Artificial intelligence is widely seen as the most important technology of our time and has attracted a huge amount of interest regarding not only its technological capabilities but also its economic and ethical impact. It has, however, been less discussed with regard to the book world and publishing. AI is applicable to publishing at multiple levels, all of them significant. It could change the business-processing aspects of publishing; but, even more importantly, the latest advances in machine learning from the likes (...) of Google and OpenAI demonstrate a powerful capacity to translate and even compose text. Publishing and publishing studies alike need to grapple with the implications of a world where machines as well as humans can produce the core product. (shrink)

Why has the flow of big, world-changing ideas slowed down? A provocative look at what happens next at the frontiers of human knowledge. The history of humanity is the history of big ideas that expand our frontiers—from the wheel to space flight, cave painting to the massively multiplayer game, monotheistic religion to quantum theory. And yet for the past few decades, apart from a rush of new gadgets and the explosion of digital technology, world-changing ideas have been harder to come (...) by. Since the 1970s, big ideas have happened incrementally—recycled, focused in narrow bands of innovation. In this provocative book, Michael Bhaskar looks at why the flow of big, world-changing ideas has slowed, and what this means for the future. Bhaskar argues that the challenge at the frontiers of knowledge has arisen not because we are unimaginative and bad at realizing big ideas but because we have already pushed so far. If we compare the world of our great-great-great-grandparents to ours today, we can see how a series of transformative ideas revolutionized almost everything in just a century and a half. But recently, because of short-termism, risk aversion, and fractious decision making, we have built a cautious, unimaginative world. Bhaskar shows how we can start to expand the frontier again by thinking big—embarking on the next Universal Declaration of Human Rightsor Apollo mission—and embracing change. (shrink)

Originally presented to Roy Bhaskar’s postgraduate seminar at the Institute of Education, London, in 2012, this article situates and delineates the concept of totality and the cluster of related concepts in dialectical critical realism.