Shortlisted as the Best UK Specialist Business Book of The Year

“…humanises the dark and confused topic of AI and calls us to action”
DERREN BROWN, Illusionist and author

We live in a world increasingly ruled by technology, which now shapes and governs our lives seemingly as much as laws and regulations. But unlike laws and regulations, the influence of tech in our lives too often goes unchallenged by citizens and governments. We comfort ourselves with
the old refrain that technology has no
morals and is free of prejudice – only its
users are fallible. 

But is this actually true? Dr Robert Smith thinks that, in today's world, this is dangerously not the case. 

Having worked in the field of artificial intelligence for over 30 years, Smith reveals evidence that the mechanical actors in our lives do indeed have, or at least express, morals: they're just not the morals of the progressive modern society we imagined we were moving towards. Instead, we are beginning to see increasing incidences of machine bigotry, greed, segregation and mass coercion.

It is easy to assume that this is the result of programmer prejudice or the product of dark forces manipulating the Internet. But what if there is something more fundamental and explicitly mechanical at play, something inherent in the technology itself?

Offering a rigorous, fresh perspective, Rage Inside the Machine challenges the long-held assumption that technology is an apolitical and amoral force. Shedding light on little-known history and investigating the complex connections between scientific philosophy, institutional prejudice, and new technology, this book demonstrates how centuries-old, non-scientific ideas are encoded deep within our modern technological infrastructure, and it reveals how new thinking and research could help us fix it.