On what basis can we challenge Artificial Intelligence (AI) - its infusion, investment, and implementation across the globe? This book answers this question by drawing on a range of critical approaches from the social sciences and humanities, including posthumanism, ethics and human values, surveillance studies, Black feminism, and other strategies for social and political resistance. The authors analyse timely topics, including bias and language processing, responsibility and machine learning, COVID-19 and AI in health technologies, bio-AI and nanotechnology, digital ethics, AI and the gig economy, representations of AI in literature and culture, and many more. This book is for those who are currently working in the field of AI critique and disruption as well as in AI development and programming. It is also for those who want to learn more about how to doubt, question, challenge, reject, reform and otherwise reprise AI as it been practiced and promoted.

We are defined by the tools and technologies we use. They shape our identity. They feed and shelter us. But they also threaten our very existence. What separates us from all other animals is primarily the plethora of tools and technologies we created for our well-being and for our very survival. They are the source of our admirable success as a species; and they are the source of our most terrifying problems. Sometimes, they are the only solution to the very problems they created. That puts us in a race against ourselves, a race among technologies, a race between the good they do and the misery they cause, often the same technology doing both at different times and under different conditions. This has been the human condition from the beginning of our species, and it will likely be the human condition at the end. Although we appear helpless, being dragged along a road carved by our own creations, there are some things we can do to minimize the risk to ourselves, without giving up all the advantages of a myriad of technologies we created. We may not be able to eliminate the basic paradox of human existence, but we may somewhat reduce the suffering. This book is about the beauty and the misery of our technological human society, offering some modest remedies for the misery, while praising the beauty.

This book explains that while posthumanism rose in opposition to the biblical contention that ‘Man was created in the image of God’, transhumanism ascertained the complementary view that ‘Man has been assigned dominion over all creatures’, further exploring a path that had been opened up by the Enlightenment’s notion of human perfectibility. It explains also how posthumanism and transhumanism relate to deconstruction theory, and on a broader level to capitalism, libertarianism, and the fight against human extinction which may involve trespassing the boundary of the skin, achieving individual immortality or dematerialization of the Self and colonisation of distant planets and stars. Two authors debate about truth and reason in today’s world, the notion of personhood and the legacy of the Nietzschean Superhuman in the current varieties of anti-humanism.

Originally published in 1997 by City Lights Books.

This book presents a novel view of intelligence, and of the relationship between machine intelligence and human beings. From this perspective, machine intelligence is viewed as an artificial aid to human intelligence, and the two are seen to form a 'seamless web'.Having established this new perspective on intelligence, the book highlights some basic deficiencies of unaided human intelligence through case studies to show how human beings are capable of destroying existing intelligence networks as well as how they fail to recognize that such intelligence networks are needed. In many such cases, along with the other aspects of the problem, there is also a failure of discourse: bad arguments and the like dominate the discourse, and crucial aspects of the situation are overlooked or glossed over.The book then lays out a proposal on how to deal with this kind of problem -- one that relies heavily on techniques developed in AI. This is done in the form of a new kind of grand challenge for AI, involving software monitors that are applied to discourse on major issues. All this is in keeping with the perspective on intelligence and AI presented in this book.

Three decades into the ‘digital age’, the promises of emancipation of the digital ‘revolution’ in education are still unfulfilled. Furthermore, digitalization seems to generate new and unexpected challenges – for example, the unwarranted influence of digital monopolies, the radicalization of political communication, and the facilitation of mass surveillance, to name a few. This volume is a study of the downsides of digitalization and the re-organization of the social world that seems to be associated with it. In a critical perspective, technological development is not a natural but a social process: not autonomous from but very much dependent upon the interplay of forces and institutions in society. While influential forces seek to establish the idea that the practices of formal education should conform to technological change, here we support the view that education can challenge the capitalist appropriation of digital technology and, therefore, the nature and direction of change associated with it. This volume offers its readers intellectual prerequisites for critical engagement. It addresses themes such as Facebook’s response to its democratic discontents, the pedagogical implications of algorithmic knowledge and quantified self, as well as the impact of digitalization on academic profession. Finally, the book offers some elements to develop a vision of the role of education: what should be done in education to address the concerns that new communication technologies seem to pose more risks than opportunities for freedom and democracy.

A fascinating look at Artificial Intelligence, from its humble Cold War beginnings to the dazzling future that is just around the corner. When most of us think about Artificial Intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that Artificial Intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways, the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate. In Thinking Machines, technology journalist Luke Dormehl takes you through the history of AI and how it makes up the foundations of the machines that think for us today. Furthermore, Dormehl speculates on the incredible--and possibly terrifying--future that's much closer than many would imagine. This remarkable book will invite you to marvel at what now seems commonplace and to dream about a future in which the scope of humanity may need to broaden itself to include intelligent machines.