Did you get any say in whether or not A.I. will radically transform your world? (Or autonomous weapons, or bioengineering, or many other radical new technologies?)
At this very moment, a tiny number of Silicon Valley leaders are making risky decisions that will have a huge impact on the rest of the eight billion people on this planet. They don't mean to cause harm, but their new creations often bring dire unintended consequences: destructive psychological, social, economic, and political results. We call these "side effects," but they're often more powerful than the intended ones.
Too many books about technology end with a vague plea that we really ought to do something about these problems. The Frankenstein Fix gets to the deep roots of what tends to cause them—and it provides a broad array of actual solutions.
The book offers insights from interviews with many experts, including tech critic Douglas Rushkoff, science historian Stephen Johnson, and psychologist Katy Cook. It also provides a cornucopia of unique features, from an intriguing account of how people have resisted dangerous inventions throughout history, to surprising takes on space colonization and why the Amish reject technologies, to a toolbox of powerful techniques that could enable us to predict—and avoid—future troubles.
