ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents that there is the sheer scale of systems of digitization, of technological automation and of social relations threaded through artificial intelligence (AI) - all being key global enablers of the digital data economy. AI is not a ‘new technology’ which simply transcends, or renders redundant, previous technologies. The complex, adaptive digital systems of AI should not be viewed as simply products of the contemporary but, in part, depend upon technological systems which have developed at earlier historical periods. Whilst the emergence of complex communication networks coincided with the advent of industrialization, it was in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century that digital communication technologies and networks were systematically established on a global scale. AI technologies go all the way down into the very fabric of lived experience and the textures of human subjectivity, personal life and cultural identities.
