The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs

An eminent political thinker uses our history with states and corporations—"artificial agents" to which we have granted immense power—to predict how AI will remake society.

Countless books, news reports, and opinion pieces have announced the impending arrival of artificial intelligence, with most claiming that it will upend our world, revolutionizing not just work but society overall. Yet according to political philosopher and historian David Runciman, we've actually been living with a version of AI for 300 years?because states and corporations are robots, too. In The Handover, Runciman explains our current situation through the history of these "artificial agents" we created to rescue us from our all-too-human limitations—and demonstrates what this radical new view of our recent past means for our collective future.

From the United States and the United Kingdom to the East India Company, Standard Oil, Facebook, and Alibaba,...