Digital Wisdom: Searching for Agency in the Age of AI

Inviting us to an active role in reshaping technology is at the core of Digital Wisdom: Searching for Agency in the Age of AI. The book helps you understand more about the underlying issues of AI, social media, and data analytics, so we all can pick a better path together. This book explores how fundamental aspects of today’s digital technology intersect with our rights and assumptions about private life, individual autonomy, and social boundaries.

This exploration begins with a discussion about what all that data collected about us is for, and how companies, governments, and ourselves (as people who also work for those companies and governments) might want to alter the dynamic. The book looks at our changing sense of privacy, and how data is not just recorded but fused, correlated, shared, and acted upon in ways that seem fundamentally different than our laws or principles once assumed. It talks about technology’s role in making us seem to be more divided than ever, affecting our politics, our pastimes, and even our basic ability to connect with one another. Examining ways in which technology is used to change our minds--sometimes for our benefit, and sometimes to our detriment--the book breaks down the increasing use of algorithms that impact our everyday lives, so we can build a more ethical practice of digital technology.

This exploration about our digital future invites us to, instead, build a practice of Digital Wisdom. It makes an argument for how we can use this wisdom to live more fully in the ways we want, with the features of technological advancement we choose. It suggests how our educational systems, industries, and governments could shift to better support Digital Wisdom. These ideas are not exhaustive; Digital Wisdom is a mindset rather than a simple set of steps to follow. Applying this mindset is going to take creativity from all of us, but, in the end, the Digital Wisdom mindset will guide us in taking concrete steps towards a more responsible digital future.

Richard Lachman is a Professor in the RTA School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he also serves as Director of the Experiential Media Institute and Academic Director of the Zone Learning network of incubators. An award-winning digital producer and frequent media-commentator on technology issues, Richard has led projects with UNICEF, TIFF, The Banff Centre, Penguin UK, The Discovery Channel, the CRTC, and others. His work in transmedia has been honored with a Gemini Award, a CNMA, and a Webby Honouree.

Richard completed his doctorate at UNE in Australia researching spreading activation networks for documentary storytelling, and earned both a Master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab’s Interactive Cinema Group and a Computer Science degree from MIT. Early in his career, he was part of a startup acquired by Mattel, where he ended as Lead Designer and Engineer on the Petz software series, which shipped over three million units worldwide.

With research spanning AI, transmedia storytelling, digital documentaries, immersive media, and collaborative design thinking, Richard continues to be unsuccessful in describing what he does to his kids.

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