The first five chapters of the book

(Yogi)

Yogi and Marcus are very excited to announce that the first five chapters of our book "Beyond the Age of Machines" are now available on this website.

This includes a short introduction, manifesto, and the book's main 12 theses.

Chapter 3, "The Age of Machines," explains exactly what we mean by this term, why anyone in their right mind would write a book with this title at this point in history, and how humanity has lost perspective of its own limits through the very recent view that the whole world is a machine.

Chapter 4, "Death to the Demon," talks about various kinds of determinism and how Laplace's demon still haunts this world, even though we thought we had vanquished it ages ago.

Chapter 5, "A Large World," introduces the distinction between small and large worlds, which is extremely important for setting up a theory of (scientific) knowledge for our age, and also to understand the fundamental differences between organisms and algorithms/machines.

Each chapter has a feedback form at the end. If you read the book and you find it interesting, or annoying, or flawed, or whatever, please leave your comment at the end of the relevant chapter. The whole idea of writing this book online is to improve it through crowdsourced wisdom.

Thanks in advance to everyone who makes the effort. If you say something that makes it into the final edition, and you leave your name in the feedback form, we will mention you in the acknowledgments of the book.

Last but not least, I'd like to point you to the wonderful illustrations Marcus has made for the book (see the small sample in this post). Not all of the above chapters are already illustrated, so it's worth checking back every once in a while to see what Marcus has been up to in the meantime.

Enjoy the read!