In a time of existential threats from climate change, computer-based superintelligences, AI-accelerated nuclear and biological warfare and more, we can no longer avoid some profound questions about what's going on.
Why is it that what we've been taught to celebrate as progress, as modern history's greatest social and technical achievements, are now threatening our very existence?
Author Wade Rowland writes that the worst of these global crises are the fruits of a basic error made by well-intentioned Enlightenment thinkers at the dawn of the scientific revolution: a misunderstanding of the essence of humanity. In assuming the worst about human nature and fashioning a civilization based on those false assumptions, some of early modern philosophy's most revered thinkers set us on a dangerous path.
Rowland argues that by better understanding human nature in the light of current scientific and philosophical knowledge, we can better—and we can do better.
Because we have what it takes—because we are good.

Ranked among Canada's leading literary journalists, Wade Rowland is the author of more than a dozen non-fiction books including Ockham's Razor, Greed, Inc., and Saving the CBC. He spent many years in television news production at the network level and has held senior management roles at both CTV and CBC, where he was also senior producer of the consumer affairs program Marketplace. Rowland holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture and is currently Associate Professor at York University. Born in Montreal, he grew up in Regina and Winnipeg and currently lives in rural Port Hope, Ontario, with his wife Christine Collie Rowland.

Wade Rowland's profile page

"Timely. Necessary. Urgent. Wade Rowland asks which will ultimately predominate - our Humanity or the Machine?" —Jeffrey Dvorkin.