlines the additive manufacturing process, industrial and household markets, and emerging uses.The use of 3D printing—digitally controlled additive man
A concise history of GPS, from its military origins to its commercial applications and ubiquity in everyday life.GPS is ubiquitous in everyday life. GPS mapping is standard equipment in many new cars
A concise history of spaceflight, from military rocketry through Sputnik, Apollo, robots in space, space culture, and human spaceflight today.Spaceflight is one of the greatest human achievements of t
An accessible guide to the major issues and arguments surrounding school choice.The issues and arguments surrounding school choice are sometimes hijacked to make political points about government cont
A concise overview of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), a promising but overlooked climate change mitigation pathway.The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide (CO2), and these CO2 em
An accessible, nontechnical overview of active touch sensing, from sensory receptors in the skin to tactile surfaces on flat screen displays.Haptics, or haptic sensing, refers to the ability to identi
What extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence.A rising tide of extremist movements threaten to destabilize civil societies around the globe.
An accessible, concise primer on the neurological trait of synesthesia -- vividly felt sensory couplings -- by a founder of the field.One in twenty-three people carry the genes for the synesthesia. No
How we arrived in a post-truth era, when "alternative facts" replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.Are we living in a post-truth world, where "alternative facts" replace ac
The future is like an unwritten book. It is not something we see in a crystal ball, or can only hope to predict, like the weather. In this volume of the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, Nick Mo
The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the advent of
We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal ac
Robots are entering the mainstream. Technologies have advanced to the point of mass commercialization -- Roomba, for example -- and adoption by governments -- most notabl
Today, machine learning underlies a range of applications we use every day, from product recommendations to voice recognition -- as well as some we don't yet use everyday
Philosophers from Descartes to Kripke have struggled with the glittering prize of modern and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. The brain is physical. If the
Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a mature brain was fixed like a fly in amber, unable to change. Today, we know that our brains and nervous systems change th
People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consum
Most of the information available on cloud computing is either highly technical, with details that are irrelevant to non-technologists, or pure marketing hype, in which the cloud is simply a selling p
Although it is among the oldest of market institutions, the auction is ubiquitous in today's economy, used for everything from government procurement to selling advertising on the Internet to course a
When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from info
The word "sustainability" has been connected to everything from a certain kind of economic development to corporate promises about improved supply sourcing. But despite the apparent
The idea that human history is approaching a "singularity" -- that ordinary humans will someday be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines or cognitively enhanced biological i
We turn on the lights in our house from a desk in an office miles away. Our refrigerator alerts us to buy milk on the way home. A package of cookies on the supermarket shelf suggests that we buy it, b
The New York Times declared 2012 to be "The Year of theMOOC" as millions of students enrolled in massive open online courses (known as MOOCs),millions of investment dollars flowed to the companies mak
Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. We have beliefsabout objects, about culture, about the past, and about the future. We have beliefs about otherpeople, and we believe
How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain?How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to think,to understand its
In our daily life, it really seems as though we have free will,that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make. Youget up from the couch, you go for a wa
Thinkers have been fascinated by paradox since long before Aristotle grappled withZeno's. In this volume in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Margaret Cuonzo exploresparadoxes and the strategi
Ever since the term "crowdsourcing" was coined in 2006 byWired writer Jeff Howe, group activities ranging from the creation of the OxfordEnglish Dictionary to the choosing of new colors for M&Ms h
Sitting on the beach on a sunny summer day, we enjoy the steady advance and retreatof the waves. In the water, enthusiastic waders jump and shriek with pleasure when a wave hits them.But where do thes
