Behavioral economist Dan Ariely returns in this revised and expanded edition of the New York Times bestseller PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL (first edition published in February 2008) to offer a much-needed take on the irrational decisions that led to our current economic crisis.
We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.
Through candid interviews and encounters with some of the the world's most successful business people, find out what makes great leaders tick, learn what it takes to be credible and read about the things that they'd do differently if they had to do it all again.
Drink your way around whitewashed Cape Dutch architecture and the endlessly photogenic hills and vines of South Africa's Winelands; or discover the wildlife of the acacia-studded savannah of the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya; all with your trusted travel companion.
