Ubud Writers and Readers Festival: Burning Books, Accepting Artifice: Man or Machine?

From the printing press to the internet, each technological shift has been met with fears about what might be lost alongside what is gained. Is AI simply another such turning point, or something fundamentally different? As intelligence becomes increasingly centralised and commercialised, what happens to critical thinking, scholarship, and our capacity to interpret the world for ourselves? Join author Richard King and social anthropologist Brian Lang, moderated by Emily Broadmore, as they discuss the risks of an intellectual purge, and what happens when technological progress reshapes what it means to be human.