The intended audience for AI hype isn't the people who are forced to use AI. The AI show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. . Investment bankers claim AI will to be worth more than $16 trillion: a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. When the AI bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI – as he so successfully did in Enshittification – Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.

We live in a time of unprecedented technological change and uncertainty, from AI to transhumanism. Humankind is faced with the question of what the future will be like and – more burningly – should be like. We confront increasing dangers from geopolitical instability, war and the climate crisis that threaten to render these developments either irrelevant or deadly.

The answer can’t just be to call a halt.

A. C. Grayling asks the question no one else is asking. What do we wish to keep from yesterday that will help us decide today what we want and don't want tomorrow. How we might navigate the complexities to build a fairer, more equal, sustainable future.

'You know how the best writers pinpoint something you’ve felt for ages but haven’t been able to articulate? This is like that. It’s so good. She should give Radio 4’s next Reith Lectures' Guardian

An electrifying, thought-provoking exploration of how the digital era is reshaping our world, by bestselling, Women's Prize-winning writer Naomi Alderman

From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Power

What’s the most useful thing you could know about your own life?

In this era-defining book, developed from her groundbreaking Radio 4 essay series, Naomi Alderman turns to a question that affects us all: how do we understand, and navigate, the epoch we’re living through?

The internet has flooded us with more knowledge, opinions, ideas, opportunities, as well as verbal attacks and misinformation, than ever before. It lets us learn more quickly and also spread falsehood more quickly, it brings us together and also divides us in countless new ways. There is no going back. But we have been here before. In fact, this is humanity’s third information crisis.

The first, the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, and the second, the invention of the printing press 600 years ago, drastically reshaped our perceptions, interactions and mental landscapes in ways that feel acutely familiar. Overwhelmed by information, people become afraid and angry, unsettled and distressed, as well as more knowledgeable, educated and curious.

By looking at those previous information crises, both the turmoil and the advances, Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better understand our present, and how this might help us chart a way forward (once again), through the turbulent seas of information overload.

'Alderman is one of our most surprising and delightful public intellectuals, and this book grapples wonderfully with our current schisms and their historical precedents' JON RONSON

Discover the powerful, practical and optimistic guide to strengthening your mind for the modern world and thriving in the age of AI, from acclaimed neuroscientist and Sunday Times bestselling author Dr Hannah Critchlow.

'A vital book for understanding how our brains can adapt and thrive in an age of innovation.' – Joseph Jebelli, bestselling author of The Brain at Rest

'Full of fascinating new research. Profoundly empowering.' – Professor Hannah Fry, bestselling author of Hello World

'Fascinating neuroscience that is also a guide to modern life … Brilliant. – Dr Darragh Ennis, neuroscientist and professional quizzer

How do we nurture our brains – and our children’s brains – so we have the resilience to thrive during the coming wave of technological and societal change? How can we keep up in the face of AI?

The 21st Century Brain provides the answers.

In her empowering and practical new book, bestselling neuroscientist Dr Hannah Critchlow takes you on a journey through the fascinating landscape of the latest neuroscience research, detailing how we can develop the essential human skills that technology cannot replace – and that matter most for personal fulfilment, wellbeing and long-term success.

Grounded in the latest science, you’ll discover how to strengthen and future-proof essential skills, including:
· Emotional intelligence and collaboration
· Imagination, creativity, and flexible thinking
· Long-term thinking and decision-making
· Adaptability and mental resilience
· Intuition, loyalty, and connection

Writing in her informative and accessible voice, Dr Critchlow shows why our greatest strengths lie not in competing with machines, but in becoming more fully human.

Blending fascinating research with practical advice and simple brain exercises, The 21^st Century Brain is the must-read guide to navigating rapid technological change with confidence.

When longtime AI expert and journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, it was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely market forces.

But the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources: the ‘compute’ power of scarce high-end chips, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans on the ground ‘cleaning it up’ for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. We have entered a new, ominous age of empire with OpenAI setting a breakneck pace, as a small group of the most valuable companies in human history try to chase it down.

In exhilarating prose and with unparalleled access to those closest to Sam Altman, Hao recounts the meteoric rise of OpenAI and shows us the sinister impact that this industry is having on society.

Discover how artificial intelligence thinks and reasons, and how we can make the most of their super-human abilities, in the must read new book from the prize-winning technology writer and author of The Dark Net and The People vs Tech.

‘[An] essential read’ Emma Saunders, BBC Culture Reporter

Knowing how to speak to AI – and how not to – is a skill that everyone now needs.

Hundreds of millions of people now talk to AI, such as ChatGPT, every day. They organise their finances and holidays, ask advice, seek therapy and find love – via machines. Almost overnight, chatbots are transforming society, politics and business. This is one of the biggest and fastest technological changes in history.

However, most people still don't really understand how AI works, how to make the most of it – or what the dangers are. As some people use it to turbo-charge their productivity at work, others are falling into dangerous conspiracies, delusions and psychosis.

In How to Talk to AI, award-winning technology writer Jamie Bartlett takes you inside the machine: showing how we can stay in control of our powerful new companions, even as they are changing the way we live, feel, and think.

Written in his accessible style, How to Talk to AI is the essential and empowering guide to help you understand how to make the most of these incredible new technologies, without succumbing to new powers of manipulation and control.

Praise for Jamie Bartlett:

‘This book could not have come at a better moment’ Sunday Times

‘One of the world’s leading experts on the digital revolution’ David Patrikarakos, Literary Review

‘Eye-opening … Bartlett is an informal yet informed guide’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Confident and well-informed‘ New Scientist

‘A hell of an achievement… Buy it and read it.‘ The Times

‘Fascinating… Jamie Bartlett is an expert guide’ Independent

‘Highly readable’ Financial Times

‘Smart, provoking reportage… Required reading for anyone’ Tom Chatfield, author of Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are

'Mallaby has done full justice to his kaleidoscopically interesting subject … expertly structured and vividly reported, the book presents the most insightful portrait of Hassabis to date' Financial Times

A revelatory portrait of the visionary behind Google DeepMind, the race to control the future – and what it means to win

Even in a tech world crowded with visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. Born to working class, immigrant parents in North London, a chess prodigy by five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven-figure job offer from a video-game studio to study science at Cambridge. Long before the current obsession with AI, he founded the path-breaking company DeepMind in order to pursue a single, audacious goal: the dream of artificial superintelligence, which would solve humanity’s hardest problems, change life and work as we know it, and perhaps even unlock the deepest mysteries of the Universe. For his scientific achievements, he won a Nobel Prize in 2024, and his company, now Google DeepMind, is considered the tech giant’s engine room.

For the past three years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with him and his inner circle as well as detractors and rivals at other companies. The result is a revelation-packed portrait of a singular mind and a historic reckoning with the AI revolution, a shift potentially more significant than any since the dawn of complex thought 70,000 years ago.

As Mallaby chronicles, DeepMind is locked in an arms race with Silicon Valley competitors to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby become the keeper of humanity’s future. Yet this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis has remained in Britain, and unlike his rivals, his aims are not wealth and power but scientific enlightenment. Like them, however, he is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. He aims to control the technology, but the technology may ultimately control him – and humanity writ large.

Nebula Award, Ray Bradbury Prize and Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist and Hugo and Locus Award winner Ray Nayler returns with a gripping technological thriller.

‘A fast-paced dystopian thriller’ – SFX Magazine

‘First-rate science fiction’ – Cory Doctorow

‘As much a novel of ideas as it is a techno-thriller . . . A more erudite and emotionally engaging Philip K Dick’ – Irish Times

In a familiar yet different Europe governed by AI, life is more efficient, objective, and peaceful. Yet all is not as it seems. Meanwhile, at Europe’s eastern edge, the Federation endures under the rule of a President who has preserved his power by transferring his consciousness from body to body.

As both worlds begin to crumble, Lilia, a Federation scientist, discovers a way to slip the nets of surveillance and alter the balance of power. On the run, she becomes the reluctant centre of a struggle between resistance and control. Yet the systems and people surrounding her may already be beyond redemption. Is there any way to put humanity’s future back in its own hands?

‘Fascinating and essential… I urge you to read every syllable’ JO BRAND

‘All men must read this book if they have any interest in a truly just, fair and equal society’ ROBIN INCE

AI is here, bringing a seismic shift in the way our society operates. Might this mean a future reimagined on equitable terms for women and marginalised groups everywhere?

Not unless we fight for it. At present, power remains largely in the hands of a few rich, white men. New AI-driven technologies, with misogyny baked into their design, are putting women in danger, their rights and safety sacrificed at the altar of profitability and reckless speed.

In  The New Age of Sexism,  Sunday Times  bestselling author and campaigner Laura Bates takes us deep into the heart of this rapidly evolving world. She explores the metaverse, confronts deepfake pornography, travels to cyber brothels, tests chatbots, and hears from schools in the grip of online sexual abuse, showing how our lives – from education to work, sex to entertainment – are being infiltrated by easily accessible technologies that are changing the way we live and love. What she finds is a wild west where existing forms of discrimination, inequality and harassment are being coded into the future we will all have little choice about living in – unless we seize this moment to demand change.

Gripping, courageous and eye-opening,  The New Age of Sexism  exposes a phenomenon we can’t afford to ignore any longer.  Our future is on the line. We need to act now, before it is too late.

‘Urgent reading for anyone who is interested in the intersection of tech and gender equality, and indeed anyone who wants to be a part of building a better future, free from misogyny’  EMMA-LOUISE BOYNTON

‘A brilliantly researched, incredibly illuminating and frequently chilling account of the next chapter in tech’s ongoing assault on our core values. A chapter that is already unfolding around us all’ JAMES O’BRIEN