<h2>Book Review: The Ethics of AI: Power, Critique, Responsibility</h2>Rainer Mühlhoff’s The Ethics of AI: Power, Critique, Responsibility, published by Bristol University Press in 2025, is a timely and thought-provoking examination of artificial intelligence from a philosophical and social perspective. At 232 pages, the book moves beyond the common tendency to discuss AI ethics primarily in terms of abstract principles such as fairness, transparency, and safety. Instead, Mühlhoff asks a more fundamental question: who has power through AI, how is that power exercised, and who is responsible for its consequences? The book is openly available under a Creative Commons licence, making it particularly valuable for students and researchers.&nbsp;The central argument is that AI should not be understood as a neutral technological tool. According to Mühlhoff, AI systems are embedded within social, economic, political, and technological structures that influence how they are designed and used. The author therefore proposes a “power-aware ethics of AI”, encouraging readers to examine the relationships between technology and power rather than concentrating only on the behaviour of individual users or developers. The book's introduction explicitly frames the project around what it means to do a power-aware ethics of AI.&nbsp;&nbsp;The book is organised into three major sections: The Power of AI, The Power of Prediction, and The Power of Control. This structure is one of its strongest features because it shows how AI can exercise influence at different levels. The first section examines the nature of AI itself, human involvement in supposedly automated systems, the influence of technological design, and the relationship between AI and human subjectivity. Particularly important is the chapter on Human-Aided AI, which challenges the assumption that AI systems are completely autonomous and demonstrates the continuing importance of human labour and participation.&nbsp;&nbsp;The second section focuses on prediction, one of the most important functions of contemporary AI. Mühlhoff examines AI systems as prediction machines and explores the consequences for privacy and knowledge. The concept of predictive privacy is particularly significant because modern AI can infer information about individuals even when they have not explicitly provided it. This raises questions that traditional concepts of privacy may not adequately address. The book therefore demonstrates that AI can create new forms of knowledge and influence simply by analysing patterns in large quantities of data.&nbsp;The final section, The Power of Control, examines AI cybernetics, opacity, algorithmic bias, and collective responsibility. These chapters are particularly relevant to contemporary debates about AI governance. Mühlhoff argues that the difficulty of understanding how complex machine-learning systems reach particular outcomes can create serious problems of accountability. If an algorithm influences employment, financial opportunities, social services, or other important decisions, determining who is responsible for an unjust outcome becomes increasingly difficult. The chapter on collective responsibility therefore moves the discussion away from blaming a single programmer or user and toward examining the wider systems in which AI operates.&nbsp;&nbsp;One of the book's greatest strengths is its interdisciplinary approach. Mühlhoff combines philosophy, ethics, technology studies, political thought, and examples from contemporary digital systems. He is particularly interested in how AI can influence everyday behaviour through mechanisms such as prediction, optimisation, targeting, and design. Consequently, the book is not concerned only with hypothetical future scenarios in which machines become autonomous or superintelligent. Instead, it focuses on the forms of power that already exist in today's AI systems. This makes the book highly relevant to current discussions about AI regulation, social media, data protection, algorithmic discrimination, and corporate power.There are nevertheless some limitations. Readers seeking a technical explanation of machine learning will find relatively little practical programming or mathematical material. The book is fundamentally a work of critical AI ethics, rather than an AI engineering textbook. In addition, its strong emphasis on power and critique means that questions about the potential benefits of AI sometimes receive less attention than questions concerning its risks and social consequences. Readers interested in developing a balanced framework for responsible AI may therefore wish to complement it with literature on innovation, human-centred AI, and the positive social applications of technology.&nbsp;Overall, The Ethics of AI: Power, Critique, Responsibility is an important contribution to contemporary AI ethics. Its most significant contribution is its insistence that ethical AI cannot be achieved simply by adding principles or technical safeguards to existing systems. We must also examine the structures of power, responsibility, and control within which those systems operate. This makes the book especially valuable for research into AI governance, human dignity, privacy, algorithmic bias, social justice, technology and society.&nbsp;&nbsp;Full book: <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.20433222?utm_source=chatgpt.com">Download *The Ethics of AI* — JSTOR Open Access</a>

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In a world where artificial intelligence increasingly influences the fabric of our daily lives, this accessible book offers a critical examination of AI and its deep entanglement with power structures. Rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios, it emphasises how AI impacts our everyday interactions and social norms in ways that fundamentally reshape society. By examining the different forms of exploitation and manipulation in the relationship between humans and AI, the book advocates for collective responsibility, better regulation and systemic change.

This is a resounding manifesto for rethinking AI ethics through a power-aware lens. With detailed analysis of real-world examples and technological insights, it is essential reading for anyone invested in the future of AI policy, scholarly critique and societal integration.

The Ethics of AI: Power, Critique, Responsibility

<h2>Book Review: Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities</h2>Edited by Hannes Bajohr, Open Humanities Press, 2025Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities, edited by Hannes Bajohr, is a timely and intellectually ambitious collection that examines the rapidly changing relationship between artificial intelligence and the humanities. Published by Open Humanities Press in 2025, the book brings together scholars from fields including philosophy, literary studies, media studies, history, and digital humanities. Unlike many books that approach artificial intelligence primarily as a technological development or a social problem, this volume asks a more challenging question: what can the humanities learn by thinking with AI, rather than simply thinking about AI?&nbsp;The central argument of the book is that AI should not be treated merely as an external technology that humanities scholars observe and criticize. Instead, concepts associated with machine learning, data processing, pattern recognition, and generative systems can become intellectual tools for reconsidering fundamental humanistic questions. These include the nature of meaning, language, representation, creativity, knowledge, history, writing, and culture. In this sense, the book does not attempt to provide a technical introduction to artificial intelligence. Rather, it uses AI as a lens through which longstanding questions about human thought and cultural production can be reconsidered.&nbsp;The collection contains essays by scholars including Peli Grietzer, Leif Weatherby, Mercedes Bunz, Hannes Bajohr, Fabian Offert, Lev Manovich, Babette Babich, Markus Krajewski, Orit Halpern, Christina Vagt, and Audrey Borowski. Their contributions approach AI from very different perspectives. For example, the book considers how neural networks challenge conventional ideas about language and symbolic systems, how generative AI changes our understanding of writing, and how multimodal AI complicates the traditional distinction between text and image. Other chapters examine AI's relationship with history, aesthetics, philosophy, and the development of technological knowledge.&nbsp;A particularly interesting aspect of the book is its treatment of generative AI and writing. The emergence of systems such as ChatGPT raises fundamental questions about authorship and creativity: if a machine can generate coherent text, what does it mean to write? Is generated text simply a new technological form of writing, or does it require us to rethink the concept of writing itself? Mercedes Bunz's chapter, for example, examines the mechanics of large language models alongside established theories of language and writing, arguing that generated writing may represent the beginning of a new form of writing with its own cultural logic.&nbsp;The book is also valuable because it does not approach AI with either unquestioning optimism or straightforward technological pessimism. Critical AI scholarship has often concentrated on problems such as surveillance, exclusion, inequality, and the concentration of technological power. Thinking with AI retains these critical concerns but attempts to go further. It asks what AI reveals about concepts that existed long before current AI systems, including aesthetic judgment, historical interpretation, language, knowledge, and human creativity. This makes the book particularly useful for readers interested in the philosophical and cultural consequences of AI rather than simply its technical capabilities.&nbsp;Nevertheless, the book has some limitations. It is an edited academic collection rather than a conventional introductory textbook, and some chapters are conceptually demanding. Readers looking for practical explanations of machine-learning algorithms, programming techniques, neural-network architectures, or step-by-step applications of AI may find the book unsuitable. Its primary purpose is intellectual exploration rather than technical instruction. Some arguments also require familiarity with philosophical and humanities scholarship, which may make sections difficult for readers coming from a purely technological background.&nbsp;Overall, Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities is a valuable and contemporary contribution to the growing field of AI and the humanities. Its greatest contribution is its insistence that artificial intelligence should not be understood solely as a technological tool but also as a phenomenon capable of challenging fundamental assumptions about human knowledge, creativity, language, culture, and meaning. For researchers interested in the relationship between AI, humanities, ethics, culture, education, and society, the book provides a strong conceptual foundation. It is particularly relevant to current debates about whether AI will merely automate existing intellectual activities or instead transform the way humans understand and produce knowledge. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in education, research, cultural production, and everyday life, the book's central proposition—that we should learn to think with AI while remaining critically aware of its limitations and consequences—is both timely and significant. The book is also freely available as an open-access PDF from Open Humanities Press, making it especially accessible for researchers and students.

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A collected volume of essays published by the Open Humanities Press explores a novel approach to the intersection of AI and the humanities, proposing that instead of merely writing about AI, scholars should think with AI. Rather than treating AI as an external subject of study, the essays explore how concepts from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science can provide ways to rethink core humanistic questions of meaning, representation, and culture.

Machine Learning the Humanities

Monetary law is essential to the functioning of private transactions and international dealings by the state: nearly every legal transaction has a monetary aspect. Money in the Western Legal Tradition presents the first comprehensive analysis of Western monetary law, covering the civil law and Anglo-American common law legal systems from the High Middle Ages up to the middle of the 20th century. Weaving a detailed tapestry of the changing concepts of money and private transactions throughout the ages, the contributors investigate the special contribution made by legal scholars and practitioners to our understanding of money and the laws that govern it. Divided in five parts, the book begins with the coin currency of the Middle Ages, moving through the invention of nominalism in the early modern period to cashless payment and the rise of the banking system and paper money, then charting the progression to fiat money in the modern era. Each part commences with an overview of the monetary environment for the historical period written by an economic historian or numismatist. These are followed by chapters describing the legal doctrines of each period in civil and common law. Each section contains examples of contemporary litigation or statute law which engages with the distinctive issues affecting the monetary law of the period. This interdisciplinary approach reveals the distinctive conception of money prevalent in each period, which either facilitated or hampered the implementation of economic policy and the operation of private transactions.

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Money in the Western Legal Tradition presents the first comprehensive analysis of Western monetary law, covering the civil law and Anglo-American common law legal systems from the High Middle Ages up to the middle of the 20th century.

Money in the western legal tradition

A critical examination of economics’s&nbsp;past and future, and how it needs to change, by one of the most eminent political economists of our time. &nbsp; The dominant view in economics is that money and government should play only a minor role in economic life. Economic outcomes, it is claimed, are best left to the “invisible hand” of the market. Yet these claims remain staunchly unsettled. The view taken in this important new book is that the omnipresence of uncertainty makes money and government essential features of any market economy. &nbsp; Since Adam Smith, classical economics has espoused nonintervention in markets. The Great Depression brought Keynesian economics to the fore, but stagflation in the 1970s brought a return to small-state orthodoxy. The 2008 global financial crash should have brought a reevaluation of that stance; instead the response has been punishing austerity and anemic recovery. This book aims to reintroduce Keynes’s central insights to a new generation of economists, and embolden them to return money and government to the starring roles in the economic drama that they deserve.

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A critical examination of economics’s past and future, and how it needs to change, by one of the most eminent political economists of our time.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

The optimum quantity of money is a normative monetary policy conclusion drawn from the long-run properties of a theoretical model. Most famously associated with Milton Friedman, the optimum calls for a zero nominal rate of interest and thus a steady state of price deflation at the long-run real rate of interest. Although this policy prescription has played a minor role in monetary policy implementation, it has had an enormous influence in monetary theory.

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The optimum quantity of money is a normative monetary policy conclusion drawn from the long-run properties of a theoretical model. 

The Optimum Quantity of Money

The director of the Center of Contemporary Jurisprudence (Fiqh), Hujjatul Islam Wal Muslimin Ethna-Ashari in this video discusses Seminary Qualifications. He discusses that the seminaries possess deep-rooted intellectual and non-intellectual traditions and are perhaps among the oldest educational centers in the world. He goes to report that outside the Islamic Republic of Iran the outputs of the seminaries, whether in philosophy, theology, rational sciences, or in jurisprudence and ethics have been praised. and finally the director questions how these qualifications—like ijtihad can be given global recognition and accreditation.

The director of the Center of Contemporary Jurisprudence (Fiqh), discusses Seminary Qualifications and how it can be given global recognition and accreditation.

Seminary Qualifications

IRIB Quran TV Channel Interview with Hujjatul Islam Wal Muslimin Ethna-Ashari - Director of Center of Contemporary Jurisprudence (Fiqh) of the Islamic seminary has been broadcasted whereby a whole program was dedicated on this center. Subjects taught and researched upon was discussed and a long list of significant international issues were mentioned including stock markets and capital markets, medical jurisprudence, legal entities, legislative jurisprudence, child rights, and AI.&nbsp;

IRIB Quran TV Channel Interview with Director of Center of Contemporary Jurisprudence (Fiqh) discussing the subjects, taught, researched and published

IRIB Quran TV Channel Interview

The works and aims of the Center of Contemporary Jurisprudence (Fiqh) has been introduced in a news broadcast on IRIB News TV channel. It mentions that eight academic research groups had been formed that have worked and published on a variety of fields of Jurisprudence of economics, cyberspace, artificial intelligence as well as constitutional law, human rights, procedural law and international studies.

The works and aims of the Center of Contemporary Jurisprudence (Fiqh) has been introduced in IRIB News TV channel.

IRIB News Interview

Introduction to Centre of Contemporary Jurisprudence (Fiqh) broadcasted on IRIB News Channel

Introduction to Centre of Contemporary Jurisprudence (Fiqh) broadcasted on IRIB News Channel

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