The low of HCI is at the top

These are the top 10 from Amazons' best seller list for HCI books this morning.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

Lanier’s reasons for freeing ourselves from social media’s poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success (..)

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible

Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids - and How to Break the Trance by Nicholas Kardaras

Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

As we enjoy the internet’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

Shoshana Zuboff shows that we are at a crossroads. We still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in, and what we decide now will shape the rest of the century. Our choices: allow technology to enrich the few and impoverish the many, or harness it and distribute its benefits.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingo

With the Master Algorithm in hand and data as its fuel, machine learning - essentially the automation of discovery, a kind of scientific method on steroids - will become the most powerful technology humanity has ever devised.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

a look at what it means to be human at a moment of unprecedented technological possibility.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

A call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head.

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

He was instead a relentless visionary that saw the potential of the way individuals could interact with computers and software. (..) His ideas became so influential, his passion so contagious, that Waldrop called him "computing's Johnny Appleseed.

Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do by B.J. Fogg

Technology designers, marketers, researchers, consumers―anyone who wants to leverage or simply understand the persuasive power of interactive technology―will appreciate the compelling insights and illuminating examples found inside. Persuasive technology can be controversial―and it should be. Who will wield this power of digital influence? And to what end?

I'ts almost evil how the top eight are all warning us of this pit of hellish fire we are sliding into, and the second to last tells the tail of a time of great optimism for tech, yet the final book is a how to guide for starting this pit fire.

05.10.2020