"On the surface, a doctor in rural India, a food delivery worker in Pittsburgh, and an activist exiled from China have nothing in common. Yet their lives are linked by their unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence, from technology that marks children as future criminals to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community. In Code Dependent, Madhumita Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world. AI has already infiltrated our day-to-day existences through social media algorithms and language-generating chatbots such as ChatGPT. But it's also affecting us in more insidious ways. It touches everything from our interpersonal relationships to our kids' education, our work, finances, public services, and even our human rights. By highlighting the voices of ordinary people in places far removed from Silicon Valley, Code Dependent explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed, and often exploitative technologies on individuals and wider society. It also reveals the immense power a small group of companies in Northern California exerts over communities and governments worldwide. The ways in which algorithms and their effects are governed in the coming years will profoundly impact us all. Yet we cannot agree on a common path forward. We cannot decide what preferences and morals we want to encode in these entities--or what controls we may want to impose on them. We are collectively relinquishing our moral authority to machines. Madhumita Murgia's brilliant book not only sheds light on this chilling phenomenon but also charts a path of resistance. AI is already changing what it means to be human, in ways large and small, and Murgia reveals what could happen if we fail to reclaim our humanity."-- Front flap.