Financial Times: AI cannot replace the atomic human
Neil Lawrence’s Financial Times opinion piece argues that the part of human attention machines cannot measure is also the part they cannot replace.
6 June 2024
6 June 2024
The Atomic Human: Understanding ourselves in the age of AI is published by Allen Lane.
The book asks what remains distinctively human once machines take on tasks we have treated as marks of intelligence. It argues that human intelligence is social and embodied, shaped by tight constraints on how much we can compute and how slowly we communicate. Slicing away the facets that machines can replace leaves an indivisible core — the atomic human. Understanding that contrast is what lets people, not only specialists, decide how AI should be used, and how to keep institutions open rather than handing judgement to a digital oligarchy.
Further details are on the publisher’s page. The embodiment argument in the book is taken up in the group’s Information Topography programme.