What TNW is reading (week 14)

Ah, welcome welcome.

I see you enjoyed last week’s edition and are back for more. Well we won’t disappoint. For the uninitiated (go back and start at post one, please) the team at TNW has made a New Year’s Resolution to read a bit more.

So every week, a select number of our team will share with you what’s currently living on their nightstand, or saved in Pocket, or is sitting in that browser tab begging to be read.

This week our team explore how machine intelligence can be a potential threat to our job, simple changes in diet and lifestyle that can prevent premature death, the story of nations banding together in a catastrophic global event, and the side of Isaac Newton that was hidden for centuries. Happy reading.

The Rise of the Robots – Martin Ford

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The idea that advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will take human jobs away, transforming the labor market and the economy forever, has become a hot topic in the past couple of years.

Martin Ford’s ‘Rise of the Robots’ is a defining text for the argument that white collar professional workers’ jobs are threatened by technology. What does the future hold for humanity? This book explores how the next few decades might take shape.

For more on the book, read Andrew Keen’s praise for it.

Martin Bryant, Editor-at-Large

How Not to Die – Michael Greger

I’ve always taken an interest in food and exercise but that interest became more intense after reading Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Body.

To discover that there was rigorous scientific research on ways to improve your health outside the mainstream fascinated me.

More recently I’ve been learning about how the industrial farming industry is having a disastrous impact both on the planet and our health, which lead me to Greger’s ominously named book.

The author is a trained doctor who has spent his entire professional life exploring how nutrition can have a positive impact on our lives but also in the fight against disease.

I’ve been looking into the idea of becoming vegetarian more and more recently and this book is pushing me at a rate of knots in that direction.

If you need any more convincing, Google what happened to Frances Greger when she started eating a plant based diet.

Matt Hussey, Editor-in-Chief

Seveneves – Neal Stephenson

I’ve only just started with Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Seveneves, and I’m captivated by it because I’m an apocalypse/dystopian future nut.

When the moon is shattered into seven pieces by a strange celestial force, scientists realize that they’ll soon have an uncontrollable meteor shower on their hands that will bring an end to life on earth.

The only way for mankind to survive is to evacuate people and move them to an orbiting habitat in space. Of course, it’s hardly a simple matter of jetting people into the sky.

It’s fascinating to follow the possible ways of making this happen; Stephenson tells his story through the struggles of a group of astronauts who will never see their terrestrial home again. I can’t wait to find out how they pull this off.

Abhimanyu Ghoshal, Reporter

The Faith Behind the Famous: Isaac Newton – Charles Hummel

It was only a week ago that I started my journey to learn more about the spiritual side of Sir Isaac Newton, whose pall was borne by three earls, two dukes, and the Lord Chancellor, that even Voltaire, the man who had a strong opinion against Christianity said, “He was buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.”

Once viewed as an icon of cold rationality, his 329 lots of unpublished manuscripts now housed in Jewish National and University Library, revealed that Newton was also an alchemist, a biblical scholar, and a religious devotee who spent more time on theology than on science.

Having written three million words on theology, church history, Jewish ritual and prophetic exegesis (critical explanation of a religious text), these manuscripts showed me how widely-ranging and complex his intellectual was.

One Newton’s quote taken from The General Scholium, convinced me to put him as my role model, “This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the centers of other like systems, these, being form’d by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One (sic).”

Dhika Democrat, Content Marketer TNW Deals

This is a #TNWLife article, a look into the lives of those that work at The Next Web.