Homo Numericus: The Coming ‘Civilization’ offers a critique of the tendency towards digitisation and our trust in algorithmic intelligence, whilst making an argument about the reality of human societies and that which is of fundamental importance in them.
Reasoning Robots It was announced recently that developers of artificial intelligence models at Meta are working on the next stage of ‘artificial general intelligence’, with a view to eliminating mistakes and moving closer to human-level cognition. This will allow chatbots and virtual assistants to complete sequences of related tasks and was described as the beginning of efforts to enable AI models to ‘reason’, or to uncover their ability to do so. This represents a significant advance. One example given, of a digital personal assistant being able to organise a trip…
Contemporary Monastic Economy presents a richly illustrated study of how monastics reconcile the tension between their consecrated life and economic activity, which, though fascinating in its own right, can also be read with a view to contributing to our understanding of value and purpose in work and business.
On Saturday, February 10th, in Chinatown in San Francisco, a crowd of people attacked and burnt a driverless car operated by Waymo (Google’s self-driving car project). This represents an escalation of activism against autonomous vehicles led by a group calling itself the Safe Street Rebels, who generally seek to disable driverless cars by placing a traffic cone on the bonnet (or hood, for our American readers), which renders the vehicle immobile until a company employee can attend to it. The group’s website expresses a variety of grievances regarding the introduction…
Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices for the Modern Economy provides an interesting overview and analysis of the evidence connected to various debates that surround capitalism, whether in connection with the environment, wealth and poverty, inequality and exploitation, morality and politics. With a focus on quantitative survey data, it offers an objective rather than ideological assessment of capitalism as an economic system and the charges frequently laid against it.
In Faith in Markets, Benedikt Koehler (PhD), a fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs, has brought together a series articles that consider the ways in which Christianity, Judaism and Islam have encouraged adherents ‘towards behaviours that tended to market economics’ (page 7). The collection discusses the three major Abrahamic faiths and also a contains a chapter looking at eastern religious traditions more broadly, but the focus in this review is on the Judaeo-Christian tradition specifically. The first part of the book considers the mutual influences of religious practice or…
Faith in Markets: Abrahamic religions and economics edited by Benedikt Koehler (published 2023) offers a series of studies of the ways in which the Abrahamic faiths have steered adherents towards practices that tend towards markets and sheds light on the ways in which market concepts are embedded in or developed by religious thought. It also examines tensions that arise with the contemporary application or interpretation of religious authorities in these areas.
