Author(s): Madhumita Murgia

Technology | Sociology | 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction | 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction — short list

Technology that marks children as future criminals. An app bringing medical diagnoses to a remote tribal community. A British poet, an Indian doctor and a Chinese activist in exile. In this propulsive, illuminating work, Madhumita Murgia, AI editor for the Financial Times, shows how automated systems are reshaping lives all over the world.

'Code Dependent is the intimate investigation of AI that we've been waiting for, and it arrives not a moment too soon. Murgia travels the world to bring us intimate portraits of every aspect of the human condition- inner life, family, work, class, race, geography, gender, community, politics - as each is unmade and remade by today's global AI juggernaut. Most critically, Murgia doesn't just 'tell.' She 'shows' us in moving detail that AI is nothing more than a spectrum of possibilities selected and shaped by the economic and political powers that bring it to life. Her work brilliantly reveals the quiet daily violence and flesh and blood consequences of today's dominant AI regime designed and deployed by surveillance capitalism. Ultimately, the steady drumbeat of her stories opens our eyes to what could have been and what might yet become if we learn to join forces to reclaim our digital century for people and planet.' - Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus

What does it mean to be human in a world that is rapidly changing thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, of automated decision-making that both draws on and influences our behaviour?

Through the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from the cosy enclave of Silicon Valley, Code-Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often exploitative technologies on individuals, communities, and our wider society. Murgia exposes how AI can strip away our collective and individual sense of agency - and shatter our illusion of free will.

The ways in which algorithms and their effects are governed over the coming years will profoundly impact us all. Yet we cannot decide what preferences and morals we want to encode in these entities - or what controls we may want to impose on them. And thus, we are collectively relinquishing our moral authority to machines.

Murgia not only sheds light on this chilling phenomenon, but also charts a path of resistance. AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small. In this compelling work, Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity.