Sparks

About This Book

Three million years in a single volume: the sweeping, accessible story of how a creature that learned to chip a stone went on to tame fire, farm the land, forge metal, print the word, harness steam and electricity, and build machines that fly, compute, and now learn.

Along the way it puts a human face on the story — Faraday, Lovelace, Turing, von Neumann, Gates, Jobs, Berners-Lee, Torvalds — and explains the hardest modern ideas, from the transistor to artificial intelligence to quantum computing, in plain language anyone can follow.

Clear-eyed about both the genius and the cost of every invention, this is the history of how we built the modern world — and the question of whether we can govern what we have made.