Being Human in the Digital World
Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Provides new ways of interrogating our humanity as AI reshapes our socio-political relationships, lived environments, and bodies.

Beate Roessler (Edited by), Valerie Steeves (Edited by)

9781009383875, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 November 2025

224 pages
28 x 19 x 2 cm, 0.44 kg

Being Human in the Digital World is a collection of essays by prominent scholars from various disciplines exploring the impact of digitization on culture, politics, health, work, and relationships. The volume raises important questions about the future of human existence in a world where machine readability and algorithmic prediction are increasingly prevalent and offers new conceptual frameworks and vocabularies to help readers understand and challenge emerging paradigms of what it means to be human. Being Human in the Digital World is an invaluable resource for readers interested in the cultural, economic, political, philosophical, and social conditions that are necessary for a good digital life. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. Introduction Beate Roessler and Valerie Steeves
Part I. Conceptualizing the Digital Human: 2. Platform city people David Murakami Wood
3. Robots, humans, and their vulnerabilities Beate Roessler
4. Cultural foundations for conserving human capacities in an era of generative artificial intelligence: toward a philosophico-literary critique of simulation Frank Pasquale
5. Surveillance and human flourishing: pandemic challenges David Lyon
Part II. Living the Digital Life: 6. Is there an obligation to be machine readable? Solon Barocas, Margot Hanley and Helen Nissenbaum
7. Carebots: gender, empire and the capacity to dissent Chloé S. Georas
8. Networked communities and the algorithmic other Valerie Steeves
9. The birth of code|body Azadeh Akbari
Part III. Technology and Policy: 10. Exploitation in the platform age Daniel Susser
11. People as packets in the age of algorithmic mobility shaping Jason Millar and Elizabeth Grey
12. Doughnut privacy: a preliminary thought experiment Julie E. Cohen.

Subject Areas: IT & Communications law [LNQ]