The Handover
How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Profile Books Ltd
Published:5th Sep '24
Should be back in stock very soon
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£20.00(9781788163675)
Does it matter if we are ceding power to AI? Especially if we have been there before.
'The Singularity' is what Silicon Valley calls the idea that, eventually, we will be overrun by machines that are able to take decisions and act for themselves. What no one says is that it happened before. A few hundred years ago, humans started building the robots that now rule our world. They are called states and corporations: immensely powerful artificial entities, with capacities that go far beyond what any individual can do, and which, unlike us, need never die. They have made us richer, safer and healthier than would have seemed possible even a few generations ago - and they may yet destroy us. The Handover distils over three hundred years of thinking about how to live with artificial agency.
Persuasive ... the ever-erudite host of the terrific Talking Politics podcast ... ranges far and wide, from hunter gatherers to Elon Musk, from the wisdom of juries to the (terrifying) implications of autonomous weapons systems -- Tim Adams * Guardian *
Runciman's erudition is formidable ... a wide-ranging history of the modern state and an exploration of how AI technology may change the world [from] one of our leading public intellectuals -- Jason Cowley * Sunday Times *
Compelling ... David Runciman makes salutary arguments [about] the most urgent problem we face -- Blake Smith * Literary Review *
Quirky, meditational, disturbing ... original thinking -- Sherelle Jacobs * Telegraph *
Praise for David Runciman: 'A clear and forceful writer * Financial Times *
Runciman's flair for turning a pithy and pungent phrase is one of the things to admire about his writing ... That and [his] cogency, subtlety and style * Observer *
Refreshingly free of received and rehearsed wisdoms, Runciman doesn't tiptoe around sacred cows and invites us to take part in that most adult way of thinking: to examine contradictory ideas in tandem and ponder what the dissonance amounts to * Australian *
ISBN: 9781788163682
Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 24mm
Weight: 260g
336 pages
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