Business, Finance & Law Biographies & Histories Books

Biographies & Histories

The Amazing Journey of Reason: from DNA to Artificial Intelligence (SpringerBriefs in Computer Science)

Organisms, or organized, living, systems. What's their origin? Why and how did they evolve? The Amazing Journey of Reason analyses the evolution of  complex structures in the universe -from the subatomic particles after the Big Bang onwards- in order to understand the emergence of today's interconnected society.  Artificial Intelligence, it concludes, is just the final step of a journey which started with DNA, itself the first Information and Communication Technology devised by nature on planet earth. What we are living today is the formation of the distributed nervous system of a metaorganism, in which human beings are the cells. A reassuring environment for us, but one where each individual will count increasingly less. A hugely complex, world-wide organism which makes Homo, while more communicans, also increasingly less sapiens.

Biographies & Histories

Global History with Chinese Characteristics: Autocratic States along the Silk Road in the Decline of the Spanish and Qing Empires 1680-1796 (Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History)

This open access book considers a pivotal era in Chinese history from a global perspective. This book’s insight into Chinese and international history offers timely and challenging perspectives on initiatives like “Chinese characteristics”, “The New Silk Road” and “One Belt, One Road” in broad historical context. Global History with Chinese Characteristics analyses the feeble state capacity of Qing China questioning the so-called “High Qing” (shèng qīng 盛清) era’s economic prosperity as the political system was set into a “power paradox” or “supremacy dilemma”. This is a new thesis introduced by the author demonstrating that interventionist states entail weak governance. Macao and Marseille as a new case study aims to compare Mediterranean and South China markets to provide new insights into both modern eras’ rising trade networks, non-official institutions and interventionist impulses of autocratic states such as China’s Qing and Spain’s Bourbon empires.