Wise Animals

  • Author Tom Chatfield
  • Narrator Tom Chatfield
  • Publisher Pan Macmillan
  • Run Time 9 hours and 47 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Technology: general issues.
Get in the xigxag app
This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.
Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Evocatively read by the author, Tom Chatfield.

'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

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.

Critics Review

  • 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, New York Times bestselling author of Curation, Human Frontiers and 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

  • Both thought-provoking and startlingly original, Wise Animals is Tom Chatfield’s magnum opus.

    Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World

More from the same

Author

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.