I, Human
AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Sapiens and Homo Deus and viewers of The Social Dilemma, psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic tackles one of the biggest questions facing our species: Will we use artificial intelligence to improve the way we work and live, or will we allow it to alienate us?
It's no secret that AI is changing the way we live, work, love, and entertain ourselves. Dating apps are using AI to pick our potential partners. Retailers are using AI to predict our behavior and desires. Rogue actors are using AI to persuade us with bots and misinformation. Companies are using AI to hire us—or not.
In I, Human psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic takes readers on an enthralling and eye-opening journey across the AI landscape. Though AI has the potential to change our lives for the better, he argues, AI is also worsening our bad tendencies, making us more distracted, selfish, biased, narcissistic, entitled, predictable, and impatient.
It doesn't have to be this way. Filled with fascinating insights about human behavior and our complicated relationship with technology, I, Human will help us stand out and thrive when many of our decisions are being made for us. To do so, we'll need to double down on our curiosity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence while relying on the lost virtues of empathy, humility, and self-control.
This is just the beginning. As AI becomes smarter and more humanlike, our societies, our economies, and our humanity will undergo the most dramatic changes we've seen since the Industrial Revolution. Some of these changes will enhance our species. Others may dehumanize us and make us more machinelike in our interactions with people. It's up to us to adapt and determine how we want to live and work.
The choice is ours.
What will we decide?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The threat posed by artificial intelligence isn't mass unemployment or murderous droids but subtler mental derangements, according to this astute study. Columbia psychology professor Chamorro-Premuzic (Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?) suggests that AI's use in search engines, social media, and gadgetry is part of an effort by tech companies to harvest attention and money by identifying and manipulating human patterns of behavior. AI, he contends, prods users to scan and click in predictable, routinized ways; saps attention and patience with information overload; reinforces biases (hiring algorithms, for instance, can recreate bosses' racial prejudices); and feeds narcissism by courting obsession over the likes garnered by selfies. Chamorro-Premuzic sees little psychic upside to AI, though he's hopeful that using better data could enable it to challenge rather than amplify biases. The author sometimes meanders away from AI, as when he offers a stimulating celebration of humility as a prerequisite for competence, and the elegant prose ensures his perceptive analysis goes down smoothly ("While we optimize our lives for AI... our very identity and existence have been collapsed to the categories machines use to understand and predict our behavior, our whole character reduced to the things AI predicts about us"). The result is a shrewd, insightful take on the dangers of AI.
