Technology & society

Karrie G. Karahalios · MIT Press · 2026

This book serves as a first-of-its-kind roadmap for auditing artificial intelligence systems to prevent decision-making failures in health care, policing, and employment. Using canonical examples of AI gone wrong, from misidentified facial recognition to biased hiring algorithms, this book explains why robust audits are essential and how they drive concrete policy and corporate change.

Dwaipayan Banerjee · Princeton University Press · 2026

In this book, Banerjee examines India's pursuit of technological self-sufficiency, and the global forces that prevailed against this vision. He describes why the nation is "the world's leading provider of inexpensive outsourcing and offshoring services, yet enjoys minimal benefits from more profitable advances in research, manufacturing, and development."

Elisabeth B. Reynolds · MIT Press · 2026

A new world order is emerging, and within it, U.S. priorities are shifting. For the country to flourish as well as defend and secure its interests, it must build on its decades of experience in developing frontier technologies and globally competitive industries through investments into priority technologies for the 21st century. This volume presents an introduction to some of the key areas where the U.S. must lead in order to ensure both national and economic security: critical minerals, semiconductors, biomanufacturing, quantum computing, drones, and advanced manufacturing.

Nick Montfort · Printed Matter · 2026

This work is based on a text generator that produces French and English news items that imagine some of the ways technology will impact us in the near future. Most of the generated news involves people getting struck by autonomous vehicles or even aircraft. Others describe labor disputes, hostile takeover attempts, inventions, and the termination of online services. What is imagined in "RT/TS" is not apocalyptic or discontinuous but actually features many of the same problems we face today; the methods of producing the texts are today's as well.

Sotirios Kotsopoulos SM '00 · Springer Nature · 2025

chapter by Terry W. Knight, the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Design and Computation in the Department of Architecture This book provides a panorama of "shape computation" and "shape grammars," a computational theory that has, from its inception 50 years ago, been directed toward the "how" of design. Knight's chapter, "How is that? Computing the Temporality of Drawing," describes how process and time are key to studying, appreciating, designing, and making things. She notes that in creative production it is not only important to ask, "What is that?" but also "How is that?", in other words, how did or how can a thing come to be? As a process carried out over time, computation offers a means for rethinking, representing, and elevating the "how" in designing and making activities.

Alex "Sandy" Pentland · MIT Press · 2025

How can we build a flourishing society by using human nature to design technology rather than letting technology shape society? Pentland explores how cultural inventions, from civilizations to the Enlightenment, accelerated innovation and collective wisdom. He argues that understanding these key factors in cultural evolution is essential for solving global challenges like climate change and pandemics, and shows how AI and digital media can aid rather than replace human deliberation.

Benjamin Mangrum · Stanford University Press · 2025

We often deal with our doubts and fears about computing through humor, whether reconciling ourselves to machines or critiquing them. In fact, this dynamic turns up throughout modern culture, in movies, television, fiction, and the theater. Mangrum analyzes this phenomenon in "The Comedy of Computation," digging into several facets of modern culture and technology.

Erik Lin-Greenberg · Cornell University Press · 2025

In "The Remote Revolution," Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of international security, but not in ways one would expect. Leveraging diverse types of evidence from original wargames, survey experiments, and cases of U.S. and Israeli drone operations, Lin-Greenberg explores how drone operations lower risks of escalation.

Munther Dahleh · Cambridge University Press · 2025

Harnessing the power of data and artificial intelligence (Al) methods to tackle complex societal challenges requires transdisciplinary collaborations across academia, industry, and government. In this book, Dahleh, founder of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), offers a blueprint for researchers, professionals, and institutions to create approaches to problems of high societal value using innovative, holistic, data-driven methods.

Ja-Naé Duane · Wiley · 2025

This book describes how we're at the end of one 200-year arc and embarking on another. With this new age of intelligence, Duane and Fisher highlight the catalysts for change currently affecting individuals, businesses, and society as a whole. They also provide a model for transformation that utilizes a holistic view of making radical change through three lenses: you as a leader, your organization, and society.

Dimitris Bertsimas · Dynamic Ideas · 2025

Analytics is transforming health care operations, empowering medical professionals and administrators to leverage data and models to make better decisions. This book provides a practical introduction to this exciting field. The first part establishes the technical foundations of health care analytics, spanning machine learning and optimization. The second part presents integrated case studies that cover a wide range of clinical specialties and problem types using descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.

David Mindell · MIT Press · 2025

Climate change, global disruption, and labor scarcity are forcing us to rethink the underlying principles of industrial society. In this book, Mindell envisions this new industrialism from the fundamentals, drawing on the 18th century when first principles were formed at the founding of the Industrial Revolution. While outlining the new industrialism, he tells the story of the Lunar Society, a group of engineers, scientists, and industrialists who came together to apply the principles of the Enlightenment to industrial processes.

Joseph F. Coughlin · MIT Press · 2024

Populations around the world are aging, and older adults' economic influence stands to grow markedly in future decades. This volume brings together entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, public servants, and others to address the multifaceted concerns of aging societies and to explore the possibility that certain regions will distinguish themselves as longevity hubs: home to disproportionate economic and innovative activity for older populations.

Nick Montfort · MIT Press · 2024

The discussion of computer-generated text has recently reached a fever pitch but largely omits the long history of work in this area - text generation, as it happens, was not invented yesterday in Silicon Valley. This anthology aims to correct that omission by gathering seven decades of English-language texts produced by generation systems and software, long before ChatGPT and Claude.

Greg Epstein · MIT Press · 2024

Today's technology has overtaken religion as the chief influence on 21st-century life and community. In "Tech Agnostic," Epstein explores what it means to be a critical thinker with respect to this new faith. Encouraging readers to reassert their common humanity beyond the seductive sheen of "tech," this book argues for tech agnosticism - not worship - as a way of life.

Catherine D'Ignazio · MIT Press · 2024

"Counting Feminicide" brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting feminicide, and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. D'Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account.

Jacob Lehrer · Parametric Architecture · 2024

In his chapter, "Garbage In, Garbage Out: How Language Models Can Reinforce Biases," Lehrer discusses how inherent bias is baked into large data sets, like those used to train massive AI algorithms, and how society will need to reconcile with the inherent biases built into systems of power. He also attempts to reconcile with it himself, delving into the mathematics behind these systems.

Tod Machover · Penguin Random House · 2024

In their chapter, "Composing the Future of Health," the co-authors discuss their approach to combining scientific research, technology innovation, and new composing strategies to create evidence-based, emotionally potent music that can delight and heal.

R. David Edelman · Oxford University Press · 2024

Fifteen years into the era of "cyber warfare," are we any closer to understanding the role a major cyberattack would play in international relations - or to preventing one? Uniquely spanning disciplines and enriched by the insights of a leading practitioner, Edelman provides a fresh understanding of the role that digital disruption plays in contemporary international security.

Daniela Rus · W. W. Norton and Company · 2024

In "The Heart and the Chip," Rus and Mone provide an overview of the interconnected fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and reframe the way we think about intelligent machines while weighing the moral and ethical consequences of their role in society. Robots aren't going to steal our jobs, they argue; they're going to make us more capable, productive, and precise.

Héctor Beltrán · Princeton University Press · 2023

In this book, Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders' personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán shows how these hackers apply concepts from the coding world to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions - at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics.

Richard Larson · INFORMS · 2023

Decisions are a part of everyday life, whether simple or complex. It's all too easy to jump to Google for the answers, but where does that take us? We're losing the ability to think critically and decide for ourselves. In this book, Larson asks readers to undertake a major mind shift in our everyday thought processes. Model thinking develops our critical thinking skills, using a framework of conceptual and mathematical tools to help guide us to full comprehension, and better decisions.

Joy Buolamwini SM '17 · Penguin Random House · 2023

Director's Circle To many it may seem like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Buolamwini, this moment has been a long time in the making. "Unmasking AI" is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls "the coded gaze" - evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products. She shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity "excoded" and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools.

Carlo Ratti · Yale University Press · 2023

This book explores how the growth of digital mapping, spurred by sensing technologies, is affecting cities and daily lives. It examines how new cartographic possibilities aid urban planners, technicians, politicians, and administrators; how digitally mapped cities could reveal ways to make cities smarter and more efficient; how monitoring urbanites has political and social repercussions; and how the proliferation of open-source maps and collaborative platforms can aid activists and vulnerable populations.

Olivier de Weck and Jeffrey Hoffman · Springer · 2023

This book covers the latest understandings of space resources, including mission concepts, exploration approaches, mining and extraction technologies, commercial potential, and regulation. In their chapter, "Lifetime Embodied Energy: A Theory of Value for the New Space Economy," adapted from Lordos' MIT master's thesis, the authors advance a method based on embodied energy to objectively value space systems that utilize space resources.

Daron Acemoglu · PublicAffairs · 2023

In their new book, Acemoglu and Johnson detail the ways that artificial intelligence and other digital technologies have mesmerized the business elite while threatening to undermine jobs and democracy. The authors decry the economic and social damage caused by excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance, and offer a counter vision whereby the tremendous computing advances of the past half century can become empowering and democratizing tools.

Danielle Wood · Oxford University Press · 2023

"Reclaiming Space" is an innovative study of space travel's history, legitimacy, and future. Wood's chapter, "Opportunities to Pursue Liberatory, Anticolonial, and Antiracist Designs for Human Societies Beyond Earth," is one of 27 original essays seeking to incubate, illuminate, and illustrate a more diverse and inclusive conversation about space exploration.

Daniel Frey · Edward Elgar Publishing · 2022

This book highlights innovations and appropriate technologies helpful for the development of people around the world and across economic backgrounds. An illuminating and informative look into more sustainable global technological development, the handbook presents new disruptive forms of innovation-producing technologies and origin stories about pathbreaking practitioners and organizations. And it provides both the traditional socioeconomic and political frameworks for appropriate technologies and alternative solutions for sustainable development.

Paul Roquet · Columbia University Press · 2022

Roquet's analysis of virtual reality uncovers how it is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home, and nation. He examines how VR in Japan diverged from American militarism and techno-utopian visions, becoming a tool for renegotiating personal space. When digital platforms continue encroaching on everyday life, "The Immersive Enclosure" takes a critical look at attempts to jettison existing social realities and offers a bold new approach for understanding the media environments to come.

Tobias Macey · O'Reilly · 2021

In this book, contributors from notable companies including Twitter, Google, Stitch Fix, Microsoft, Capital One, and LinkedIn provide 97 concise and useful tips for cleaning, prepping, wrangling, storing, processing, and ingesting data. Current and aspiring engineers will learn powerful real-world best practices for managing data big and small.

Ritu Raman · MIT Press · 2021

You are a biological machine whose movement is powered by skeletal muscle, just as a car is a machine whose movement is powered by an engine. If you can be built from the bottom up with biological materials, other machines can be as well. This is the idea driving biofabrication: building with living cells. Part of the MIT Press' Essential Knowledge series, "Biofabrication" offers an introduction to how materials and machines powered by cells can tackle challenges in medicine, agriculture, and global security.

Alex "Sandy" Pentland · MIT Press · 2021

Data are now central to the economy, government, and health systems - so why are data and the artificial intelligence systems that interpret data in the hands of so few? "Building the New Economy" argues that we need to think about data as a new type of capital, and that data trusts and distributed ledgers can empower people with user-centric data ownership, transparent and accountable algorithms, machine-learning fairness principles and methodologies, and secure digital transaction systems.

Ariel Ekblaw · MIT Press · 2021

In the Anthropocosmos - an era of space exploration in which we will expand humanity's horizons beyond our planet's bounds - humans have twin responsibilities, to Earth and to space, and we should neither abandon our own planet to environmental degradation nor litter the galaxy with space junk. This generously illustrated volume presents space technology for this new age: prototypes, artifacts, experiments, and habitats for an era of participatory space exploration.

Daniel Huttenlocher · Little, Brown & Co. · 2021

Artificial intelligence is coming online in searching, streaming, medicine, education, and many other fields and, in so doing, transforming how humans are experiencing reality. In "The Age of AI," three leading thinkers have come together to consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the societies in which we live.

Daniel Jackson · Princeton University Press · 2021

Software matters more than ever before. Why, then, is so much software flawed? Why isn't there a straightforward way to create software that is easy to use, robust, and secure? This book gives new answers to old questions, offering a fresh perspective on software design, with examples from over 100 familiar apps. It's accessible to anyone - strategist, marketer, manager, designer, or programmer - who wants software that is more empowering, dependable, and delightful to use.

Daron Acemoglu · Boston Review, distributed by MIT Press · 2021

This book brings together experts - economists, legal scholars, policymakers, and developers - to explore the intersection of technology and economic justice, and to consider what steps tech companies can do take to ensure the advancement of AI does not further diminish economic prospects of the most vulnerable.

Kate Darling · Macmillan · 2021

Are robots going to replace us and take our jobs? While those discussions are going on in many industries, Darling offers a different take. She argues that by treating robots the same way we treat animals - with humanity - and incorporating them in our work, military, and family life, our future with robot technology looks bright.

Sarah Williams · MIT Press · 2020

Data inevitably represent the ideologies of those who control their use; data analytics and algorithms too often exclude women, the poor, and ethnic groups. In this book, Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways.

Catherine D'Ignazio · MIT Press · 2020

Data are neither neutral nor objective. While they have been used for good (exposing injustice, improving health outcomes), they have also been used to discriminate (granting home loans, determining jail sentences). The authors present a new way of thinking about data informed by intersectional feminism, and offer strategies for how data scientists can work toward a more just society.

Michael Schrage · MIT Press · 2020

Schrage explains the origins, technologies, business applications, and increasing societal impact of recommendation engines, the systems that allow companies worldwide to know what products, services, and experiences "you might also like." Part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.

Sinan Aral · Currency · 2020

Drawing on decades of research and business experience, Aral provides an insider's tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical insights into the social media trends of the 2020 election and beyond.

Julie Shah · Basic Books · 2020

A vision for how robots can survive in the real world and how they will change our relationship to technology. From teaching them manners, to robot-proofing public spaces, to planning for their mistakes, this book answers every question you didn't know you needed to ask about the robots on the way.''