This is the homepage for the book: Smarter Planet or Wiser Earth? How Dialogue Can Transform Artificial Intelligence into Collaborative Wisdom. It includes information, reviews, appendices, and dialogue about the book as well as the songs included in it. It also includes links to to a Creative Commons versions of the book which are available for free download in English here – y también en español aqui).
[Para materiales en español cliquez aqui.]
Book Summary: Technology employing Artificial Intelligence systems needs to be wiser, not just more efficient and “smarter”. It must balance all the relevant values to make life more just, convivial, ecologically sustainable, and spiritually nourishing. This requires an expansion of the conceptions of rationality used in AI technology as well as in mainstream economics, politics, and ethics.
This book describes the kind of dialogical rationality needed by drawing on contemporary research on conflict resolution and peacemaking including Quaker, Gandhian, Indigenous, and other traditions of collaborative reasoning and ethical choice. To respond effectively to threats from ecological collapse, climate change, wars of mutually assured destruction, and out of control technology, it offers systematically wiser ways to reason in our daily lives and collectively transform our dominant institutions.
Initial praise: “. . . not simply a treatise of where we are but a prescription on how we can achieve the better outcome. What a wonderful world we might live in if everyone took a dose of this medicine.”– Katie Wasserman, AI consultant for Wall Street corporations
“ . . . encouraging all of us to step up and be part of creating a Wiser Earth . . . a must read for those who are looking for ways to make things better.” — Fred Benson, US Army Colonel retired, former Vice President for the Weyerhaeuser Company
“We may never be able to create machines in our own image, but perhaps we can engineer machines to reflect and respect our values. This book is a guide to what that image of ourselves could be.” – Rich Hilliard, software engineer
Join dialogue about the book through comments and guest posts on the discussion blog here.
To hear the Songs for a Wiser Earth included in the book, listen here.
For Appendices to the book and other resources, go here.
Video lectures, podcasts, and interviews based on the book are linked on the media page here.
The book is published by Quaker Institute for the Future and Producciones de La Hamaca and is available at standard booksellers online like Barnes and Noble or Amazon as a paperback or Kindle and will soon be released as a hardback and in audio form. It can also be downloaded in a free pdf as a Creative Commons version here.
For more information about Gray Cox, see his homepage here. He can be contacted directly at gray@coa.edu or #1-207-460-1163