Books
In Defense of Limits: Human Time and AI Scale
Due out on March 9, 2027, by MIT Press
Pre-order nowIn the age of AI — an era obsessed with measuring, quantifying, and trading everything — how can we recognize and realize the value of each unique and precious human life? The answer, Esther tells us in her highly anticipated second book, is good questions: How can we flourish within our limits — of time, scale, and scope — even as we consider what we can share while we’re alive and pass along when we leave? What are the differences in limits between humans and AI, and what are the implications of those differences? How can we use our own limits to set priorities to realize our own immeasurable value during our finite lives? What role should limits play in formal sectors such as business, government, and philanthropy, where the interplay between power and money corrupts intentions and destroys value?
Observing her own limits, Esther does not try to explain or predict everything. Instead, she prompts us not just to consider some solutions, but also to ask our own questions and consider our own relationships with AI.
Praise for In Defense of Limits
"Esther Dyson has known everyone and seen everything in the modern high-tech era. In this original and infectiously readable book, she shares the most precious thing she has learned: The right questions to keep asking about our digital and human futures."
James Fallows
author of Our Towns, National Book Award recipient
“In a time captivated by hyper-efficient algorithms and the rapid growth of AI, Esther Dyson's In Defense of Limits beautifully reminds us that our unique human essence lies not in flawless computation, but in our finite time. A vital reminder that embracing our natural limits is necessary to truly flourish.”
Lili Cheng
Corporate Vice President and Managing Director, Microsoft Research Americas
“Esther Dyson has connections to the movers and shakers in the tech world that are second to none. There’s no one better qualified to share useful wisdom about where AI is going.”
Neal Stephenson
#1 New York Times bestselling author of Polostan and Cryptonomicon
“A masterwork by our generation's smartest and most empathetic analyst of technology and society, writing at the very top of her game. Esther Dyson deftly dismantles today's myths of immortality and limitless growth, revealing instead the power in embracing the vitality and poignancy of a life lived in the present, bound by place, and inspired by its very ephemerality.”
Douglas Rushkoff
author of Survival of the Richest and Team Human
"Immortality is just one "t" away from immorality. It would be bad for us in every sense of the word to live forever or to become infinitely wealthy. Esther explains why death and taxes are not just inevitable, but actually good for us."
Kim Scott
author of Radical Candor
"I have known Esther Dyson for twenty-five years, and this is unmistakably her book. It is curious, humble and candid. It speaks to what she has learned by showing up, asking questions and listening. She turns a lifetime spent at the technological frontier into a deeply human case for protecting our agency, purpose, and care.”
Azeem Azhar
Founder, Exponential View; author of The Exponential Age
"With her new book In Defense of Limits, tech-maven-investor and sage Esther Dyson argues that our present AI vexations may work out, if we focus on keeping our institutions and interhuman relationships reasonable and sane. If nothing else, that will offer our new cyber-children a better role-model than most of what they are observing right now.”
David Brin
author of The Transparent Society, Earth, and The Postman
“A passionate plea to choose quality over quantity, connection over isolation and depth over superficiality in our lives with AI. As tech-veteran Dyson implores, to embrace the good we need guardrails, limits.”
Marietje Schaake
Financial Times columnist; author of The Tech Coup
Previous
Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (1997)
Esther presents a fascinating exploration of our new digital society, offering a detailed view of the rapidly expanding digital environment and providing a framework that will allow all of us to think intelligently about its effect on every aspect of our private and public lives. She charts the implications of the Internet for business, government, education, communities, and individuals, and illuminates the fundamental conflicts in the spread of digital communication: conflicts between personal privacy and society's interest in openness, between security and freedom, between commerce and community, between government oversight and personal autonomy, between flourishing creativity and the protection of intellectual property.
Written with an insider's knowledge and a ready wit, and filled with anecdotes about the movers and shakers behind both products and policy, Release 2.0 provides readers with a full understanding of the new world of cyberspace and shows how it is transforming the way we work and live. The challenge, and the opportunity, is for citizens to resolve these conflicts and trade-offs in their own public and private communities.
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You can email Esther at edyson using this site's domain name.