Who's Afraid of Ai? : Fear and Promise in the Age of Thinking Machines

A penetrating guide to artificial intelligence: what it is, what it does, and how it will change our lives

• Is it ethical to allow robots―endlessly patient―to replace human caregivers in providing comfort and companionship to the elderly?
• Since AI feeds on big data, can we prevent its misuse by corporations or the government?
• Will AI ever be capable of runaway self-improvement? And if “the singularity” does arrive, with AI’s intelligence exponentially outpacing our own, what will become of us when, in many ways, we’re obsolete?

Dr. Thomas Ramge thinks and writes at the crossroads of technology and economics, sustainability and society. He has published more than twenty nonfiction books, selling more than two million copies worldwide, including Who’s Afraid of AI?, On the Brink of Utopia, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, and The Global Economy as You’ve Never Seen It. His essays and articles appear in The Economist, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Foreign Affairs. He holds a PhD in sociology of technology and is an Associated Researcher at the Einstein Center Digital Future. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous publishing awards, including the German Essay Prize 2022, the Axiom Business Book Award 2019 (Gold Medal, Economics), and the getAbstract International Book Prize 2018.