New book: The Technological Imperative. Why we develop our media. Essays on human agency and AI

As media evolution is driven by the technological imperative (media seeking better performance), AI may not need agency at all.

Hello, media determinists. This blog was paused for a while because I was busy finishing my book The technological imperative. Why we develop our media. Essays on human agency and AI. It is now available on Amazon.

Funny thing: there is a period when I post the book on Amazon and then keep it to myself to make first orders, to look at it from outside, through the reader’s eye, and fix the last (hopefully) bugs. While I was doing it, without announcing the book, somebody somehow found it and started buying it. And not just once—five people bought the book before it was announced. It happens to me for the first time. Perhaps AI monitors everything about itself and buys it to check and neutralize… or perhaps people are so eager to read something about AI that they search for new titles, I don’t know.

It seems there are so many articles and books on AI that there shouldn’t be any shortage. But this book certainly presents a unique approach: it’s not about AI, it’s about the technological imperative that has driven media evolution toward AI, dragging human civilization along, in the same direction, to the same end… So read, like, share. The book is fairly short, 130 pages, and densely packed with ideas, some of which might look crazy. Here is the foreword.

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Do humans or technologies shape history? That’s the core question of techno-determinism, and it became crucial during the Cold War: are we doomed just because a doomsday weapon has already been made, or can we still control its power? A somewhat similar question resurfaces with AI. Are we served by AI, or do we serve AI? More broadly, does media evolution maintain human development, or, on the contrary, does human development maintain the evolution of media?

The essays in this book are organized around the concept of the technological imperative—the inherent tendency of any technology to move toward greater performance and capability. Acting as the invisible hand of media evolution, the technological imperative has driven the long co-development of humans and their media to the point where we are about to create artificial intelligence.

Coupled with the acceleration of historical time, the technological imperative has brought humankind into a future that is no longer distant. In just a few years, we have moved from debating whether artificial intelligence can pass the Turing test (a now largely forgotten topic) and its lack of creativity, to fearing that AI is taking human jobs. Yet AI keeps moving faster than our worries: while we debate human-AI competition in the workplace, AI systems are already assembling teams of agents to tackle complex problems, reshaping the very meaning of work in the knowledge economy.

At this pace, it becomes hard to see the bigger picture and address the bigger questions. In the meantime, some of those bigger questions have acquired urgent, practical significance. For example, how do you prove you are human? What was a philosophical question just yesterday is fast becoming an everyday legal, social, and bureaucratic challenge. Suddenly, sophisticated media ecological theories become relevant and have to yield simple, practical answers: to prove you’re human, you need to show your ID, effort, or flaws.

This selection of essays rethinks established concepts and introduces new ones. It examines how AI is reshaping human experience and offers a glimpse into a future that, until recently, felt safely remote.

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The table of contents

• Foreword

• The acceleration problem: exponential AI upends incremental history

• The technological imperative

• Vygotsky and the child language of AI

• As speech shrinks — thought starves. Cognitive effects of digital orality

• If art has reversed from pursuing beauty to seeking self-expression…

• Generating knowledge with AI: Epistemic partnership?

• Robo-journalism before and after ChatGPT

• How to prove you’re human? You have three options: show human ID, show human effort, show human flaws

• There is no “I” in AI (but not that “I” that you think)

• Cascade of Singularities. A futuristic speculation

• Digital orality, the digital reversal, postjournalism, and the future of media

• The emancipation of intelligence

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Check it out on Amazon, Kindle and paperback copies are available:

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See other books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)