The Atomic Human
What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI

This is a real curate’s egg of a book. Let’s start with the title - it feels totally wrong for what the book’s about. ‘The Atomic Human’ conjures up some second rate superhero. What Neil Lawrence is getting at is the way atoms were originally conceived as what you get when you pare back more and mor......more

Don't read it if you are not okay with some disappointment. This book lacks good quality editing. It is longer than needed, badly structured and very badly drifting at points. I can see a much better version of this book with around 100 pages or more truncated, many stories removed, and paragraphs......more

Full review and summary. Lawrence pushes us to think about what it means to be human as AI keeps advancing. He introduces the idea of the “atomic human,” which represents the part of us that’s unbreakable and can’t be copied by machines. This isn’t about literal atoms; it’s a metaphor for our core es......more

I enjoyed reading Lawrence's book a lot. I loved the clear description of I/O throughput issues that humans have compared to a machine, as well as the critique to the reductionist approach to computer science. Moreover, as a young professional in the space, it was really interesting for me to get an......more