Posts about books

Announcing ‘Intelligence: AI and Humanity’

March 18, 2026 | No Comments
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Bloomsbury Academic is announcing the launch of a new book series: Intelligence: AI and Humanity. I’m humbled, delighted, and honestly amazed to say that I will be the series editor.

Intelligence is a venue for writers from a wide array of fields and areas of expertise to reflect on artificial intelligence as a mirror to society and culture. Books in this series will not be technical — not about artificial intelligence as technology. Instead, they will examine AI’s meaning to our lives and collective humanity. AI’s entrance into public discourse as a literate machine challenges us to reexamine our views of intelligence, creativity, language, learning, authority, humanity. The intended audience is broad, both academic and trade: anyone with an interest in AI and its profound implications for us all.

The first three books and authors we’re announcing represent the range of perspectives we wish to offer. 

  • Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, CEO and cofounder of Humane Intelligence and a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics, asks the first and fundamental question raised by AI: What is intelligence?
  • Dr. Charlton McIlwain, Vice Provost and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and author of Black Software, will examine whether and how Black Americans could use the opportunity of AI to overcome years of white technological oppression. 
  • Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum, the Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English at the University of Virginia, warns of the coming Textpocalypse, altering our relationship with text forever. 

I hope to see authors proposing books to reflect on fundamental questions raised by AI and to explore how AI in turn reflects on society, for AI replays to us the collective notions, misapprehensions, clichés, and biases of those who have had the power and privilege to publish in the past. I want to see books that challenge presumptions about AI and power, creativity, education, democracy, sustainability, religion, history, artistry, collaboration, and countless topics I’ve yet to imagine. 

Featuring scholars, public intellectuals, journalists, and professionals, books in Intelligence will be written by authors from many fields — history, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, communication, community studies, linguistics, literature, religion, classics, economics, law, government, and the arts — and from diverse and global perspectives.

Almost seven decades ago, Sputnik overthrew the humanities in favor of science, technology, and mathematics in American education, policy, and culture. But now that the machine can speak our languages, the CEOs of some AI companies say schools should stop training computer scientists in favor of developing domain expertise. Could this, then, be the revenge of the liberal arts major?

The humanities and social sciences have been largely left out of deliberation about technology and its impact on society. Intelligence will provide them their place at the table, to bring their perspective, expertise, and inquiry to critical discussion of this technology and the opportunities, perils, and questions it presents.

Print required capital to control. Electronics required expertise to operate. AI is different in that its tools are designed for anyone to use. All one needs is human language and a phone or a keyboard or geeky eyeglasses to seek, organize, and query information or to command a computer to create text, image, sound, or code. 

That potential for broad and fast adoption of these tools is why Bloomsbury Academic and I believe this series is needed, providing space for writers to stand apart, to observe, to ask key questions, and most of all to challenge readers to understand and undertake their roles in the future of these technologies and society. 

The series it the brainchild of Haaris Naqvi, Director of Scholarly and Student Publishing for Bloomsbury US and Global Editorial Director of Bloomsbury Academic. Haaris has been the wise, supportive, and patient editor and publisher of three of my own books. One day, Haaris called and asked whether I thought a book series on AI was a good idea — and whether I would like to edit it. Well, of course. We compared our hopes and plans for the series and found ourselves in quick kismet. 

So now here we are. We plan to publish three to five books a year, each an independent work through which we hope readers will be led to more books in the series. Prospective authors may submit proposals— emailing intelligencebloomsbury@gmail.com — to be reviewed by us, outside reviewers, and the Bloomsbury board. The decisions will not be mine alone. I will be eager to hear suggestions for both subjects and authors. 

We also plan to hold a series of events featuring writers and ideas covered in the series. Watch this space and listen to the AI podcasts I cohost —  Intelligent Machines and AI Inside — for announcements and updates.

Telling the story that defies telling

November 8, 2022 | 1 Comment
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Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World is perhaps the single most effective chronicle of the Holocaust I have read.

Freedland does not attempt to convey the full scope of the Holocaust or of Auschwitz; that is an impossibility in any literature. He tells the story of one man, Rudolf Vrba — born Walter Rosenberg — who as a teenager memorized every detail of death in the camp and became one of only four Jewish prisoners ever to escape, so he could tell the world and hope to save lives.

There are, of course, countless excellent studies and stories of Auschwitz. What impresses me so about Freedland’s is his discipline in staying close to his subject, seeing through his eyes alone — and his subject’s discipline, in turn, gathering facts.

Freedland is a journalist, an incisive thinker who, in my experience, commanded any conversation I witnessed at The Guardian, where he was head of opinion and is still a columnist. The Escape Artist is a work of journalism that I cannot help but see as a work about journalism, as it brought me to reflect on my field.

Freedland begins with the escape, then tells of Vrba’s capture, subjugation, and survival and of all he witnessed and recorded in his memory. When he manages to leave and find refuge, he and another escapee pour every fact, every number — even the sequences of numbers registered to and tattooed on prisoners and their relationship to their place of origin and date of arrival — to a committee of Jewish leaders in their home country. Their report is typed up in spare, sparse language recounting only the facts. At first, as Freedland relates, Vrba is upset that it does not include a warning to the Jews of Hungary, for based on what these two men saw and heard, they are next on the trains. The leaders refused to include anything that is not based on verifiable fact — no speculation, no prediction — to assure the credibility of the report. There is a lesson for journalism.

The report, in various versions and translations, makes its way to London and Washington and also into the hands of journalists, who finally begin to get word out about the horrors, though far too little is done. What strikes me here is the value of witness. Vrba committed a profound act of journalism; without his observation and memory and courage, there would have been no reports.

I won’t go on, only will recommend that you read or listen to the book yourself. I am going to try — and likely fail — to post more about books I am reading to share recommendations with you (and hope to read more recommendations from from).

Start the presses

October 15, 2012 | 3 Comments
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A set of very happy announcements from the CUNY Journalism School and the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism:

* First, we are opening the new Cuny Journalism Press. Yes, I said press. On paper. And screen. Working with the innovative OR Books and John Oakes, we are creating a press that will produce print books and e-books about journalism and by journalists with new business models (starting with a higher share of revenue to authors). Just as we are working here at CUNY on new business models for newspapers and magazines and other denizens of the printed page, so do we want to see new models come to book publishing. So my dean, Steve Shepard, my colleague Tim Harper — who is heading up the press — and others here thought it would be a great idea to start this enterprise. We’ll be announcing some other related activities with Oakes soon.

* Second, I’m thrilled to announce that the first book to be published is by none other than @acarvin, aka Andy Carvin, the man who tweeted the Arab Spring and showed us all a new way to think of journalism and how it must add value to the flow of information the net now enables. Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring and a Journalism Revolution, will be released later this year (and available for pre-order soon). I recommend the book to you all. I’ve had the privilege to read it — and write its foreword. A snippet:

Andy is a prototype for a new kind of journalist. He also turns out to be a masterful storyteller. He has taken all he witnessed from afar in the Arab Spring and crafted it into a dramatic, compelling, informative page-turner. He has combed his archive of more than 100,000 tweets and sifted through the rapid-fire, staccato progression of the voices to find a narrative sense and create a cohesive saga….

Yes, we still need reporters on the ground to ask and answer the questions. We need them to bring us perspective and context. Andy does not replace them. He and his nodes and networks of witnesses, participants and experts add to the news in ways not possible before. Journalism is not shrinking. Through Andy’s example, as well as through experiments in data journalism, crowdsourcing, hyperlocal sites and innovations yet to come, journalism is growing. Andy Carvin is proof of that.

* Tim Harper announced another three titles: Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers, by former New York Times chief counsel James Goodale; Investigative Journalism in America: A History, by Steve Weinberg, a member of the University of Missouri Journalism School faculty and co-founder of IRE, the leading association of investigative reporters and editors; and The Pleasures of Being Out of Step: Nat Hentoff’s Life in Journalism, Jazz and the First Amendment, by CUNY Journalism Professor David L. Lewis, a former Daily News reporter and “60 Minutes” producer and associate producer who is also directing a feature-length documentary on Hentoff.

If I manage to get off my duff and get moving on a project I’ve been working on, I might add to that bookshelf myself.

Just as CUNY saw an opportunity for a new journalism school when others thought journalism was dying, so did we see an opportunity to start a new press about journalism even though others declared books dying. At Tow-Knight, I believe we must not only study and teach new models but we must also help incubate them. The CUNY Journalism Press is one such effort.

Advice to media & Muslims: Don’t feed the trolls

September 13, 2012 | 24 Comments
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The jerk who made that video, the one that supposedly incited rioting and murder in Egypt and Libya, is the very definition of a troll: He made it to elicit the reaction he was sure he’d cause. That is what trolls do.

Those who reacted are trolls, too, but of course worse: murderers. They exploited just any excuse — an obviously cheesy, fake movie seen by no one — to stir up their band of fanatics into visible outrage and violence.

The media who cover these trolls — the trolls who make the bait and the trolls who look for bait — are dupes themselves, just continuing a cycle that will only rev faster and faster until someone says: Stop. Stop feeding the trolls.

We’ve learned that online, haven’t we all? Oh, I sometimes have to relearn the lesson when one of my trolls dangles some shiny object in front of me and I snap. I just pulled the food bowl away from one troll: no reaction for you. I was just delighted to see another troll get his comeuppance and said so. But as a rule, a good rule, one should never, never feed the trolls. They only spit it up on you. Starving them of the attention they crave and the upset they hunger for and feed on is the only answer.

But still, there’s no controlling the trolls. Some still think the trolls can be stopped. An Australian newspaper just started a #stopthetrolls campaign to bring the ride miscreants to justice and silence. Good luck with that. In a sense, the rioters and murderers in Libya and Egypt and now elsewhere are demanding that someone stop the trolls they are choosing to get heated up about.

But, of course, there is no stopping them. Neither do I want to stop them. I believe in protecting free speech, which must include protecting even bad, even noxious speech.

Zeynep Tufecki, a brilliant observer of matters media, digital, and social, cautioned on Twitter that we must understand a key difference in attitudes toward speech here and elsewhere in the world: “Forget Middle East, in most of Europe you could not convince most people that *all* speech should be protected. That is uniquely American,” she tweeted yesterday. “In most places, including Europe, ‘hate-speech’ –however defined — is regulated, prosecuted. Hence, folks assume not prosecuted=promoted…. US free speech absolutism already hard to comprehend for many. Add citizen media to mix, it gets messy. Then, killers exploit this vagueness.” Excellent points and important perspective for the current situation.

But the internet is built to American specifications of speech: anyone can speak and it is difficult unto impossible to stop them as bits and the messages they carry are designed to go around blocks and detours. The internet *is* the First Amendment. We can argue about whether that is the right architecture — as an American free-speech absolutist, I think it is — but that wouldn’t change the fact that we are going to hear more and more speech, including brilliance and including bile. There’s no stopping it. Indeed, I want to protect it.

So we’d best understand how to adapt society to that new reality. We’ve done it before. This from Public Parts about the introduction of the printing press:

“This cultural outlook of openness in printing’s early days could just as easily have gone the other way. The explosion of the printed word — and the lack of control over it — disturbed the elite, including Catholic theologian Desiderius Erasmus. ‘To what corner of the world do they not fly, these swarms of new books?’ he complained. ‘[T]he very multitude of them is hurtful to scholarship, because it creates a glut and even in good things satiety is most harmful.’ He feared, according to [Elizabeth] Eisenstein, that the minds of men ‘flighty and curious of anything new’ would be distracted from ‘the study of old authors.’ After the English Civil War, Richard Atkyns, an early writer on printing, longed for the days of royal control over presses. Printers, he lamented, had ‘filled the Kingdom with so many Books, and the Brains of the People with so many contrary Opinions, that these Paper-pellets become as dangerous as Bullets.’ In the early modern period a few ‘humanists called for a system of censorship, never implemented, to guarantee that only high-quality editions be printed,’ Ann Blair writes in Agent of Change. Often today I hear publishers, editors, and academics long for a way to ensure standards of quality on the internet, as if it were a medium like theirs rather than a public space for open conversation.”

There is a desire to *control* conversation, to *civilize* it, to *cleanse* it. God help us, I don’t want anyone cleaning my mouth out. I don’t want anyone telling me what I cannot say. I don’t want a society that silences anything that could offend anyone.

I understand why Google decided to take down That Video from YouTube in Libya and Egypt, given how it is being used, while also arguing that it meets YouTube’s standards and will stay up elsewhere. But YouTube thus gives itself a dangerous precedent as some will expect it to cleanse other bad speech from its platform. YouTube is in a better position in Afghanistan, where the government blocked all of YouTube but then it’s the government that is acting as the censor and it’s the government that must be answerable to its people.

But in any case, blocking this video is no more the answer than rioting and murdering over it. All this will only egg on the trolls to make more bad speech and in turn egg on trolls on the other side to exploit it.

The only answer is to learn how to deal with speech and to value it sufficiently to acknowledge that good speech will come with bad. What we have to learn is how to ignore the bad. We have to learn that every sane and civilized human knows that bad speech is bad. We don’t need nannies to tell us that. We don’t need censors to protect it from us. We certainly don’t need fanatics to fight us for it. We need the respect of our fellow man to believe that we as civilized men and women know the difference. We need to grow up.

Book as process, book as byproduct, book as conversation

October 24, 2011 | 8 Comments
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Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber wrote a brilliant post about the nature of books and conversation using as illustration a conversation about my book. It is, as Jay Rosen said, too good to summarize. So please do go read it.

I love Garber’s piece not just because she said that “90 percent of Morozov’s criticisms are wildly unfair,” referring to a so-called review of my book. I love it because Garber delivered the most serious criticism of my book to date:

The precise thing that makes idea-driven books so valuable to readers — their immersive qualities, the intimate, one-on-one relationship they facilitate between authors and readers — also make them pretty lousy as actual sharers of ideas. Books don’t go viral. And that’s largely because the thing that makes books lucrative to authors and publishers — their ability to restrain ideas, to wall them off from the non-book-buying world — is antithetical to virality. How can books be expected to share ideas when the very point of their existence is containment?

I wrote a book about sharing. But a book is a bad form for sharing.

The book, Garber said, is “designed to advance books within the marketplace, rather than the marketplace of ideas. It aims at publicity rather than publicness, at selling objects rather than propelling the arguments they contain.”

Garber is right. I’ve confessed my hypocrisy in writing both my books on other grounds: I didn’t make them digital, clickable, correctable, linkable…. I did it to get paid, edited, promoted, and distributed (though with the closing of Borders, that last function becomes less valuable). Garber points out as mitigation that I had shared my ideas about publicness on my blog before I wrote the book.

“The professor has been preaching publicness for years — at Buzzmachine, in his Guardian column, at conferences, on TV, on Twitter, on the radio, on his Tumblr. If you follow Jeff Jarvis, you follow Public Parts. You’ve seen his thoughts on publicness take shape over time. The book that resulted from that public process — the private artifact — is secondary. It is the commercial result of a communal endeavor.”

She’s being too easy on me. While I wrote the book, I did share and discuss many of the ideas in it on my blog. That can be a form of collaboration and peer review. But I didn’t do it nearly enough, as far as I’m concerned. I was so busy researching, writing, and editing the book that I neglected the blog.

As Garber notes, I say in Public Parts that I should try to make my next project — if I choose to undertake one — different.

At the end of Public Parts, Jarvis mentions that his next project may not be a book at all, but rather a book-without-a-book: a Godinesque series of public events held both in person and online. “The book,” Jarvis writes, “if there is one, would be a by-product and perhaps a marketing tool for more events.”

The book, if there is one. The book, a by-product. Imagine the possibilities.

I’m still working on what that could be. So let me begin the process and outline my early thinking here to hear what you think.

Start with Kevin Kelly’s 2006 essay in The New York Times Magazine arguing that authors would come to support themselves with performance — and John Updike’s appalled reaction to this “pretty grisly scenario.” I’m not suggesting that authors become merely actors after their books are done.

I’m suggesting, as Garber does, that talks, events, symposia, blogs, hangouts… — discussion with smart people in any form — should come before the book. The process becomes the product; the book (if there is one) is a byproduct.

To take an example: I’ve been wanting to explore the impact of one simple idea, that technology now leads to efficiency over growth. I wrote a post about one aspect of that here and here as well as here and here. The conversation was amazing in its intelligence, perspective, and generosity. It became even better when Y Combinator founder Paul Graham posted it to Hacker News with a challenge, asking what makes this revolution (digital v. industrial) different. Amazing replies ensued. It took me many hours to go through it all, taking many notes.

That made me decide to propose this topic as a talk to South by Southwest. If accepted, that will give me a deadline for research. But I want — no, need — more conversation in the meantime.

That leads me to an idea for a new business. I don’t really want to start it or run it; I just wish it existed so I could use it.

It is time to disrupt the conference and speaking businesses and give some measure of control back to speakers (also known as authors) and their publics (formerly known, as Jay Rosen would say, as audiences). I hope for a way to support the work of authors and thinkers — support it with conversation, attention, and collaboration as well as money.

So imagine this: Authors decide to hold their own event. If you have the brand and popularity of, say, Seth Godin (or, in the sales arena, Jeffrey Gitomer), you can gather a large roomful of fans without effort; each does. But folks like me don’t have their brand or promotional power. So let’s say I get together with another one or two authors and we propose an event in which we discuss what we’re working on.

Kickstarter would seem to be an ideal platform to find out whether there is sufficient demand to support such a gathering, at least to get started. If enough folks sign up, the authors can rent a venue: no risk. The startup I wish for would handle logistics for a fee. It could also be a platform for groups to get together, organizing conferences without conference organizers.

The event, in my view, isn’t speeches to audiences so much as conversations. The author needs to bring value: a presentation, a talk, a set of ideas or challenges. But it’s the conversation I crave, to develop and further challenge ideas and gather perspectives. The event could be streamed for a larger public. It could be videoed and shared online for continued exchange via blogs, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al.

Note that this isn’t about containing ideas but sharing them. That’s what Garber and I both want.

Is there a book? Why should there be? Because a book can memorialize the ideas and research that comes out of this process. It can bring the discipline that the form — and a good editor, like mine — can demand. It can spread the ideas yet farther — to the many more people who couldn’t be bothered joining in the process and the conversation. It can make the ideas last longer. (In Public Parts, I quote Gutenberg scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein pointing out that Gutenberg’s Bible turns out to be a much longer lasting repository of data than a floppy disk.)

If there’s a book, is it printed? The likelihood of that decreases by the day. So if it is just electronic, then it can change form, including video from the process; photos and graphics to illustrate points; and permalinks to any part of the book to support conversation on the net.

So now we arrive back that the book I apologized for not writing in WWGD? — digital, clickable, linkable, correctable, updateable, part of a conversation. There are issues: Conversations can be invaded by trolls. There’s no economic certainty. We’ll make missteps.

But can we get closer to Garber’s ideal? Well, we’ll know it when we see it. But if we try this route, we now have a standard to judge it against: the one Garber sets in her great post.

Our assumptions about information itself are shifting, reshaping “the news” from a commodity to a community, from a product to a process. The same changes that have disrupted the news industry will, inevitably, disrupt the book industry; Public Parts hints at what might come of the disruption. Books as community. Books as conversation. Books as ideas that evolve over time — ideas that shift and shape and inspire — and that, as such, have the potential of viral impact.

Can books go viral? Garber asks. Maybe, if they’re allowed to be more than books.