Our technologies, especially emerging ones, hold up a mirror to ourselves. Plato famously critiqued writing because he believed it would impoverish humans’ capacity for memory. And while our innovations have accelerated over the millennia, our questions about who we are have remained mostly the same. Joseph Vukov’s Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence demonstrates how contemporary discourse about AI reflects perennial accounts of what it means to be human. For Vukov, the greatest threat AI poses is not an outright dystopia (as some predict), but rather that it can mislead us to define the human according to three inadequate paradigms: functionalism, gnosticism, or materialism. For Vukov, AI’s emergence is an opportunity to assert anew how humans exceed each of those definitions. Only with a non-dualistic account of humans as both spiritual and corporeal will we be able to build AI in a way that encourages human flourishing.
Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence
Joseph Vukov
New City Press
$19.95 | 154 pp.
Two biographers sat by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s side as he died. Emerson never fit the profile of an untimely prophet: he was recognized as a legend even in his own lifetime, and he has only continued to draw out the biographer’s pen ever since. James Marcus has added yet another entry to the list this year. Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson proposes a multifaceted Emerson: Unitarian minister turned Transcendentalist; public lecturer and apostle of solitude; cloistered metaphysician and family man; German Idealist who declared America’s intellectual independence from Europe. Marcus contends that, despite his often-flattened popular image, Emerson cannot be “reduced to the gospel of individualism”: from his abolitionist speeches to his metaphysics of interconnectedness (the “over-soul”), Emerson preached communalism in both practical and philosophical terms.
Glad to the Brink of Fear
A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson
James Marcus
Princeton University Press
$29.95 | 344 pp.
Microfinance was supposed to solve global poverty. Presidents, celebrities, and global-development advocates insisted that these very small loans made to entrepreneurs could give people who didn’t have access to formal credit the resources they needed to grow a business, thereby strengthening their families and communities. Why didn’t it live up to the hype? In We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky, Mara Kardas-Nelson investigates the effect that microfinance has on borrowers in Sierra Leone. Instead of being lifted out of poverty, many borrowers, mostly women, have been trapped in debt by high-interest microfinance loans—sometimes losing their homes or ending up in prison. “If I’ve learned anything,” Kardas-Nelson writes, “it’s that distilling deeply complicated problems into bite-sized solutions is a great way to make a big mess, often without meaning to.”
We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky
The Seductive Promise of Microfinance
Mara Kardas-Nelson
Metropolitan Books
$31.99 | 400 pp.
