Home › Books › Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
by
75/99
Critics' Rating Index
13/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
94/99
Volume of Reviews
56/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal and provocative exploration of how technology companies have reshaped human language, and, if we let them, could steal it from usWhen it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive teaching A.I.-powered machines to write and talk like human beings. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to get machines to communicate for us. But if this came to pass, would it be liberation or subjugation? Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with this question. In 2021, she used a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister's death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.The experience, revealing both the appeal and the danger of corporate-owned language machines, forced Vara to interrogate how technology has changed how she uses language, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal's first Facebook reporter, to testing early versions of ChatGPT—all while adding to the trove of human-created material that Big Tech exploits. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral A.I. experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates Big Tech's incursion into our lives, while proposing that by harnessing the collective imagination that taught us to communicate in the first place, we might invent a nobler, freer relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.
Reviews
"A complicated and many-sided book ..."
"Vara is an appealing narrator—smart, funny, honest, and a little neurotic ..."
"Vara's essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability."
"The most poignant selections find pathos in the gap between humanity and AI's superficial approximation of it ..."
"Alarming and somehow moving."
"Provocative, challenging, and concerning, Vara's clever, eye-opening approach brings home the often-uneasy confluence of individual desire, social benefits, and corporate ambition."
"This book is by turns absurd and insightful, engaging with the ethics of algorithms, surveillance, and privacy in a meaningful way ..."
"It raises ethical questions that remain unanswered even as the author endeavors to explore the paradoxes of her own engagement with AI."
"This seamless blend of personal narrative and systemic critique parallels Vara's subject: technology that has made it feel impossible to compose a self and a society without it ..."
"The answers [to Vara's survey] are so breathtakingly rich, the details so specific and arresting, that they highlight the blandness of ChatGPT's replies."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!