A riveting, intellectual journey through the history of artificial intelligence and how it has shaped culture and the workplace.

THE TIME OF AI
How Generative AI is Changing Culture, Work, Politics and Time
by Kate Crawford
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

A leading scholar of artificial intelligence explores the ways in which AI is shaping contemporary culture: how it will change our lives, for better and for worse, and what it means to live in this crucial, watershed moment. The book will be structured around five parts, each centered on a basic ingredient of human creation: Words, Images, Sounds, Motion, and Systems. The chapters contend with how each element is transformed by AI systems, and how the industries that depend upon it are changing, Asking what does this mean for us, as individuals and as a society, Professor Crawford posits that the best way to understand the cultural metamorphosis underway is to start with how AI makes things for us, and what we are making of it. In this way, the book speaks to changes at the foundational level of human creation, as well as addressing a dramatic series of simultaneous industrial shifts.

Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Distinguished Professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She has founded multiple research groups including FATE at Microsoft Research, the AI Now Institute at New York University, and the Knowing Machines Group at the University of Southern California. Her last book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2021), won multiple awards including the prestigious Sally Hacker Prize, and was described by the Financial Times and New Scientist as one of the best books of the year.