Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, sold one of his internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius's life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits. Vance uses Musk's story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age: can the...

"Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870-2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression,...

Makes correlations between success and geography, explaining how such rising centers of innovation as San Francisco and Austin are likely to offer influential opportunities and shape the national and global economies in positive or detrimental ways.

"Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years--for businesses, governments, and the global community--and how we can navigate them. Ross highlights the best opportunities for progress and explains why countries thrive or sputter. He examines the specific fields that will most shape our economic future over the next ten years, including cybercrime...

"Native rural Virginian and now Chief technology officer at Microsoft, Kevin Scott, discusses the future of AI and how it can be realistically used to promote growth even as the job landscape shifts"--

Former editor of The Guardian newspaper discusses the shifts in the news landscape in recent years and what those shifts might mean for the future of democracy.

World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolu­tion, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work.
Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and...

A leading economist challenges dominant theories on global inequality, discussing why wealth persistently remains in the hands of a few and how technological development threatens to create a scarcity of unskilled jobs that will lead to even greater inequality. "In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, economist Thomas Pikkety argued that the contemporary phenomenon of rising inequality across the globe is a function of the inheritance of...

"Digital, social, and mobile connection has exploded. 1.2 billion people-- almost 20% of the population of our planet-- use Facebook. About 250 million use Twitter. For the first time in history we're all in touch with one another--but how connected are we? Yes, it's good to have "friends" who "like" you, or contacts that can help you get a new job. But solving big problems, creating amazing products, changing social policy, discovering a cure that...

Staying true to his trademark journalistic approach, Andrés Oppenheimer takes his readers on yet another journey, this time across the globe, in a thought-provoking search to understand what the future holds for today's jobs in the foreseeable age of automation.
The Robots Are Coming! centers around the issue of jobs and their future in the context of rapid automation and the growth of online products and services. As two of...