The Autonomous Revolution

INTRODUCTION

DIGITAL LEVIATHAN

IT IS HARD NOT TO SENSE that something vast and unsettling is emerging from beneath modern life. Even here in Silicon Valley, where we have become accustomed to continuous change, this time it somehow seems different—a change so sweeping and complete as to be unlike anything we have ever before experienced.

But it isn’t just here that this change is becoming apparent; the harbingers are everywhere. Institutions upon which we have rested our faith, some of them for centuries, now seem to be deeply troubled, with no obvious remedy short of dissolution and replacement. Education, government, law, religion, marriage, work, the economy, science … all seem, in the two decades since the turn of the millennium, to have ...