PRIME MEMBER EXCLUSIVE | 3 Months Free Trial

Auto-renews at INR 199/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime. Offer ends 15 July, 2026.
New Books in Artificial Intelligence cover art

New Books in Artificial Intelligence

New Books in Artificial Intelligence

Written by: Marshall Poe
Listen for free

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
Episodes
  • Joseph Turow, "The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    Joseph Turow, "The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
    Jul 3 2026
    A respected voice on technology shows how seemingly simple ads help dismantle democracy and public discourse. Whether you’re intentionally shopping or casually browsing social media, something is following you: ads. Their creators seem to know your income bracket, politics, age, location, medical conditions, and tastes in clothing, food, and romantic partners. As advertising firms use predictive AI to discover your hot buttons and generative AI to push them, your online world becomes an increasingly bespoke—and isolated—place. The fervid competition around personalization in digital marketing has given rise to an ecosystem of advertisers, media outlets, tech companies, and retailers who monetize your data while threatening the health of our media, discourse, and sense of community. In this urgent book, award-winning author Joseph Turow shows how we got here, and how to change direction.The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age (University of Chicago Press, 2026) shatters common beliefs about advertising history by showing that individualized ads are not new. Today’s AI-enabled advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization while weaponizing data in unprecedented ways that drive social fragmentation and the disappearance of shared social reality. Informed by interviews with marketing insiders and covering the latest technology advances, Turow accessibly explains how artificial intelligence sifts through our data to tag and target us wherever we go with personalized videos, pictorial billboards, audio messages, and more. A logical next step for advertiser support is tailored entertainment and news, a shift that further destroys the common ground necessary for a functioning democracy. A must-read for all who care about the future of public discourse, The Problem with Personalization reveals how targeted advertising has altered how we’re seen and what we see in return.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 7 mins
  • The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest

    The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest
    Jun 25 2026
    Research shows that honesty is the single most important characteristic a person can possess when it comes to liking them, respecting them, and understanding them. But honesty is eroding in many areas of society today, as we are confronted with honesty crises in politics, education, relationships, religion, celebrity culture, and technology. Over the past 50 years, no single philosopher has offered a comprehensive exploration of honesty—how we define it, how it diverges in private and public spaces, and how it depends on shared perceptions of reality. Dr. Christian Miller addresses this gap, while showing how modern life increasingly rewards dishonesty, with profound consequences for our relationships, institutions and culture—a phenomenon he names The Honesty Crisis (Oxford UP, 2026). From cases such as sermon plagiarism to AI-assisted cheating to the rise of fake news, Dr. Miller explores how dishonesty has become easier, more pervasive and even normalized in our society. Yet The Honesty Crisis does more than diagnose the problem: it proposes concrete, practical steps to preserve honesty where it matters most. Guest: Dr. Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. The author of numerous articles and books, he also directed The Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She holds a Ph.D. in history which she uses to explore which stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. She is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Understanding Disinformation When Your Professor Asks You To Cheat The Last Human Job Who Gets Believed The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking What Do You Want Out of Life The Museum of Failure The Well-Gardened Mind A Meaningful Life The Good- Enough Life Tell Me What You Want Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
    Show More Show Less
    50 mins
  • Reinvention in an Era of Volatility

    Reinvention in an Era of Volatility
    Jun 18 2026
    Caroline Stokes is a strategist who works with C-Suites and Boards to lead their organizations through AI disruption, climate risk, and geopolitical instability. Her new book Aftershock to 2030: A CEO's Guide to Reinvention in the Age of AI, Climate, and Societal Collapse is published by Broad Book Press and serves as a roadmap for leaders navigating the tidal wave of change going on today. The founder of Workplace EQ, Caroline Stokes is previously the author of the business book Elephants Before Unicorns, about which she was interviewed by Dan Hill for his previous NBN podcast, “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” in 2020. Empathy, mental sovereignty, super hero: those three aspirations define this conversation well. Let’s unpack each term, in turn, to provide a sense of Caroline Stokes’ perspective on the world of work nowadays. One of Stokes’ points here is that emotional labor is of real value but the burden of getting it done rarely falls equally on people’s shoulders in business, with women often taking the greater load. Who should be stepping up more? CEOs, for whom empathy is rarely a Top 10 or even Top 30 strength of theirs. Sometimes hyper-masculinity gets in the way; other times, it might be that they feel blocked by the misperception that empathy entails just “dumping” one’s feelings on others at work, when in reality admitting vulnerability in relation to specific, mission-critical aspects of one’s job should really be the primary focus. In turn, what is “mental sovereignty” in Stokes’ work view? The term is meant to denote showing respect to everyone, regardless of rank, as part of creating a culture that highly values psychological safety. Finally, “super hero” enters the picture because, as a long-time executive coach, Stokes knows that within most if not all leaders lies a desire to be a difference-maker in ways that go beyond hitting the quarterly numbers alone. Within every leader, she believes, lurks a seven-year-old child eager to be a force for moral good as well as financial success for the enterprise overall. Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.
    Show More Show Less
    36 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet