Future Politics

Politics in the Twentieth Century was dominated by a single question: how much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society? Now the debate is different: to what extent should our lives be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems - and on what terms? Digital technologies - from artificial intelligence to blockchain, from robotics to virtual reality - are transforming the way we live together. Those who control the most powerful technologies are increasingly able to control the rest of us. As time goes on, these powerful entities - usually big tech firms and the state - will set the limits of our liberty, decreeing what may be done and what is forbidden. Their algorithms will determine vital questions of social justice. In their hands, democracy will flourish or decay. A landmark work of political theory, Future Politics challenges readers to rethink what it means to be free or equal, what it means to have power or property, and what it means for a political system to be just or democratic. In a time of rapid and relentless changes, it is a book about how we can - and must - regain control. Winner of the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize.

Jamie Susskind is a barrister and the author of the award-winning bestseller Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech (Oxford University Press, 2018), which received the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize 2019, and was an Evening Standard and Prospect Book of the Year. With fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge, the Evening Standard has written that Jamie "could be one of the great public intellectual rock stars of our time." Jamie speaks around the world about politics and technology, and appears regularly on the media. Recent engagements include Microsoft, Google, Harvard, Stanford, various professional services firms, investor and private conferences, and all the main literary festivals. He is equally comfortable delivering set-piece speeches to large crowds as he is in discussion in more intimate settings.

- Introduction - Part I. THE DIGITAL LIFEWORLD - 1: Increasingly Capable Systems - 2: Increasingly Integrated Technology - 3: Increasingly Quantified Society - 4: Thinking Like a Theorist - Part II. FUTURE POWER - 5: Code is Power - 6: Force - 7: Scrutiny - 8: Perception-Control - 9: Public and Private Power - Part III. FUTURE LIBERTY - 10: Freedom and the Supercharged State - 11: Freedom and the Tech Firm - Part IV. FUTURE DEMOCRACY - 12: The Dream of Democracy - 13: Democracy in the Future - Part V. FUTURE JUSTICE - 14: Algorithms of Distribution - 15: Algorithms of Recognition - 16: Algorithmic Injustice - 17: Technological Unemployment - 18: The Wealth Cyclone - Part VI. FUTURE POLITICS - 19: Transparency and the New Separation of Powers - 20: Post-Politics