The CONQUEST of INTELLIGENCE: Coming Emancipation Humanity

The Conquest of Intelligence argues that artificial intelligence is not primarily a tool that makes clever people cleverer, but a technology that severs the link between intelligent outcomes and intelligent persons. Placing this rupture in the long sequence of emancipations by which human beings were relieved of muscular labor, memory, and calculation, the book traces what happens to a civilization whose entire institutional apparatus, from schooling and the professions to bureaucracy and hierarchy, was engineered to ration a resource that is ceasing to be scarce. It examines the economics of cognition sold as a metered utility, the widening gap between what we can do and what we can explain, the political question of who owns the systems on which the emancipation depends, and the small set of human acts that cannot be delegated without dissolving the person who delegates them. It ends where abundance forces us to begin: with the question of what is worth doing, which our institutions were designed to avoid. Written for readers in management, education, policy, technology, and the professions, as well as for anyone trying to think clearly about the decade they are living through, the book offers not a forecast but a vocabulary, and a set of practical tests for telling emancipation from dependence while the difference can still be acted upon.