The Atomic Human: What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI

A renowned computer scientist seeks to understand whether artificial intelligence and machine learning will dominate us, separating myth from fact about one of the most important issues of our time.
 
Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displace us from our position at the center of the world. If artificial intelligence is the automation of decision-making, what, then, is unique and irreplaceable about human intelligence, what does it mean for the human left behind? Is there an essence, the core of the human, that can’t be replaced by the machine?
 
Through storytelling from his personal, family, and professional life, Neil Lawrence brings a timely, fresh perspective to this new, emerging era, recounting his personal journey to understand the riddle of intelligence. By understanding the core of what makes us human – the “atomic human” – Lawrence provides the grounding we need to understand how AI can either be a tool for us or that we become a tool of AI, enabling us to choose the future we want.

Lawrence persuasively shows that we can only control AI and decide what is right for society by understanding our intelligence and contrasting it against the new intelligence we are creating – an intelligence he describes as “helpless” without humans, but also able to manipulate us if we do not have a frame of reference for AI’s way of thinking in relation to our own. By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, The Atomic Human reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded. Not just by the experts, but ordinary people.