A forthcoming book by Asim Javed
Future Without Consent
How AI, Power, and Profit Are Deciding What Comes Next
Coming soon. Planned formats: Hardcover · Paperback · Kindle
AI is being deployed at a scale and speed that no democratic institution can match. Decisions that will shape the next century of human civilization (who gets surveilled, which jobs disappear, what information people see) are being made by a handful of companies and governments with little public input and even less accountability.
Future Without Consent is about the decisions being made right now, while there is still time to change them. These systems are already in our workplaces, our newsfeeds, and our institutions, and the rules that will govern them are being written this decade, largely by the companies building them. The book connects the technical breakthroughs to the power they hand to a few, and to what that power costs the rest of us: our attention, our livelihoods, our shared sense of what is true. It asks what we are owed, and what we should insist on, while we still have a choice.
How the book is organized
This book is organized in three parts, each building on the last. You can read it straight through, or you can start with whichever part speaks most directly to your concerns. But the argument is cumulative: Part I explains why this is happening, Part II shows what it is doing to us, and Part III reveals who is in control and what is at stake. The live timeline on this site extends the book's coverage with events tracked in real time.
The Three Parts
01
Why They Won't Stop
The ideology and motivations of the people building the most powerful AI systems in history. The arms race, the ethical tradeoffs, and the paradox of builders who acknowledge danger but insist only they can manage it.
02
The Assault on Human Agency
What this technology is doing to us. How AI hijacks attention and emotion, how shared reality collapses under synthetic media, what happens when human labor and purpose are displaced, and where that leads.
03
The Altar of Power
Who is being entrusted with the power to shape this future. The merger of Silicon Valley, the security state, and the institutions that were supposed to protect the public from both.
About the Author
Asim Javed is an AI Strategist, author, and educator with an M.Sc. in Computation from the University of Oxford, where his research focused on AI and computer vision. He has spent over two decades helping organizations navigate technology transitions, most recently as AI Methodologist at Scaled Agile, Inc. His work bridges the gap between AI capability and its consequences for human agency, democratic governance, and economic power. He publishes The Consent Report, a weekly newsletter that extends the themes of this book into real-time coverage.
The Consent Report
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Weekly analysis of AI, power, and human agency. Plus updates as the book takes shape.
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