Digital Wisdom : Searching for Agency in the Age of AI

A critical examination of current technological trends—artificial intelligence, privacy, and social media—this work highlights the discrepancies between prevailing assumptions and the actual impact of these technologies. Accessible to a broad audience, it offers clarity and practical strategies for navigating the evolving digital landscape.

Inviting us to an active role in reshaping technology is at the core of Digital Wisdom: Searching for Agency in the Age of AI. The book helps you understand more about the underlying issues of AI, social media, and data analytics, so we all can pick a better path together. This book explores how fundamental aspects of today's digital technology intersect with our rights and assumptions about private life, individual autonomy, and social boundaries. This exploration begins with a discussion about what all that data collected about us is for, and how companies, governments, and ourselves (as people who also work for those companies and governments) might want to alter the dynamic. The book looks at our changing sense of privacy, and how data is not just recorded but fused, correlated, shared, and acted upon in ways that seem fundamentally different than our laws or principles once assumed. It talks about technology’s role in making us seem to be more divided than ever, affecting our politics, our pastimes, and even our basic ability to connect with one another. Examining ways in which technology is used to change our minds—sometimes for our benefit, and sometimes to our detriment—the book breaks down the increasing use of algorithms that impact our everyday lives, so we can build a more ethical practice of digital technology. This exploration about our digital future invites us to, instead, build a practice of Digital Wisdom. It makes an argument for how we can use this wisdom to live more fully in the ways we want, with the features of technological advancement we choose. It suggests how our educational systems, industries, and governments could shift to better support Digital Wisdom. These ideas are not exhaustive; Digital Wisdom is a mindset rather than a simple set of steps to follow. Applying this mindset is going to take creativity from all of us, but, in the end, the Digital Wisdom mindset will guide us in taking concrete steps towards a more responsible digital future.