In contemporary discussions about the future of artificial intelligence we often lose our heads. While economists offer bleak predictions of mass job losses and a deepening of already widespread precarity, Silicon Valley utopians insist that new technologies are bringing us ever closer together and will one day deliver us from work, disease and poverty. But when human life is reduced to a set of rational processes waiting to be optimised we risk losing sight of the irreducible quality of human experience. With his characteristic attention to the subtleties of the human condition, Robert Skidelsky offers a challenging account of what it means to pursue the good life in the age of the machines.
Robert Skidelsky is the 2019 Fellow of the joint IHS-IWM Fellowship Program. Now an emeritus professor of political economy at Warwick University, he was made a member of the House of Lords in 1991, and is a fellow of the British Academy. Skidelsky is best known for his three-volume biography of the eminent British economist John Maynard Keynes.
The event will be chaired by Robert Braun.
A cooperation of IWM and IHS.