- Memoir
- Big Tech
- Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
- By Sarah-Wynn Williams
In her review of this book, former Meta employee Sabhanaz Rashid Diya called it “disappointing and revealing.” While courageous—Meta won a ruling blocking author Sarah-Wynn Williams from promoting her work—the book glossed over the writer’s own indifference to warnings about serious harm to communities caused by Facebook, Diya wrote.
Read the review.
- Nonfi…
- Memoir
- Big Tech
- Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
- By Sarah-Wynn Williams
In her review of this book, former Meta employee Sabhanaz Rashid Diya called it “disappointing and revealing.” While courageous—Meta won a ruling blocking author Sarah-Wynn Williams from promoting her work—the book glossed over the writer’s own indifference to warnings about serious harm to communities caused by Facebook, Diya wrote.
Read the review.
- Nonfiction
- Big Tech
- The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
- By Stephen Witt
Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, famously used to not talk politics. But author Stephen Witt predicted, in an interview with Rest of World, that with the Trump administration’s tariffs and export controls, Huang “must deal with politics [as] the disruption to his business is too severe.” In May, Huang publicly said that U.S. chip curbs had failed.
Read the interview with Witt.
- Nonfiction
- Big Tech
- Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company
- By Patrick McGee
Patrick McGee’s book arrived as Apple’s iPhones were losing ground to Chinese rivals not just in China but also in Europe. Yet, despite President Trump’s insistence on moving manufacturing to the U.S., McGee told Rest of World that he was “not optimistic” that the company could replicate its supplier network anywhere else. “It’s America’s most iconic company, and it’s a bargaining chip of Beijing’s,” he said.
Read the interview with McGee.
- Nonfiction
- Artificial Intelligence
- Empire of AI: Dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI
- By Karen Hao
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was valued at about $300 billion recently, a near doubling of its valuation in just six months. But its breakneck growth comes at a high cost to the environment and to workers in poorer nations, author Karen Hao told Rest of World. Big tech firms have been very effective in “completely hijacking the public’s imagination for what AI should look like and how it should be developed,” even though ethical and sustainable alternatives exist, she said.
Read the interview with Hao, and an excerpt from the book.
- Nonfiction
- Artificial Intelligence
- The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
- By Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender
Tens of thousands of poorly paid workers around the world are needed to label text, images, videos, and sounds to make the AI tools that we use every day. The work is highly precarious and takes an enormous mental toll. Yet this work can be a boon for people who are disabled, or have care responsibilities that require them to remain at home. It could be “a sustainable job if there were stronger job protections in place,” authors Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender write.
Read an excerpt from the book.
- Nonfiction
- Big Tech
- House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company
- By Eva Dou
Eva Dou’s portrait of HuaweiiHuaweiHuawei is a Chinese technology company focused on mobile phones and telecommunications, and is seen as a poster child for China’s global tech ambitions.READ MORE’s reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, and how he built one of the world’s most powerful tech companies, is also a story of China’s rapid rise in the global order. It is a giddy mix of money, influence, surveillance, and nationalism that has confounded countries around the world as they grapple with the growing reach of Chinese tech companies.
Listen to a reading of the book.
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