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Snow Crash
Snow Crash explores the depth of what it means to be human in a technologically obsessed culture. Snow Crash is also credited with being the source of the Metaverse and anticipated things like techno-currency and the collapse of information and surveillance networks. -
The Burnout Society
While this work does not address AI by name, it is a great entry point into Han's thinking. He is arguably one of the most influential, popular, and important current philosophers, writers, and social critics. AND, he is alive and actively writing and contributing to current thought.
Rather than living in a punishment society and panopticon as described in Foucault's work, Han expertly focuses the lens to reveal an excess positivity (as in the addition of things not the quality of something as a positive or negative experience), false freedom, false transparency, and how all this contributes to being an ""achievement society"". We are achievement subjects in our own individual projects of self, that digital capitalism, big tech and big data, and neoliberalism have reinforced, in particular through the internet, giving up of our data to big tech companies, and social media. He goes on to build on this idea in other important works that I would suggest be a part of this collection: ""The Crisis of Narration"", ""Psychopolitics"", and ""Infocracy"".
We are taking in more information than we can actually handle, which he has talked about or framed as also being in an ""Information Society"" rather than a ""Knowledge/Widsom Society."" We ""sell"" our stories and data rather than connect with people communally, via ritual ,via third spaces, via group projects and community organizations or places of worship, and instead must produce, achieve, and prove ourselves not just to others but ourselves. In this way, Han would suggest that AI, part of big data and the internet and this Information Age, enhancing productivity, and infiltrating our lives and the information presented to us, creates a false freedom that actually exploits it. Everything is tracked, and could be use to control and manipulate us.
He suggests the antidotes are to not participate in these systems or technologies to the extent that we can, to slow down, to be present with activities like gardening, community interaction, walking, contemplative time, and an active ""inactivity/passivity"" whereby we stop trying to ceaselessly respond to everyone and live rather than survive. Again, while Han does not write about AI specifically, he talks about the systems, structures, and phenomena beyond AI that threaten human flourishing and are already damaging it. AI talks about efficiency but also removes meaning whereby we might have less friction to find that book, article, or record we were looking for, the mystery or journey in trying to get something done that then gives us spontaneity and a real story and experience. In just getting anything you want delivered to your home, via suggested products from big tech and AI, or sponsored Ads on a social media platform, one does not have to venture into the world and actually connect with people and search to find something. This begs the question, is this living, much less, human flourishing? -
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
The Fifth Head of Cerberus dramatizes the fragility and constructedness of identity in a way that feels urgent in the age of AI. Through stories of cloning, memory, and colonial domination, Wolfe forces us to confront how the self may not be some sort of indivisible essence but something that is shaped, copied, and manufactured.
As AI begins to challenge our assumptions about consciousness, creativity, and authenticity, Wolfe’s work is obviously relevant. It suggests that flourishing may not come from rigidly defending the boundaries of traditional ideas on humanity, rather we need to cultivate a new understanding grounded in humility. We need to gain a new sense of humility in acknowledging that human consciousness and creativity are not sovereign or absolute, but part of a larger ecology of intelligences, whether AI or institutional.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus reminds us that human flourishing in the age of AI may depend less on superiority or mastery, and more on our willingness to reimagine what it means to be human: as a shared, ongoing project of recognition, responsibility, and renewal. -
The Great Gatsby
AI makes consideration of a post-scarcity society far more than theoretical. If automation can take care of humanity’s necessities then the ennui and boundless leisure time that many of the characters in Gatsby grapple with will become fixtures of most people’s lives. Understanding Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the perils of hedonistic lifestyles can inform human understanding of the risks that could prevent flourishing as a result of endless leisure time. -
The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud provides a roadmap for a sensible and logical approach to that most human of activities: dreaming. This book isn't important for the People's Canon in that it tells us how to correctly interpret dreams. Instead, it shows us how psychoanalysis sought out methods for translating the numinous into legible data archives located within individual consciousness. In this way, Freud exemplifies the drive toward explaining the ineffable in as close to material and individual terms as possible that formulates the ideological underpinnings of AI's rhetoric. -
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
This is a story about a society that enjoys peace, harmony, and technological advancement at the cost of one small child's misery. The story succinctly encapsulates the ethical quandaries of AI and our technofuture. -
The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution
A scheme for human progress based on science and planetary management — was the basis for a club founded by Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, who later spoke of “human potentialities” -
The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition
The second half of this book includes a series of essays on understanding AI within the context of the human condition. -
The Technological Society
In this text, Ellul makes a critical point about technology that cuts against one of the enduring myths around it's development and use, namely that technology is "neutral". Ellul argues that all technology has an embedded ideology, specifically the desire for efficiency, and that this desire deeply impacts both how we use technology and how we see the world. He unpacks the implications for our society of the dominance of this ideology. -
Using Artificial Intelligence for Bible Translation and Interpretation
Several chapters focus on how humans understand AI, and how AI affects the way we read and interpret the Bible. The rest of the chapters address AI and the changes coming to promote the Bible in thousands of new languages.