The summer 2019 issue of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe here for as little as £10 a year.
Will tech set us free?
Willing servants
The social industry was invented to capture social life and turn it to profit – and, writes Richard Seymour, we are all slaving away as its unpaid “digital serfs”.
The lure is that we can write whatever we like to anyone we like: friends, celebrities, jihadists, porn stars, politicians. We can find friends, build careers, pursue political agendas. But in the new economy of writing, we are no more in control than the Luddites were in control of the machines they smashed. We have access only on condition that we work, by feeding the machine with data about ourselves. The more we engage, the better it knows us, and the more accurately it can goad us into engaging more. Everything we see in our feeds is a somatic barrage of information designed to keep us working.
Fighting for the future
Asteroid mining, synthetic meat, surrogacy – a slew of radical thinkers envisage brave new worlds. But, asks Niki Seth-Smith, can we get there?
Traditionally, it is left-wing and radical anti-establishment thinkers who have taken it upon themselves to imagine new worlds and utopias in turbulent times. Yet the shelves look surprisingly bare when it comes to how we might harness our current advances in technology to pursue the betterment of all humankind. What optimism there is often seems to come from the top down – from the tech billionaires and internet giants. Three books out this year buck the trend by proposing radically new approaches and ways of thinking in order to shape our future.
The Q&A: Marcus Du Sautoy
JP O'Malley speaks to the mathematician about artificial intelligence, creativity and algorithms.
There is huge hype around AI that is comparable to the dot com boom. There is a lot of dishonesty. So we really need to think about whether this application of AI is genuinely exciting, creating new things, or whether it’s just companies trying to get people to buy products.
The autumn 2019 issue of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe here for as little as £10 a year.
Also in this issue:
- Peter Geoghegan on why the violent past of Northern Ireland is resurfacing today
- What Samira Ahmed learned from visiting Iran's bazaars
- Vron Ware asks whether feminism can be kept separate from questions of racism and war
- A major new study reveals the complex picture of religion and atheism today. Jeremy Rodell explores
- Huw Lemmey on the shockingly intimate photos of Nan Goldin
- Why romcoms are back in business, by Caroline Crampton
- Robert O'Connor reports from the world's disputed borderlands, where football can be a matter of life and death
- The rise of ayahuasca: Lucinda Elliott reports from Brazil on Santo Daime
- Marcus Chown shares 10 amazing facts about the Moon
- On the 70th anniversary of the publication of 1984, Yiannis Baboulias reflects on what Orwell's masterpiece tells us about truth
- Charlotte L. Riley on the roots of female anger
- PLUS: Columns from Michael Rosen and Laurie Taylor; book reviews; the latest developments in biology, chemistry and physics; cryptic crossword and Chris Maslanka's quiz
New Humanist is published four times a year by the Rationalist Association, a charity founded in 1885. Our journalism is fiercely independent and supported entirely by our readers. To make a deeper commitment, why not donate to the Rationalist Association?
