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Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI
Today's computer scientists play the same role as the oracles of the ancient world and the astrologers of the Middle Ages. Modern predictions not only advise on war, crop output, and marriages, but algorithms and statisticians also now determine whether we can get a loan, a job, an apartment, or an organ transplant. And when we cede ground to these predictions, we lose control of our own lives.
In this powerful, refreshing new look at the many ways prediction shapes our everyday lives, University of Oxford professor Carissa Véliz explains how putting too much stock in others' predictions makes us vulnerable to charlatans, con artists, dubious technology, and self-deception. Examining a wide range of subjects both personal and societal, including medicine, climate, technology, society, and others, Véliz uncovers a number of predictions about humans tend to be self-fulfilling; more data doesn't guarantee better outcomes; AI is more likely to increase risk than decrease it; and a free and robust society requires not more prediction, but better preparation.
Véliz argues in this incisive and bracingly original book that the main promise of prediction is not knowledge of the future, but rather power over others. Prophecy is an invitation to defy those orders and live life on our own terms.
In this powerful, refreshing new look at the many ways prediction shapes our everyday lives, University of Oxford professor Carissa Véliz explains how putting too much stock in others' predictions makes us vulnerable to charlatans, con artists, dubious technology, and self-deception. Examining a wide range of subjects both personal and societal, including medicine, climate, technology, society, and others, Véliz uncovers a number of predictions about humans tend to be self-fulfilling; more data doesn't guarantee better outcomes; AI is more likely to increase risk than decrease it; and a free and robust society requires not more prediction, but better preparation.
Véliz argues in this incisive and bracingly original book that the main promise of prediction is not knowledge of the future, but rather power over others. Prophecy is an invitation to defy those orders and live life on our own terms.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published April 21, 2026
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April 21, 2026
The Authority of What Has Not Yet Happened
Carissa Véliz’s “Prophecy” traces prediction from sacred theater to algorithmic power, revealing how forecasts can become scripts before lives have had time to answer.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 20th, 2026
In the cold half-light of “Prophecy,” an oracle-machine watches over an unsigned page, while the door waits to decide whether a life may enter its own future.
A forecast is never only a forecast once someone else has to live under it. It may arrive in modest clothes: a probability, a score, a risk label, an institutional hunch with decimal places and a frictionless interface. But once it helps decide who gets the loan, the job, the apartment, the hospital bed, the prison sentence, or a feed’s attention, it has stopped behaving like weather and started behaving like a script.
Carissa Véliz’s “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI” is sharpest at that threshold: where a guess gains power over a life. Prediction may fail, of course. The deeper trouble begins when it changes incentives, access, and behavior until the forecast starts to look fated. The person denied the chance is then told the system merely saw what was coming. How tidy. How ancient.
The book returns to that threshold until repetition becomes a form of pressure. Véliz has not written another solemn sermon about machines. She reaches backward into temples, omens, entrails, court astrologers, monarchs, con men, and the old commerce of dread. Her claim is that the prediction trade is not as modern as its vendors and evangelists prefer to imagine. Algorithms may run on data rather than laurel smoke, but they often perform an ancient bargain: fear sold back as authority. A prophecy, in this account, is not only a guess about what comes next. It is a maneuver of power with better lighting.
“Prophecy” begins by letting the reader hear the machinery under the floorboards. Perhaps an algorithm helped bring this book to your attention; perhaps a bookseller, librarian, friend, publisher, or publicist made a quieter forecast about your taste. The joke opens into a trapdoor. Predictions now shape credit files, job offers, housing decisions, medical care, online visibility, state force, and institutional punishment. Véliz is not arguing that all forecasting is foolish. Weather apps, epidemiologists, and doctors all have good reasons to look ahead. Her point is severe in the way useful arguments often are: when predictions about people acquire the tone that makes objection seem rude, institutions can punish us for futures that have not happened and may never happen. The question is not only whether the model is accurate. It is who has been allowed to turn a guess into a gate.
Before the closed door, the figure has not yet acted, but the score has already learned how to stand in for judgment.
First “Prophecy” seduces, then it indicts, then it asks how to live without kneeling. Oracles, astrologers, probability, measurement, risk, and AI as the contemporary Oracle of Delphi establish prediction’s glamour. Forecasts mistaken for facts, guesses hardened into verdicts, surveillance systems that turn people into profiles easier to price, rank, and police, and the stubborn survival of the unforeseeable expose its damage. The final movement turns toward truth, virtue, beauty, creativity, humor, resilience, democracy, Epicurus, and the art of not outsourcing one’s courage to a forecast. The sequence teaches the reader how to distrust without merely curling into paranoia. It is not a retreat from foresight. It is a refusal to confuse foresight with rule.
Véliz is especially good on the old theater of prophecy: the strange, lucrative, occasionally ridiculous business of knowing before others do. Tiberius tests astrologers and throws failures off cliffs. Delphi becomes sacred site, tourist economy, political theater, meat market, and prestige machine. Alexander of Abonoteichus manufactures the snake-god Glycon through masks, tubes, sealed-scroll tricks, charisma, and stagecraft good enough to pass for revelation.
These episodes are funny because human beings are funny when frightened, and chilling because frightened people are profitable. The old material is not decorative. It teaches the reader where to look first. Follow the fear. Follow the money. Follow the person who claims the world has already been read.
Prophecy begins as theater and invoice: a false god, a sealed scroll, and the old human wish to buy certainty from the dark.
That long backward glance earns its keep. Véliz makes us sit with older prophets before she lets the new ones enter the room. By the time the tech executive appears as court oracle, the comparison has earned its robe. Artificial intelligence does not look like a clean rupture from the past. It looks like the latest costume worn by the same triangle of dread, money, and power, plus the promise that someone else can tell us what we are about to become. The robe fits for a long while. When the cloth pulls, the strain matters.
The prose keeps scraping the polish off prediction. Véliz writes in sharp declarative bursts when she wants the argument to strike: predictions are not facts; prediction is power; the future is not yet available for inspection. Elsewhere, she opens into longer, theatrical passages full of temples, smoke, Oxford dinners, collapsing ceilings, fraudulent snakes, terrified rulers, and modern executives enjoying the ancient pleasure of being consulted. Her diction is clear enough to travel fast, charged enough to cut. She likes words with moral weight: truth, power, virtue, beauty, verdict, command, script. She also has a comic instinct that keeps the book from becoming sermon-shaped. The jokes do not land with equal delicacy, but the liveliness matters. A neutral version of this argument would be tidier and far less memorable. This one has elbows.
The style carries part of the case. Véliz is attacking neutrality with a thumb on the scale. Her own voice does not pretend to be a voice without fingerprints. It is learned, impatient, witty, occasionally severe, and willing to let a grotesque image do honest work. That choice gives the book personality, but it also gives it a method. “Prophecy” wants to de-sanitize prediction. It wants the model to smell faintly of incense, money, sweat, and institutional carpet.
Véliz’s sharpest move is to ask not whether a prediction works, but who has permission to let it decide. Many books about algorithms stop at accuracy: did the system classify correctly, predict reliably, malfunction visibly? Véliz asks who gets to predict whom, with what data, under what authority, for whose benefit, and at whose cost. That is more disturbing than the familiar story in which a model reads the past badly and someone loses a chance. A risk score may be statistically defensible and still morally suspect. A forecast may be plausible and still abusive. A system may sort quickly and call it wisdom.
Here “Prophecy” belongs near “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil, though Véliz is less case-based and more philosophical. It glances toward “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in its impatience with predictive arrogance, though her concern is less market uncertainty than power over other people’s chances. In its movement from technological critique to the possibility of living otherwise, it has a distant kinship with “How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell, though Véliz is more combative, less meditative, and more likely to bring an unsafe emperor to the party. Useful, briefly. Then someone should hide the knives.
The strongest chapter may be “When Predictions Become Verdicts.” Véliz begins with Caracalla and Macrinus: a prophecy that Macrinus will become emperor helps create the conditions under which Macrinus has Caracalla murdered and succeeds him. It is the book’s thesis in miniature. The prediction does not simply foresee the future; it intervenes in it. From there, Véliz develops self-fulfilling prophecy across education, business, finance, racism, sexism, venture capital, publishing, and surveillance. Her most forceful claim is that predictions about human beings can operate as statements that rearrange behavior. They appear to describe, but they also instruct, pressure, rank, invite, exclude, and command. A forecast can become a leash while still calling itself a lens.
An empty chair, a strip of paper, and a tightening shadow suggest the moment a forecast stops describing the future and begins arranging it.
The problem does not need to be imported from the headlines; the headlines merely make visible what the book already knows. We live among systems that rank us before they hear us. People are priced, filtered, recommended, ignored, targeted, nudged, deprioritized, and sometimes punished by predictions they cannot see, question, or correct. Véliz’s point is not that every model is predatory, or that every attempt to anticipate risk is tyranny in a white coat. Her better point is that prediction grows most dangerous in the places where paperwork already resembles care: hospitals, hiring systems, housing decisions, insurance, policing, feeds, institutional triage. The forecast says it is helping. The person being forecast into a corner may experience it as a door closing from the other side.
In the institutional green of “Prophecy,” people wait beneath quiet lights while unseen systems price, rank, and explain them before they speak.
The analogy eventually shows its stitching. A weather forecast, a medical prognosis, an actuarial table, a hiring algorithm, a credit score, a venture capitalist’s hunch, a chatbot’s probabilistic answer, and an oracle’s riddle all belong to the same unsettled province. They are not the same citizen. Their methods, safeguards, uses, and harms differ. Véliz knows this, and she acknowledges that some forecasts are justified and useful. But the rhetorical current runs hottest when prediction is being prosecuted as power. That heat clarifies. It also sometimes singes distinction.
The same reach that gives the book its sweep also lets too many anxieties through the door. Véliz openly wants “Prophecy” to be hard to classify: technology criticism, business book, political treatise, philosophy, partial memoir, academic critique, literary defense, humor-inflected public argument, and guide to living well. That reach gives the book range, but not every strand receives the same oxygen. The ancient material, the AI-as-oracle argument, the sections on self-fulfilling prophecy, and the closing defense of uncertainty feel essential. Some detours, especially when the target field widens to effective altruism, academia, publishing, climate, comedy, and every anxiety about what comes next, can feel less like escalation than annexation. The book never coasts, but it sometimes arrives carrying more luggage than the room can gracefully hold.
The repetition is real, though not careless. The claim that prediction is power, not knowledge, is excellent. It deserves to travel. It does travel. Then it circles the block, waves from the corner, and appears at the kitchen door with a casserole. Véliz is crossing so many domains that the thesis has to reappear in new clothes. Still, a reader may occasionally reach the destination before the paragraph does.
Yet the book would be poorer without its appetite. “Prophecy” works because Véliz understands prediction as more than a technical problem. It is a problem of fear, profit, and permission. We want forecasts because we are fragile, desiring creatures who know the last fact of the story but not its timing, texture, or terms. We want warnings. We want reassurance. We want to know whether our children will be safe, whether our work will last, whether our bodies will betray us, whether our countries will hold, whether the systems humming around us are sorting us toward shelter or ruin. Into that vulnerability comes the prophet, ancient or modern, with a fee schedule and a confident tone.
By the end, warning gives way to a harder question: how much of the future must remain unassigned? Suspicion is not the destination, only the tunnel out of false obedience. A weaker version of this book would end by scolding AI and waving a little flag marked ethics. Véliz instead asks how to live when the future cannot and should not be mastered. The final chapters argue for creativity, humor, resilience, democratic openness, and Epicurean attention to the life not yet converted into forecast. Uncertainty becomes not the embarrassing remainder left after insufficient data, but the condition of freedom. The book’s closing image of the good life as a blank page rather than a script retroactively sharpens the whole project. Prediction is dangerous not only because it may fail, but because it may steal the future by pretending to reveal it.
After the machinery of prediction recedes, the blank page remains: not proof of safety, but the fragile mercy of an unwritten life.
That turn keeps “Prophecy” from closing as another dispatch from the kingdom of smart machines and foolish humans. It does not merely ask whether machines can know us. It asks what is lost when being known in advance becomes the toll for admission. Why has the future become a credit file, a medical queue, a recommendation feed, a risk category, a moral calculation, a hiring screen, a market signal, an assigned role? And what would it mean to refuse a role prewritten by someone else’s model?
My final rating is 86/100, which corresponds to 4/5 stars. That feels like the right temperature: admiring without genuflection; persuaded by the governing lens, aware that the analogy stretches; grateful for the wit and sweep, unconvinced that every strand needed equal stage time. “Prophecy” is strongest when forecast meets gatekeeping power. It is less strong when all prediction is made to stand too near domination. But even its overreach is the overreach of a book trying to think at scale, not slackness.
What remains after the arguments, emperors, algorithms, fraudulent snakes, tech prophets, and philosophical counterspells is a useful irritation toward being sorted. The next time a system predicts you, recommends you, rejects you, scores you, ranks you, or tells you what people like you are likely to do, Véliz’s book may whisper its most useful warning: do not mistake the forecast for the life. Others may model, monetize, and market the future. They do not get the final say merely because they built the model. The middle of the page is still open, and no oracle has yet signed its name.
Early thumbnail studies test the room’s argument in miniature: desk, door, orb, page, and shadow arranged until prediction begins to feel like architecture.
The first pencil structure fixes the room’s quiet geometry before color enters: the door as gate, the page as future, the orb as watchful doubt.
The cover palette is tested as atmosphere: acid chartreuse, celadon, teal, aqua, and black-green held in tension before they become the room’s uneasy weather.
The first wash lets the room begin to breathe, softening the pencil’s administrative geometry into the cool, suspended dread of “Prophecy.”
Small motif studies refine the image’s symbolic grammar: the orb watches, the door withholds, and the blank page waits without surrendering its silence.
Instead of a visible character, this shadow study tests the human presence as absence: someone forecast, delayed, and almost but not quite erased from the room.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Carissa Véliz’s “Prophecy” traces prediction from sacred theater to algorithmic power, revealing how forecasts can become scripts before lives have had time to answer.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 20th, 2026
In the cold half-light of “Prophecy,” an oracle-machine watches over an unsigned page, while the door waits to decide whether a life may enter its own future.
A forecast is never only a forecast once someone else has to live under it. It may arrive in modest clothes: a probability, a score, a risk label, an institutional hunch with decimal places and a frictionless interface. But once it helps decide who gets the loan, the job, the apartment, the hospital bed, the prison sentence, or a feed’s attention, it has stopped behaving like weather and started behaving like a script.
Carissa Véliz’s “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI” is sharpest at that threshold: where a guess gains power over a life. Prediction may fail, of course. The deeper trouble begins when it changes incentives, access, and behavior until the forecast starts to look fated. The person denied the chance is then told the system merely saw what was coming. How tidy. How ancient.
The book returns to that threshold until repetition becomes a form of pressure. Véliz has not written another solemn sermon about machines. She reaches backward into temples, omens, entrails, court astrologers, monarchs, con men, and the old commerce of dread. Her claim is that the prediction trade is not as modern as its vendors and evangelists prefer to imagine. Algorithms may run on data rather than laurel smoke, but they often perform an ancient bargain: fear sold back as authority. A prophecy, in this account, is not only a guess about what comes next. It is a maneuver of power with better lighting.
“Prophecy” begins by letting the reader hear the machinery under the floorboards. Perhaps an algorithm helped bring this book to your attention; perhaps a bookseller, librarian, friend, publisher, or publicist made a quieter forecast about your taste. The joke opens into a trapdoor. Predictions now shape credit files, job offers, housing decisions, medical care, online visibility, state force, and institutional punishment. Véliz is not arguing that all forecasting is foolish. Weather apps, epidemiologists, and doctors all have good reasons to look ahead. Her point is severe in the way useful arguments often are: when predictions about people acquire the tone that makes objection seem rude, institutions can punish us for futures that have not happened and may never happen. The question is not only whether the model is accurate. It is who has been allowed to turn a guess into a gate.
Before the closed door, the figure has not yet acted, but the score has already learned how to stand in for judgment.
First “Prophecy” seduces, then it indicts, then it asks how to live without kneeling. Oracles, astrologers, probability, measurement, risk, and AI as the contemporary Oracle of Delphi establish prediction’s glamour. Forecasts mistaken for facts, guesses hardened into verdicts, surveillance systems that turn people into profiles easier to price, rank, and police, and the stubborn survival of the unforeseeable expose its damage. The final movement turns toward truth, virtue, beauty, creativity, humor, resilience, democracy, Epicurus, and the art of not outsourcing one’s courage to a forecast. The sequence teaches the reader how to distrust without merely curling into paranoia. It is not a retreat from foresight. It is a refusal to confuse foresight with rule.
Véliz is especially good on the old theater of prophecy: the strange, lucrative, occasionally ridiculous business of knowing before others do. Tiberius tests astrologers and throws failures off cliffs. Delphi becomes sacred site, tourist economy, political theater, meat market, and prestige machine. Alexander of Abonoteichus manufactures the snake-god Glycon through masks, tubes, sealed-scroll tricks, charisma, and stagecraft good enough to pass for revelation.
These episodes are funny because human beings are funny when frightened, and chilling because frightened people are profitable. The old material is not decorative. It teaches the reader where to look first. Follow the fear. Follow the money. Follow the person who claims the world has already been read.
Prophecy begins as theater and invoice: a false god, a sealed scroll, and the old human wish to buy certainty from the dark.
That long backward glance earns its keep. Véliz makes us sit with older prophets before she lets the new ones enter the room. By the time the tech executive appears as court oracle, the comparison has earned its robe. Artificial intelligence does not look like a clean rupture from the past. It looks like the latest costume worn by the same triangle of dread, money, and power, plus the promise that someone else can tell us what we are about to become. The robe fits for a long while. When the cloth pulls, the strain matters.
The prose keeps scraping the polish off prediction. Véliz writes in sharp declarative bursts when she wants the argument to strike: predictions are not facts; prediction is power; the future is not yet available for inspection. Elsewhere, she opens into longer, theatrical passages full of temples, smoke, Oxford dinners, collapsing ceilings, fraudulent snakes, terrified rulers, and modern executives enjoying the ancient pleasure of being consulted. Her diction is clear enough to travel fast, charged enough to cut. She likes words with moral weight: truth, power, virtue, beauty, verdict, command, script. She also has a comic instinct that keeps the book from becoming sermon-shaped. The jokes do not land with equal delicacy, but the liveliness matters. A neutral version of this argument would be tidier and far less memorable. This one has elbows.
The style carries part of the case. Véliz is attacking neutrality with a thumb on the scale. Her own voice does not pretend to be a voice without fingerprints. It is learned, impatient, witty, occasionally severe, and willing to let a grotesque image do honest work. That choice gives the book personality, but it also gives it a method. “Prophecy” wants to de-sanitize prediction. It wants the model to smell faintly of incense, money, sweat, and institutional carpet.
Véliz’s sharpest move is to ask not whether a prediction works, but who has permission to let it decide. Many books about algorithms stop at accuracy: did the system classify correctly, predict reliably, malfunction visibly? Véliz asks who gets to predict whom, with what data, under what authority, for whose benefit, and at whose cost. That is more disturbing than the familiar story in which a model reads the past badly and someone loses a chance. A risk score may be statistically defensible and still morally suspect. A forecast may be plausible and still abusive. A system may sort quickly and call it wisdom.
Here “Prophecy” belongs near “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil, though Véliz is less case-based and more philosophical. It glances toward “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in its impatience with predictive arrogance, though her concern is less market uncertainty than power over other people’s chances. In its movement from technological critique to the possibility of living otherwise, it has a distant kinship with “How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell, though Véliz is more combative, less meditative, and more likely to bring an unsafe emperor to the party. Useful, briefly. Then someone should hide the knives.
The strongest chapter may be “When Predictions Become Verdicts.” Véliz begins with Caracalla and Macrinus: a prophecy that Macrinus will become emperor helps create the conditions under which Macrinus has Caracalla murdered and succeeds him. It is the book’s thesis in miniature. The prediction does not simply foresee the future; it intervenes in it. From there, Véliz develops self-fulfilling prophecy across education, business, finance, racism, sexism, venture capital, publishing, and surveillance. Her most forceful claim is that predictions about human beings can operate as statements that rearrange behavior. They appear to describe, but they also instruct, pressure, rank, invite, exclude, and command. A forecast can become a leash while still calling itself a lens.
An empty chair, a strip of paper, and a tightening shadow suggest the moment a forecast stops describing the future and begins arranging it.
The problem does not need to be imported from the headlines; the headlines merely make visible what the book already knows. We live among systems that rank us before they hear us. People are priced, filtered, recommended, ignored, targeted, nudged, deprioritized, and sometimes punished by predictions they cannot see, question, or correct. Véliz’s point is not that every model is predatory, or that every attempt to anticipate risk is tyranny in a white coat. Her better point is that prediction grows most dangerous in the places where paperwork already resembles care: hospitals, hiring systems, housing decisions, insurance, policing, feeds, institutional triage. The forecast says it is helping. The person being forecast into a corner may experience it as a door closing from the other side.
In the institutional green of “Prophecy,” people wait beneath quiet lights while unseen systems price, rank, and explain them before they speak.
The analogy eventually shows its stitching. A weather forecast, a medical prognosis, an actuarial table, a hiring algorithm, a credit score, a venture capitalist’s hunch, a chatbot’s probabilistic answer, and an oracle’s riddle all belong to the same unsettled province. They are not the same citizen. Their methods, safeguards, uses, and harms differ. Véliz knows this, and she acknowledges that some forecasts are justified and useful. But the rhetorical current runs hottest when prediction is being prosecuted as power. That heat clarifies. It also sometimes singes distinction.
The same reach that gives the book its sweep also lets too many anxieties through the door. Véliz openly wants “Prophecy” to be hard to classify: technology criticism, business book, political treatise, philosophy, partial memoir, academic critique, literary defense, humor-inflected public argument, and guide to living well. That reach gives the book range, but not every strand receives the same oxygen. The ancient material, the AI-as-oracle argument, the sections on self-fulfilling prophecy, and the closing defense of uncertainty feel essential. Some detours, especially when the target field widens to effective altruism, academia, publishing, climate, comedy, and every anxiety about what comes next, can feel less like escalation than annexation. The book never coasts, but it sometimes arrives carrying more luggage than the room can gracefully hold.
The repetition is real, though not careless. The claim that prediction is power, not knowledge, is excellent. It deserves to travel. It does travel. Then it circles the block, waves from the corner, and appears at the kitchen door with a casserole. Véliz is crossing so many domains that the thesis has to reappear in new clothes. Still, a reader may occasionally reach the destination before the paragraph does.
Yet the book would be poorer without its appetite. “Prophecy” works because Véliz understands prediction as more than a technical problem. It is a problem of fear, profit, and permission. We want forecasts because we are fragile, desiring creatures who know the last fact of the story but not its timing, texture, or terms. We want warnings. We want reassurance. We want to know whether our children will be safe, whether our work will last, whether our bodies will betray us, whether our countries will hold, whether the systems humming around us are sorting us toward shelter or ruin. Into that vulnerability comes the prophet, ancient or modern, with a fee schedule and a confident tone.
By the end, warning gives way to a harder question: how much of the future must remain unassigned? Suspicion is not the destination, only the tunnel out of false obedience. A weaker version of this book would end by scolding AI and waving a little flag marked ethics. Véliz instead asks how to live when the future cannot and should not be mastered. The final chapters argue for creativity, humor, resilience, democratic openness, and Epicurean attention to the life not yet converted into forecast. Uncertainty becomes not the embarrassing remainder left after insufficient data, but the condition of freedom. The book’s closing image of the good life as a blank page rather than a script retroactively sharpens the whole project. Prediction is dangerous not only because it may fail, but because it may steal the future by pretending to reveal it.
After the machinery of prediction recedes, the blank page remains: not proof of safety, but the fragile mercy of an unwritten life.
That turn keeps “Prophecy” from closing as another dispatch from the kingdom of smart machines and foolish humans. It does not merely ask whether machines can know us. It asks what is lost when being known in advance becomes the toll for admission. Why has the future become a credit file, a medical queue, a recommendation feed, a risk category, a moral calculation, a hiring screen, a market signal, an assigned role? And what would it mean to refuse a role prewritten by someone else’s model?
My final rating is 86/100, which corresponds to 4/5 stars. That feels like the right temperature: admiring without genuflection; persuaded by the governing lens, aware that the analogy stretches; grateful for the wit and sweep, unconvinced that every strand needed equal stage time. “Prophecy” is strongest when forecast meets gatekeeping power. It is less strong when all prediction is made to stand too near domination. But even its overreach is the overreach of a book trying to think at scale, not slackness.
What remains after the arguments, emperors, algorithms, fraudulent snakes, tech prophets, and philosophical counterspells is a useful irritation toward being sorted. The next time a system predicts you, recommends you, rejects you, scores you, ranks you, or tells you what people like you are likely to do, Véliz’s book may whisper its most useful warning: do not mistake the forecast for the life. Others may model, monetize, and market the future. They do not get the final say merely because they built the model. The middle of the page is still open, and no oracle has yet signed its name.
Early thumbnail studies test the room’s argument in miniature: desk, door, orb, page, and shadow arranged until prediction begins to feel like architecture.
The first pencil structure fixes the room’s quiet geometry before color enters: the door as gate, the page as future, the orb as watchful doubt.
The cover palette is tested as atmosphere: acid chartreuse, celadon, teal, aqua, and black-green held in tension before they become the room’s uneasy weather.
The first wash lets the room begin to breathe, softening the pencil’s administrative geometry into the cool, suspended dread of “Prophecy.”
Small motif studies refine the image’s symbolic grammar: the orb watches, the door withholds, and the blank page waits without surrendering its silence.
Instead of a visible character, this shadow study tests the human presence as absence: someone forecast, delayed, and almost but not quite erased from the room.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
May 24, 2026
"Power is having the ability to motivate someone to think or do something that they wouldn’t otherwise."
Hence, I am using my power to write this review.
Carissa Véliz’s book is a love letter to our hopes, anxieties, and sense of awe about a future we can never control, and yet insist on trying to. She weaves together ancient prophecies, the rise of statistics and eugenics, and contemporary predictive analysis into a compelling book that I simply devoured.
There is real bravery in this writing, which faces power with the knowledge that prediction is never merely descriptive; it is a speech act, a force that helps summon the world it claims only to foresee. In that sense, this book too is a speech act: an invitation to resist, reimagine, and reclaim the future.
I have read many books that parallel this one: on technology and culture, AI ethics, behavioral science, predictive processing, neuroscience and consciousness, futures studies, and political imagination and activism. This one shoots to the top of my recommendation list. Its contribution to the field is immense. And yet, indeed, there is much more work to be done.
Beyond the scope and strength of the arguments, I was delighted by the tone and playfulness of the writing. Reading it felt like taking off your shoes, hugging a pillow, sinking into the sofa, and diving into a generous, expansive conversation in Professor Véliz’s cozy Oxford office.
I don’t often write reviews, but a prophecy led me to this book—and, if I may profess, may it lead you there too.
Hence, I am using my power to write this review.
Carissa Véliz’s book is a love letter to our hopes, anxieties, and sense of awe about a future we can never control, and yet insist on trying to. She weaves together ancient prophecies, the rise of statistics and eugenics, and contemporary predictive analysis into a compelling book that I simply devoured.
There is real bravery in this writing, which faces power with the knowledge that prediction is never merely descriptive; it is a speech act, a force that helps summon the world it claims only to foresee. In that sense, this book too is a speech act: an invitation to resist, reimagine, and reclaim the future.
I have read many books that parallel this one: on technology and culture, AI ethics, behavioral science, predictive processing, neuroscience and consciousness, futures studies, and political imagination and activism. This one shoots to the top of my recommendation list. Its contribution to the field is immense. And yet, indeed, there is much more work to be done.
Beyond the scope and strength of the arguments, I was delighted by the tone and playfulness of the writing. Reading it felt like taking off your shoes, hugging a pillow, sinking into the sofa, and diving into a generous, expansive conversation in Professor Véliz’s cozy Oxford office.
I don’t often write reviews, but a prophecy led me to this book—and, if I may profess, may it lead you there too.
June 14, 2026
The people in my life are already tired of hearing about this book. It’s a must read! Oracles, philosophers, astrology, big tech, education, a good life. It’s all in there!! Read it and be inspired!! (And yes, we will definitely be reading this as part of the OSU AI Coffee Klatch next year!)
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June 19, 2026Lo estoy dejando un poco de lado pero jo quiero retomarlo, creo que tiene temás interesantissímos pero el tono me está dando un poco de palo, como me dijo Eudald se siente un poco TedTalks con bromas, más bien chascarillos, que no terminan de aterrizar.
May 4, 2026
This is a wonderful book about the ethics of prediction - of how predictions shape the world we live in and the implications of embracing prediction machines (AI) in many spheres of life. The book is very well grounded in philosophy and some history, yet not heavy - it’s the kind that can be recommended to any intellectually curious mind as long as they are fond of reading. If you’re a researcher, you might find the grounding useful as it can serve as a foundation or scaffold for your own thinking. One of the reasons for that it because the arguments stand independent of the type of AI technology in question. This is a point that many techo-optimists miss- technology is not a panacea. If it were, no child would starve (we have the technology and capacity, and, in fact, produce enough food to feed everyone. The problem is social). In any case, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable read and I strongly recommend it.
May 28, 2026
There are a lot of books on the power of AI floating around. Many circulate familiar horror stories of how it goes wrong and the fracturing of the social fabric. Few however, ground the issue so robustly in philosophy and have such a refreshing take on the matter.
Carissa reminds us how prophecies and tellers of the future have always been aligned to power. A reminder that those that control the narrative can control reality and AI is just another iteration of this. It’s comforting to think about this latest technology wave as just another version of age old tactics in a way. It’s also a stark reminder that alternative voices, human interaction and critical thought are more important than ever.
Well worth a considered read!
Carissa reminds us how prophecies and tellers of the future have always been aligned to power. A reminder that those that control the narrative can control reality and AI is just another iteration of this. It’s comforting to think about this latest technology wave as just another version of age old tactics in a way. It’s also a stark reminder that alternative voices, human interaction and critical thought are more important than ever.
Well worth a considered read!
June 12, 2026
Anecdotes are not data, and a book full of anecdotes has little to say about data.
I found the first 200 pages of this book hair-pullingly frustrating.
It was little more than a rant - repetitive, negative and self-contradictory at times. The following main points could easily have been distilled to an article.
- Predictions have an effect on subsequent actions, so there is an ethical responsibility attached to making predictions.
- Tech companies' motives are profit-driven, and they cannot therefore be trusted to prioritise ethics and morality.
- Predictions pertaining to human behaviour diminish the dignity of human agency, especially in matters related to freedom.
Unfortunately, for most of the book the author selected examples of instances where a prediction (prophecy) got something wrong or an outlier event was not predicted, and used these to argue that we should not predict things.
Tracking the history of prediction back to ancient times where oracles predicted people's future using animal entrails or celestial omens, she draws a direct parallel to modern technological companies who, she claims, are likewise conflicted by political or economic motives. Fair enough to that point, but she gives no credit at all to the extraordinary advances in the accuracy of predictions in a wide swathe of domains, from medical advances to weather forecasting to the many other scientific and technological revolutions that have shaped our world for the better. Her focus is only on the negatives - the misdiagnosis, the calculation error, the systemic bias.
She presents statistics and probability as a battlefield between Frequentists and Bayesians. It is not though - these distinctions are interesting discussion points in philosophy, but in the practice of applied probability they are just two different approaches that ultimately converge on the same result. Perhaps the biggest flaw in the book is the complete absence of a discussion of how to quantify uncertainty. The author's approach, not being a statistician and coming from a philosophy background, is that probabilistic calculations come with uncertainty and that is enough to distrust them. "Predictions are not facts", she says, but it's a rather hollow statement without discussing when predictions are more or less likely to be accurate.
For a much better and more thorough approach to thinking through uncertainty I recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Pages 200-250 were probably the best part of the book. Here she discusses the ethics of prediction, the effective altruist movement and the problems that arise when we apply cold mathematical probability to questions of human dignity and worth. This is her area of expertise, and her points are much more solid in this section. The major takeaway is that the utilitarian approach to moral questions propounded by the effective altruist movement is rife in Silicon Valley circles, and it is these people who are determining the philosophical outlook of AI agents, which is certainly a point of both philosophical and practical concern.
There are some points where I would not be completely on the same page as the author. For example I don't have the same qualms about massive data collection by tech companies because of the positive results I experience - more personalised recommendations, quicker access to answers and content I am interested in etc. While my data is being collected and aggregated somewhere I don't really think any human is poring through my habits and behaviours. But I realise also that I fit the demographic that has perhaps least to fear from AI surveillance - I am a white, well-educated European male. Without being naive about it, for me there are generally more upsides to this new world.
I also disagree with the characterisation that knowledge of future actions equates to a removal of free will. I think this is a category mistake. Just because you know what someone is going to do does not make their doing it any less free. Harnessing technology to predict future actions provides some leverage or advantage to those who can predict, but it doesn't impinge on an individual's ability to choose their own course of action.
In summary, there are a few worthwhile points in the book to consider regarding ethics and AI. The points could have been made just as well in a shorter format.
I found the first 200 pages of this book hair-pullingly frustrating.
It was little more than a rant - repetitive, negative and self-contradictory at times. The following main points could easily have been distilled to an article.
- Predictions have an effect on subsequent actions, so there is an ethical responsibility attached to making predictions.
- Tech companies' motives are profit-driven, and they cannot therefore be trusted to prioritise ethics and morality.
- Predictions pertaining to human behaviour diminish the dignity of human agency, especially in matters related to freedom.
Unfortunately, for most of the book the author selected examples of instances where a prediction (prophecy) got something wrong or an outlier event was not predicted, and used these to argue that we should not predict things.
Tracking the history of prediction back to ancient times where oracles predicted people's future using animal entrails or celestial omens, she draws a direct parallel to modern technological companies who, she claims, are likewise conflicted by political or economic motives. Fair enough to that point, but she gives no credit at all to the extraordinary advances in the accuracy of predictions in a wide swathe of domains, from medical advances to weather forecasting to the many other scientific and technological revolutions that have shaped our world for the better. Her focus is only on the negatives - the misdiagnosis, the calculation error, the systemic bias.
She presents statistics and probability as a battlefield between Frequentists and Bayesians. It is not though - these distinctions are interesting discussion points in philosophy, but in the practice of applied probability they are just two different approaches that ultimately converge on the same result. Perhaps the biggest flaw in the book is the complete absence of a discussion of how to quantify uncertainty. The author's approach, not being a statistician and coming from a philosophy background, is that probabilistic calculations come with uncertainty and that is enough to distrust them. "Predictions are not facts", she says, but it's a rather hollow statement without discussing when predictions are more or less likely to be accurate.
For a much better and more thorough approach to thinking through uncertainty I recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Pages 200-250 were probably the best part of the book. Here she discusses the ethics of prediction, the effective altruist movement and the problems that arise when we apply cold mathematical probability to questions of human dignity and worth. This is her area of expertise, and her points are much more solid in this section. The major takeaway is that the utilitarian approach to moral questions propounded by the effective altruist movement is rife in Silicon Valley circles, and it is these people who are determining the philosophical outlook of AI agents, which is certainly a point of both philosophical and practical concern.
There are some points where I would not be completely on the same page as the author. For example I don't have the same qualms about massive data collection by tech companies because of the positive results I experience - more personalised recommendations, quicker access to answers and content I am interested in etc. While my data is being collected and aggregated somewhere I don't really think any human is poring through my habits and behaviours. But I realise also that I fit the demographic that has perhaps least to fear from AI surveillance - I am a white, well-educated European male. Without being naive about it, for me there are generally more upsides to this new world.
I also disagree with the characterisation that knowledge of future actions equates to a removal of free will. I think this is a category mistake. Just because you know what someone is going to do does not make their doing it any less free. Harnessing technology to predict future actions provides some leverage or advantage to those who can predict, but it doesn't impinge on an individual's ability to choose their own course of action.
In summary, there are a few worthwhile points in the book to consider regarding ethics and AI. The points could have been made just as well in a shorter format.
June 3, 2026
Carissa Véliz’s Prophecy is a sweeping, intellectually rigorous examination of how humanity’s obsession with forecasting has evolved from ancient oracles to artificial intelligence—and why that evolution should unsettle us. At its best, the book is a masterclass in tracing the hidden genealogy of power, demonstrating that prediction has never been about accuracy. It’s always been about influence.
Véliz makes a compelling case that forecasts are fundamentally wishful and political. Whether it’s the priestesses of Delphi, eighteenth-century actuaries pricing life annuities, or today’s AI-trained executives briefing heads of state, “prophets” have consistently monetized uncertainty and weaponized expectations to consolidate control. Her dismantling of AI as a “truth-teller” is particularly sharp: large language models aren’t oracles; they’re optimized bullshitters engineered for plausibility and engagement, not veracity. The book’s historical arc is ambitious and largely successful, drawing clear, unsettling lines between ancient divination, statistical modernism, and the surveillance infrastructure that now quietly shapes our daily lives.
Where the book stumbles is in its occasional thematic detours. Véliz’s recurring fixation on the publishing industry—bestseller manufacturing, publisher advances, and the commercial machinery behind literary validation—often feels untethered from the core argument. While the metaphor of “manufactured success” loosely aligns with her broader critique of predictive feedback loops, these passages frequently read as standalone essays rather than integrated analysis. More problematically, they accumulate toward the conclusion, diluting the philosophical payoff. The ending, which promises a return to Epicurean thought and the democratic necessity of uncertainty, arrives somewhat deflated after pages of industry sidebar commentary. A tighter editorial focus would have strengthened the book’s final resonance and left the reader with the clear, urgent call to action it deserves.
That said, when Prophecy stays on its central trajectory, it’s brilliant. Véliz’s critique of effective altruism and tech-utilitarianism is incisive, exposing how long-termist predictions are often just moral cover for present-day power consolidation. Her defense of uncertainty as essential to democracy, creativity, and human agency is refreshingly counterintuitive in an age that treats unpredictability as a bug to be engineered away. The call to embrace curiosity over forecasting, and virtue over calculated utility, lands with conviction and offers a genuinely alternative framework for navigating an increasingly algorithmic world.
Prophecy is a vital, thought-provoking work that demands a seat at the table in any serious discussion about AI, data governance, and modern political culture. Despite its occasional meandering and a conclusion that could have been sharper, the book’s central insight remains undiminished: we are handing over our future to fortune tellers who care more about power than truth. For readers willing to look past the publishing tangents, Véliz offers a necessary antidote to the age of algorithmic prophecy. Five stars—not because it’s flawless, but because it’s urgently important.
Véliz makes a compelling case that forecasts are fundamentally wishful and political. Whether it’s the priestesses of Delphi, eighteenth-century actuaries pricing life annuities, or today’s AI-trained executives briefing heads of state, “prophets” have consistently monetized uncertainty and weaponized expectations to consolidate control. Her dismantling of AI as a “truth-teller” is particularly sharp: large language models aren’t oracles; they’re optimized bullshitters engineered for plausibility and engagement, not veracity. The book’s historical arc is ambitious and largely successful, drawing clear, unsettling lines between ancient divination, statistical modernism, and the surveillance infrastructure that now quietly shapes our daily lives.
Where the book stumbles is in its occasional thematic detours. Véliz’s recurring fixation on the publishing industry—bestseller manufacturing, publisher advances, and the commercial machinery behind literary validation—often feels untethered from the core argument. While the metaphor of “manufactured success” loosely aligns with her broader critique of predictive feedback loops, these passages frequently read as standalone essays rather than integrated analysis. More problematically, they accumulate toward the conclusion, diluting the philosophical payoff. The ending, which promises a return to Epicurean thought and the democratic necessity of uncertainty, arrives somewhat deflated after pages of industry sidebar commentary. A tighter editorial focus would have strengthened the book’s final resonance and left the reader with the clear, urgent call to action it deserves.
That said, when Prophecy stays on its central trajectory, it’s brilliant. Véliz’s critique of effective altruism and tech-utilitarianism is incisive, exposing how long-termist predictions are often just moral cover for present-day power consolidation. Her defense of uncertainty as essential to democracy, creativity, and human agency is refreshingly counterintuitive in an age that treats unpredictability as a bug to be engineered away. The call to embrace curiosity over forecasting, and virtue over calculated utility, lands with conviction and offers a genuinely alternative framework for navigating an increasingly algorithmic world.
Prophecy is a vital, thought-provoking work that demands a seat at the table in any serious discussion about AI, data governance, and modern political culture. Despite its occasional meandering and a conclusion that could have been sharper, the book’s central insight remains undiminished: we are handing over our future to fortune tellers who care more about power than truth. For readers willing to look past the publishing tangents, Véliz offers a necessary antidote to the age of algorithmic prophecy. Five stars—not because it’s flawless, but because it’s urgently important.
June 17, 2026
Prophecy es una paradoja metodológica. Carissa Véliz posee una sólida formación en la tradición de la filosofía analítica, y eso se refleja en su bibliografía. En sus páginas no encontraremos citas a Heidegger, Patočka, Mumford, Foucault, Virilio, McGowan o Žižek (por citar algunos nombres). Sin embargo, lo verdaderamente sorprendente es que sus reflexiones y conclusiones resuenan con total naturalidad dentro de esa misma tradición continental y crítica del siglo XX. Es como si la autora hubiera bebido colateralmente de estos grandes pensadores, pero llegando a puertos similares a través de un mapa completamente distinto, y a través de una expresión literaria de un acceso tan fácil que puede entrañar problemas paradójicos.
Este enfoque particular dota al libro de una frescura juvenil, característica de esta autora. Carissa Véliz plantea sus tesis de modo directo, casi aforístico, convirtiendo la obra en un ejercicio de divulgación cultural, histórica y ética. Sus críticas hacia la deriva de nuestra sociedad y, especialmente, hacia la moral utilitarista que lo inunda todo, son acertadas y urgentes. Son conclusiones que un lector experimentado podría deducir de lecturas de autores previos, pero el mérito de la autora radica en darles un "twist" accesible, logrando que planteamientos éticos complejos se entiendan con sencillez.
Una sencillez que sacrifica matices y complejidades humanas. Al elegir la vía de la claridad y la concisión, el texto peca en ocasiones de una simplificación que no termina de hacer justicia a la verdadera profundidad psicológica y antropológica del problema. Se echa de menos un desarrollo más, digamos, filosófico...falta la mirada de algunos grandes autores del siglo XX, que le hubieran ofrendado una robustez a las problemáticas involucradas (la cosmovisión matemática y cuantificadora, la objetualización de los seres, la ética versus la moral...).
Esta falta de matices, por poner un ejemplo, se evidencia en cómo la autora aborda el concepto de la predicción, metiendo en un mismo saco fenómenos que requerirían distinciones más finas. Por ejemplo, no se diferencian de forma suficiente las finalidades sociales y psicológicas de la predicción astrológica política frente a la chamánica; como tampoco se pondera con justicia la distancia entre las profecías del pasado y las predicciones probabilísticas matemáticas actuales, cuya innegable utilidad en el terreno científico y social exigiría un análisis mucho más diferenciado. Con todo, por supuesto que esa metafísica probabilística, incluso cuando está bien estudiada, tiene sus problemas, pero aquí saltaríamos a lo que se ha abordado desde otras escuelas filosóficas.
En definitiva, le otorgo 4 estrellas porque el punto crítico del libro es impecable (personalmente, me ha gustado incluso para darle más). Lo que defiende y lo que denuncia debe ser escuchado. Es una lectura muy recomendable como puerta de entrada a la ética de nuestro tiempo, aunque deje al lector especializado con ganas de una arquitectura conceptual más robusta y matizada, para la que aconsejo al lector a lanzarse a autores que van a la raíz del problema desde una perspectiva múltiple y polivalente, rizomática y ética.
Este enfoque particular dota al libro de una frescura juvenil, característica de esta autora. Carissa Véliz plantea sus tesis de modo directo, casi aforístico, convirtiendo la obra en un ejercicio de divulgación cultural, histórica y ética. Sus críticas hacia la deriva de nuestra sociedad y, especialmente, hacia la moral utilitarista que lo inunda todo, son acertadas y urgentes. Son conclusiones que un lector experimentado podría deducir de lecturas de autores previos, pero el mérito de la autora radica en darles un "twist" accesible, logrando que planteamientos éticos complejos se entiendan con sencillez.
Una sencillez que sacrifica matices y complejidades humanas. Al elegir la vía de la claridad y la concisión, el texto peca en ocasiones de una simplificación que no termina de hacer justicia a la verdadera profundidad psicológica y antropológica del problema. Se echa de menos un desarrollo más, digamos, filosófico...falta la mirada de algunos grandes autores del siglo XX, que le hubieran ofrendado una robustez a las problemáticas involucradas (la cosmovisión matemática y cuantificadora, la objetualización de los seres, la ética versus la moral...).
Esta falta de matices, por poner un ejemplo, se evidencia en cómo la autora aborda el concepto de la predicción, metiendo en un mismo saco fenómenos que requerirían distinciones más finas. Por ejemplo, no se diferencian de forma suficiente las finalidades sociales y psicológicas de la predicción astrológica política frente a la chamánica; como tampoco se pondera con justicia la distancia entre las profecías del pasado y las predicciones probabilísticas matemáticas actuales, cuya innegable utilidad en el terreno científico y social exigiría un análisis mucho más diferenciado. Con todo, por supuesto que esa metafísica probabilística, incluso cuando está bien estudiada, tiene sus problemas, pero aquí saltaríamos a lo que se ha abordado desde otras escuelas filosóficas.
En definitiva, le otorgo 4 estrellas porque el punto crítico del libro es impecable (personalmente, me ha gustado incluso para darle más). Lo que defiende y lo que denuncia debe ser escuchado. Es una lectura muy recomendable como puerta de entrada a la ética de nuestro tiempo, aunque deje al lector especializado con ganas de una arquitectura conceptual más robusta y matizada, para la que aconsejo al lector a lanzarse a autores que van a la raíz del problema desde una perspectiva múltiple y polivalente, rizomática y ética.
June 16, 2026
Prof. Véliz takes us on a whirlwind tour on the annals of prophecy through Greek and Roman history to show us just how unreliable prophets are, and how prophets profit from prophecy.
Prophecy is just another business, she posits. No-one can see the future but many are sold on prophecy to assuage their fear of the unknown. Fortunetellers, palm readers, and investment analysts are all trying to spin fictions to keep you buying.
Of course, these days you cannot watch a sporting event on TV without being bombarded by sports “book” apps on your cellphone.
She lambasts the Google searches, the dating apps, all the social media sinkholes which sop up your data to help predict where and when you will shop next.
But she saves her greatest venom for the purveyors of so called artificial intelligence which she sees as just a more sophisticated prediction machine to serve up bullshit.
AI uses two technologies to control your attention ultimately by predicting the next words: deep learning, which hoovers up everything on the Internet; and reinforcement learning, which learns from your feedback.
I was a little disappointed Prof. Véliz skipped over people who use the Bible as a source of revelation. In some ways I find these people more devious and criminal than the billionaires in Silicon Valley.
Perhaps they’ll show up in her next volume.
Véliz urges us not to place bets on the future, but I ask you if that’s even possible. If I have savings they must go into some currency, and that is always a gamble. If I urge my daughter to go to university instead of taking a trade, that is a bet on the future.
Neurologists are telling us today that the way our minds work is by constructing reality with forecasts on how the future plays out.
If you believe that forecasting is ingrained in our psyche you have a right to ask yourself if on some level Véliz isn’t leading us astray from the truth.
Véliz says that a quanta of uncertainty is useful to our lives. I guess that’s helpful when considering our mortality, but really I’d like to know if the Leafs will win the Stanley Cup at some point.
Prophecy is just another business, she posits. No-one can see the future but many are sold on prophecy to assuage their fear of the unknown. Fortunetellers, palm readers, and investment analysts are all trying to spin fictions to keep you buying.
Of course, these days you cannot watch a sporting event on TV without being bombarded by sports “book” apps on your cellphone.
She lambasts the Google searches, the dating apps, all the social media sinkholes which sop up your data to help predict where and when you will shop next.
But she saves her greatest venom for the purveyors of so called artificial intelligence which she sees as just a more sophisticated prediction machine to serve up bullshit.
AI uses two technologies to control your attention ultimately by predicting the next words: deep learning, which hoovers up everything on the Internet; and reinforcement learning, which learns from your feedback.
I was a little disappointed Prof. Véliz skipped over people who use the Bible as a source of revelation. In some ways I find these people more devious and criminal than the billionaires in Silicon Valley.
Perhaps they’ll show up in her next volume.
Véliz urges us not to place bets on the future, but I ask you if that’s even possible. If I have savings they must go into some currency, and that is always a gamble. If I urge my daughter to go to university instead of taking a trade, that is a bet on the future.
Neurologists are telling us today that the way our minds work is by constructing reality with forecasts on how the future plays out.
If you believe that forecasting is ingrained in our psyche you have a right to ask yourself if on some level Véliz isn’t leading us astray from the truth.
Véliz says that a quanta of uncertainty is useful to our lives. I guess that’s helpful when considering our mortality, but really I’d like to know if the Leafs will win the Stanley Cup at some point.
June 17, 2026
Hoe moet ik me verhouden tot AI
Mijn eerste ervaring met AI (als developer) was dat ik zeer onder de indruk was, en als tech enthousiast liet ik me maar al te graag meeslepen door deze nieuwe superpower.
Maar vrij snel kwam al snel de scepsis.
In een tijd waarin we worden overspoeld door berichten over AI voelde ik de behoefte om uit de waan van de dag te komen en eens de diepte in te gaan over dit onderwerp.
Via de Podcast “The shell game” stuitte ik op Carissa Véliz. Zij is “associate professor for Ethics in AI” aan de universiteit van Oxford. De juiste persoon om eens goed naar te luisteren dacht ik zo. in april verscheen het boek “Prophecy” van haar.
Als filosofe is de blik van Carissa veelomvattender en brengt ze het grote plaatje in beeld. Zij fileert de technologie voor wat het is. Het is geen echte intelligentie en er is al helemaal geen wijsheid en bar weinig ethiek. AI is een technologie die een voorspelling doet. En deze worden ons verkocht als zijnd een realiteit.
Zij ziet een parallel met de geschiedenis want waar hebben we dat meer gezien. Van het orakel van Delphi tot Rasputin . Profeten fluisteren in de oren van machthebbers en gezamenlijk vormen zijn een pact.
In dit boek zet ze dit zorgvuldig uiteen hoe dat in de geschiedenis heeft gewerkt en hoe dat opnieuw weer vorm krijgt in de vorm van AI en de grote tech bedrijven.
Zeer onderhoudend en vlot geschreven en relevant voor deze tijd bovendien.
Na het lezen van dit boek heb ik het gevoel veel meer het bewust te zijn over deze technologie en de gevolgen op ons werk en de samenleving. Een helder licht tussen alle hype berichten .
Mijn eerste ervaring met AI (als developer) was dat ik zeer onder de indruk was, en als tech enthousiast liet ik me maar al te graag meeslepen door deze nieuwe superpower.
Maar vrij snel kwam al snel de scepsis.
In een tijd waarin we worden overspoeld door berichten over AI voelde ik de behoefte om uit de waan van de dag te komen en eens de diepte in te gaan over dit onderwerp.
Via de Podcast “The shell game” stuitte ik op Carissa Véliz. Zij is “associate professor for Ethics in AI” aan de universiteit van Oxford. De juiste persoon om eens goed naar te luisteren dacht ik zo. in april verscheen het boek “Prophecy” van haar.
Als filosofe is de blik van Carissa veelomvattender en brengt ze het grote plaatje in beeld. Zij fileert de technologie voor wat het is. Het is geen echte intelligentie en er is al helemaal geen wijsheid en bar weinig ethiek. AI is een technologie die een voorspelling doet. En deze worden ons verkocht als zijnd een realiteit.
Zij ziet een parallel met de geschiedenis want waar hebben we dat meer gezien. Van het orakel van Delphi tot Rasputin . Profeten fluisteren in de oren van machthebbers en gezamenlijk vormen zijn een pact.
In dit boek zet ze dit zorgvuldig uiteen hoe dat in de geschiedenis heeft gewerkt en hoe dat opnieuw weer vorm krijgt in de vorm van AI en de grote tech bedrijven.
Zeer onderhoudend en vlot geschreven en relevant voor deze tijd bovendien.
Na het lezen van dit boek heb ik het gevoel veel meer het bewust te zijn over deze technologie en de gevolgen op ons werk en de samenleving. Een helder licht tussen alle hype berichten .
May 14, 2026
Siento angustia existencial. Después de leer Prophecy.
Prophecy sacude los cimientos de todo lo que hacemos en investigación de mercados y consultoría. Siento una inquietud profunda al darme cuenta de que nuestra profesión ha mutado en algo oscuro.
Me he pasado +30 años creyendo que entendía a las personas, a los consumidores, pero la realidad es otra en 2026: el uso de datos masivos ha servido para intentar controlar el comportamiento humano. La tecnología predictiva funciona como una táctica de poder de las grandes empresas para vendernos sus plataformas. Mi duda existencial ¿Predicción significa manipulación?
Los algoritmos podrían estar matando nuestro libre albedrío, la creatividad y la espontaneidad, la serendipia.
Al hiper-segmentar con inteligencia artificial, convertimos a las personas en rehenes de modelos.
Luego de leer Prophecy decido que mi enfoque como consultor debe cambiar ahora mismo. Como sugiere Carissa, voy a escoger la preparación por encima de la predicción. Dejaré de intentar adivinar el futuro y trabajaré con buen humor, verdad, belleza y justicia.
Briefly: Reading Prophecy reveals to me a dark mutation in my market research practice. I am in existential crisis after reading it. What I question now: Big data functions as a tool for behavioral control. Predictive technology serves as a corporate power tactic, eroding free will and serendipity. Hyper-segmentation turns people into hostages of mathematical models. I am pivoting my consulting practice immediately. I choose preparation. My future work centers on humor, truth, beauty, and justice.
Prophecy sacude los cimientos de todo lo que hacemos en investigación de mercados y consultoría. Siento una inquietud profunda al darme cuenta de que nuestra profesión ha mutado en algo oscuro.
Me he pasado +30 años creyendo que entendía a las personas, a los consumidores, pero la realidad es otra en 2026: el uso de datos masivos ha servido para intentar controlar el comportamiento humano. La tecnología predictiva funciona como una táctica de poder de las grandes empresas para vendernos sus plataformas. Mi duda existencial ¿Predicción significa manipulación?
Los algoritmos podrían estar matando nuestro libre albedrío, la creatividad y la espontaneidad, la serendipia.
Al hiper-segmentar con inteligencia artificial, convertimos a las personas en rehenes de modelos.
Luego de leer Prophecy decido que mi enfoque como consultor debe cambiar ahora mismo. Como sugiere Carissa, voy a escoger la preparación por encima de la predicción. Dejaré de intentar adivinar el futuro y trabajaré con buen humor, verdad, belleza y justicia.
Briefly: Reading Prophecy reveals to me a dark mutation in my market research practice. I am in existential crisis after reading it. What I question now: Big data functions as a tool for behavioral control. Predictive technology serves as a corporate power tactic, eroding free will and serendipity. Hyper-segmentation turns people into hostages of mathematical models. I am pivoting my consulting practice immediately. I choose preparation. My future work centers on humor, truth, beauty, and justice.
June 5, 2026
It is one of those books that quietly changes the way you look at the world. Carissa Véliz takes a fascinating subject—the human desire to predict the future—and examines it through history, technology, politics, and everyday life. What makes the book especially compelling is how relevant its arguments feel in an era increasingly shaped by algorithms and artificial intelligence.
I appreciated how Véliz challenges the common assumption that more data automatically leads to better decisions. Instead, she explores the risks of relying too heavily on predictions, especially when those predictions can influence opportunities, behavior, and even personal freedom. The discussion of how predictive systems can become self-fulfilling was particularly eye-opening.
Despite tackling complex topics, the writing remains accessible and engaging. At times, some arguments may feel intentionally provocative, but they encourage readers to question systems that are often accepted without much scrutiny. More than a critique of technology, this book is a thoughtful examination of power and autonomy. It left me reflecting on how much of my life is shaped by predictions and how important it is to preserve human judgment, adaptability, and choice in an increasingly data-driven world.
I appreciated how Véliz challenges the common assumption that more data automatically leads to better decisions. Instead, she explores the risks of relying too heavily on predictions, especially when those predictions can influence opportunities, behavior, and even personal freedom. The discussion of how predictive systems can become self-fulfilling was particularly eye-opening.
Despite tackling complex topics, the writing remains accessible and engaging. At times, some arguments may feel intentionally provocative, but they encourage readers to question systems that are often accepted without much scrutiny. More than a critique of technology, this book is a thoughtful examination of power and autonomy. It left me reflecting on how much of my life is shaped by predictions and how important it is to preserve human judgment, adaptability, and choice in an increasingly data-driven world.
May 12, 2026
Predictions are commands, disguised as descriptions which give them the appearance of facts, although they are not. This is one important message from Véliz’ timely, intelligent, and entertaining book which is all the more important in an era in which generative AI, with its powerful predictions, is hailed and applied in all kinds of contexts of our daily lives, taking away our privacy and power to make informed decisions.
In many contexts, predictions by generative AI are already accepted unquestionably, which render them rulings and eventually facts, unless we resist believing these predictions and don’t obey their imperatives. The AI which does not recommend giving you a financial loan, decides for the bank. The AI which suggests that a person is guilty, rules if the judge doesn’t question the nature of the statistical prediction. And so on.
Apart from its important message, Prophecy is also a philosophical tour de force since Véliz manages to apply the best of what philosophy has to offer to the dangers of the potentially oppressive use of AI technologies.
In many contexts, predictions by generative AI are already accepted unquestionably, which render them rulings and eventually facts, unless we resist believing these predictions and don’t obey their imperatives. The AI which does not recommend giving you a financial loan, decides for the bank. The AI which suggests that a person is guilty, rules if the judge doesn’t question the nature of the statistical prediction. And so on.
Apart from its important message, Prophecy is also a philosophical tour de force since Véliz manages to apply the best of what philosophy has to offer to the dangers of the potentially oppressive use of AI technologies.
May 26, 2026
An engrossing follow up to Privacy Is Power, Prophecy is a ride through history, politics, religion, mathematics, and computer science. It reveals the threat that prediction represents as an exercise in power. Véliz tells a compelling story about how ancient prophetic rituals, like that of the oracle of Delphi, are apt predecessors to the algorithmic systems that are now called AI.
This is not a dry exposition about principles for AI, or a whizbang advertisement of the kind Silicon Valley pours into airport bookstores. It is a challenge about how to live, remember, and keep one's soul, about the subtle but insidious ways that prediction disempowers us from preparedness and imagination.
It is also, importantly for this venue, the most eloquent defense of reading books in an age of LLM summaries and binge-watching that I have read. It has a brio and vitality atypical for philosophers, and yet it teaches a great deal from start to finish.
It does not take a seer to predict you will enjoy it.
This is not a dry exposition about principles for AI, or a whizbang advertisement of the kind Silicon Valley pours into airport bookstores. It is a challenge about how to live, remember, and keep one's soul, about the subtle but insidious ways that prediction disempowers us from preparedness and imagination.
It is also, importantly for this venue, the most eloquent defense of reading books in an age of LLM summaries and binge-watching that I have read. It has a brio and vitality atypical for philosophers, and yet it teaches a great deal from start to finish.
It does not take a seer to predict you will enjoy it.
May 22, 2026
Interesting at times (there's some good arguments about the issues with using data for prediction, and I found the chapter about effective altruism very interesting), but sometimes it is too repetitive and sometimes I felt like there were glaring omissions (I was really expecting it to discuss predict platforms like Polymarket and how the meaning of prediction has perhaps changed due to them, but instead the tech side of things was almost entirely just about AI). I also wasn't a fan of the fact that most of the other people quoted in the book seem to be either the author's friends and colleagues, or people the author happens to have met at an event (in Oxford, as the book constantly reminds us).
April 24, 2026
Truly remarkable book, written very personally and honestly. Véliz explores prophecy throughout the ages, drawing towards the similarities between ancient seers and modern tech leaders.
A powerful book, written softly. Excellent.
A powerful book, written softly. Excellent.
May 2, 2026
I loved it. Best book I have read in a while.
May 3, 2026
Required reading
May 6, 2026
This was pretty thought provoking. I wish it hadn’t so explicitly dealt with AI in a few places because it’s already outdated and the argument feels weaker for it, even if it’s actually not.
May 7, 2026
A brilliant recommendation by my Philosophy & Ethics lecturer at Uni of Birmingham. An interesting counter to William Macaskill who I equally enjoyed reading.
May 10, 2026
Author covers too many topics without addressing AI directly. Disappointed
May 22, 2026
this was really very good, my only qualm being some moments where discussions of Communism and/or China lose nuance and seem to slip almost into Red Scare territory. overall, tho–great!
May 28, 2026
Power is defined as the ability to motivate others to act differently or to carry out one’s will despite resistance.
June 8, 2026
Fantastic book! For philosophy geeks and lay people alike. The arguments flow very naturally. Go and buy your copy!
June 9, 2026
I must say that this is very informative and helpful! Kudos to the author.
June 20, 2026
READ THIS BOOK NOW
June 25, 2026
Most important nonfiction book I’ve read this year.
June 7, 2026
I think this is a must read for all, listened to audio while traveling with my spouse, took forever since we stopped to chat about every 5 minutes there was so much to digest. Such a frightening future, glad I'm old and wasn't raised with this since birth. Caution signs are flashing!
June 24, 2026
Could have been 80 pages shorter. 3.5
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