The Atomic Human

The personal journey of a world expert to understand the riddle of intelligence, giving the rest of us a pragmatic guide to separate myth from fact about one of most important issues of our time – whether artificial intelligence and machine learning will dominate us.

The Atomic Human is an exploration of the indivisible core that is the essence of humanity in the age of artificial intelligence and machine the book that does for our ability to understand what is unique about  human intelligence in the age of AI what Thinking Fast and Slow did for rational and irrational thinking and decision-making.

Fears of AI not only concern how it invades our digital lives, but also the implied threat of an intelligence that displace us from our position at the center of the world. If artificial intelligence is the automation of decision-making, what, then, is unique and irreplaceable about human intelligence, what does it mean for the human left behind? Is there an essence, the core of the human, that can’t be replaced by the machine?

Through storytelling from his personal, family, and professional life, Neil Lawrence brings a timely fresh perspective to this new, emerging era, recounting his personal journey to understand the riddle of intelligence. By understanding the core of what makes us human – the “atomic human” – Lawrence provides the grounding we need to understand how AI can either be a tool for us or that we become a tool of AI, enabling us to choose the future we want.

Lawrence persuasively shows that we can only control AI and decide what is right for society by understanding our intelligence and contrasting it against the new intelligence we are creating – an intelligence he describes as “helpless” without humans, but also able to manipulate us if we do not have a frame of reference for AI’s way of thinking in relation to our own. By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, The Atomic Human reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded. Not just by the experts, but ordinary people.