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Wise Animals

How Technology Has Made Us What We Are

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Wise Animals

By: Tom Chatfield
Narrated by: Tom Chatfield
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About this listen

Evocatively read by the author, Tom Chatfield.

'Powerful, profound and completely engrossing, a meditation on not only technology but also history, culture, ideas, ethics, psychology and, above all, what it means to be human.' – Michael Bhaskar, co-author of The Coming Wave

Wise Animals explores the history of our relationship with technology, and our deep involvement with our creations from the first use of tools and the taming of fire, via the invention of reading and printing, to the development of the computer, the creation of the internet and the emergence of AI.

Human children know no more of modern technology than their ancestors did of older technologies thousands of years ago, and develop in relation to the technologies of their time. We co-evolve with technology as individuals as we have as a species over thousands of years.

Rather than see technology as a threat, this deeply humanist contribution to the debate proposes that we are neither masters nor victims of our technologies. They are part of who we are, and our future – and theirs – is in our hands.

 History History & Culture History & Philosophy Science Technology & Society

Critic Reviews

Timely and wide-ranging . . . Ambitious in its scope
Quite simply, one of the best books on technology and culture I have read . . . An extraordinary saga that is given coherence by his formidable intellect and beautiful writing style (Matthew d'Ancona, The New European)
Combining compelling storytelling with erudite, compassionate and often profound insight about the human condition, this book will transform how you navigate the world. (Richard Fisher, author of The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time)
Tom Chatfield is one of the smartest and most original tech thinkers writing today. Both thought-provoking and startlingly original, Wise Animals is his magnum opus. (Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor)
Powerful, profound and completely engrossing, this is a multitudinous meditation on not only technology but also history, culture, ideas, ethics, psychology and, above all, what it means to be human. It brims and fizzes with insight and argument, but never loses touch with that core attribute of its title: wisdom. In an age of intelligent machines, Tom Chatfield has written an essential handbook we will return to again and again (Michael Bhaskar, co-author of The Coming Wave)
A timely reflection about historical and technological time that is worthy of your precious hours, as erudite and thoughtful as a reader might expect from a leading philosopher of technology. (Jonathan Rowson, author of The Moves That Matter)
Writer and ‘tech-philosopher’ Chatfield is my go-to thinker on making sense of humanity’s relationship with technology. Wise Animals is a highly readable exploration of just that relationship, from the emergence of our species to now. (Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller)
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