Not a book but the novella “the machine stops” by E. M. Forster. I read this in the late nineties and it still pops up in my head frequently — especially in our age of the internet.
I found E M Forster’s novella “The Machine Stops” in the same league as the above: it is about the human condition, and technology is just a setup to talk about that.
An aside: the title is a great example of context sensitivity. On first glance, I interpreted the title as some serious bug in garbage collection algorithms/Systems (as in, they open some library that was an abandonware).
Remains to be seen how this impacts the US universities. Part of the incentive for the international students to choose the US over other countries for higher studies is because there are some seriously great professional opportunities after the studies if you can immigrate. For example, our industry is centered in the US, the US is truly a super power in research, the US mindset (startups, relatively merit-driven systems) etc compared to other developed western countries.
If there is no clear path to immigration, and if high quality education becomes relatively easily available (see: western universities setting up centers in the east), that can dry up the desire to choose a US based university I think.
This is fantastic. The exercises are non-trivial enough to be useful. One minor suggestion: if you can have the favicon set to your gopher, it can be great. Mine is a potentially narrow use case, but after logging in, I pinned this to a tab in safari, and the G throws me off a little.
In my experience, the notion of "change the world" has no age bar sadly. Also, "change the world" is often thrown about in arguably shallow contexts. But then look at how Facebook got started, and it is fair to say that it has changed the world. My point? I agree with you, but I am not sure if that's just cynicism because arguably "shallow" companies have changed the world for real.