Mastering AI: a Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future

A Fortune magazine journalist draws on his expertise and extensive contacts among the companies and scientists at the forefront of artificial intelligence to offer dramatic predictions of AI’s impact over the next decade, from reshaping our economy and the way we work, learn, and create to unknitting our social fabric, jeopardizing our democracy, and fundamentally altering the way we think.

Within the next five years, Jeremy Kahn predicts, AI will disrupt almost every industry and enterprise, with vastly increased efficiency and productivity. It will restructure the workforce, making AI copilots a must for every knowledge worker. It will revamp education, meaning children around the world can have personal, portable tutors. It will revolutionize health care, making individualized, targeted pharmaceuticals more affordable. It will compel us to reimagine how we make art, compose music, and write and publish books. The potential of generative AI to extend our skills, talents, and creativity as humans is undeniably exciting and promising.

But while this new technology has a bright future, it also casts a dark and fearful shadow. AI will provoke pervasive, disruptive, potentially devastating knock-on effects. Leveraging his unrivaled access to the leaders, scientists, futurists, and others who are making AI a reality, Kahn will argue that if not carefully designed and vigilantly regulated AI will deepen income inequality, depressing wages while imposing winner-take-all markets across much of the economy. AI risks undermining democracy, as truth is overtaken by misinformation, racial bias, and harmful stereotypes. Continuing a process begun by the internet, AI will rewire our brains, likely inhibiting our ability to think critically, to remember, and even to get along with one another—unless we all take decisive action to prevent this from happening.

Much as Michael Lewis’s classic The New New Thing offered a prescient, insightful, and eminently readable account of life inside the dot-com bubble, Mastering AI delivers much-needed guidance for anyone eager to understand the AI boom—and what comes next.

Jeremy Kahn is an award-winning journalist for Fortune magazine, where he covers artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. In addition to cover stories and features, he writes Fortune’s weekly Eye on AI newsletter and cochairs its Brainstorm AI technology conferences. Previously, he wrote about technology, including AI, for Bloomberg. His writing on a range of subjects has also appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek,The Atlantic, Smithsonian magazine, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, and Slate. He has reported from India and much of South Asia, the Ivory Coast, Iraq, Venezuela, and most countries in Western Europe. He is a former managing editor of The New Republic. An Ohio native, he now lives with his family in Oxford, England.