An award-winning defense expert tells the story of the new great power rivalry to control artificial intelligence—and how this powerful technology is shaping national power relationships and geopolitics in the 21st century.
THE BLACK BOX
by Paul Scharre
W.W. Norton, January 2023
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)
Artificial intelligence is bringing a new digital order—it is changing war, surveillance, and disinformation, with profound effects on human freedom, global security, and power dynamics. THE BLACK BOX takes us inside the immensely competitive global struggle to lead in the four key elements of AI advantage: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. A world expert in AI-enabled weapons, Paul Scharre examines the strengths and weaknesses of today’s major superpowers, including China, the United States, Europe, and the Big Tech corporations that control the global supply of data and compute.
With unique access to the world of automated warfare and surveillance—including on-site visits with major Chinese players and Pentagon startups—national security expert Paul Scharre guides readers through the alarming ways the AI revolution is reshaping the world, and the challenges democracies must overcome if they hope to maintain their global edge.
Paul Scharre is is the author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, which won the 2019 Colby Award and was named one of Bill Gates’ top five books of 2018. A former Army Ranger, he is a senior fellow and director of the 20YY Future of Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), based in Washington, DC. From 2008 to 2013, he worked in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense on policies for robotics, autonomy, and other emerging weapons technologies. He led the drafting of the official U.S. Department of Defense policy on autonomous weapons.
What do you do when you suddenly find yourself confronted with a mortal threat to your society’s fundamental, stabilizing principles? Mildred Harnack chose to stand. Milwaukee-born, she was the leader of the largest anti-Nazi resistance group in Germany, and the only American woman to be put to death on Hitler’s orders. Despite its unmatched vastness, the record of World War II atrocity and nobility will forever remain incomplete. This ever-expanding volume of belligerence and courage is perhaps the most gravely gendered historical document we have; a war perpetrated, suffered and recounted by men. There are periodically polite acknowledgments of the roles played by woman in ‘aiding’ the war effort, but these usually have the hollow ring of tokenism. Mildred Harnack’s short but monumental life shows us just how incomplete that record remains. From 1933-42, with her German husband, Arvid, Mildred led a cell that couriered top secret military intelligence to the Allies, helped dissidents and persecuted minorities escape Germany, and distributed literature that encouraged civil disobedience and exposed Nazi plans. Fusing elements of biography, political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner brilliantly interweaves family archives, original research, exclusive interviews with survivors, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, enthralling story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.
Cornel West is at the forefront of thinking about race. First published in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, RACE MATTERS became a national best seller that has gone on to sell more than half a million copies. West addresses a range of issues, from the crisis in black leadership and the myths surrounding black sexuality to affirmative action, the new black conservatism, and the strained relations between Jews and African Americans. He never hesitates to confront the prejudices of all his readers or wavers in his insistence that they share a common destiny. Bold in its thought and written with a redemptive passion grounded in the tradition of the African-American church, RACE MATTERS is a book that is at once challenging and deeply healing.
For Damon Young, existing while Black is an extreme sport. The act of possessing black skin while searching for space to breathe in America is enough to induce a ceaseless state of angst where questions such as “How should I react here, as a professional black person?” and “Will this white person’s potato salad kill me?” are forever relevant. WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER chronicles Young’s efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him. It’s a condition that’s sometimes stretched to absurd limits, provoking the angst that made him question if he was any good at the “being straight” thing, as if his sexual orientation was something he could practice and get better at, like a crossover dribble move or knitting; creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; and generating the surreality of watching gentrification transform his Pittsburgh neighborhood from predominantly Black to “Portlandia . . . but with Pierogies.” And, at its most devastating, it provides him reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white. From one of our most respected cultural observers, WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER is a hilarious and honest debut that is both a celebration of the idiosyncrasies and distinctions of Blackness and a critique of white supremacy and how we define masculinity.