Very well written/ read and full of much needed common sense.

The author’s ability to address these key, contemporary topics, in relatable language, brings home to the reader/ listener how crucial it is not to be naive to the dangers we are seemingly walking willingly into. Alegre’s scope of knowledge and lived experience is vast and we should all heed the warnings she provides.

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Excellent and import book on how AI influences us

If you are working in AI or if you are concerned how future AI is impacting us this book is for you. For me, this book is as important as Shoshana Zuboff’s book on surveillance capitalism. While Zuboff’s book reveals how the AI of big tech companies aims at influencing our actions like clicking on adverts, Susie Allegre lifts the veil on how this type of AI aims at influencing our thoughts and how this contradicts our human rights. Her book explains that is time for fighting back and protecting our rights.
The future of AI is not determined by technology. It is determined by the agreement of what we want AI do for us, with us, and to us. We can only reach this agreement through a diverse discussion which involves many fields like technology, philosophy, law, politics, ethics, social sciences and others. Susie Allegre’s book is an important and exciting contribution to this discussion.

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Great Book

I thought this was a very engaging book that covered a commonly discussed topic (digital technologies) in a novel and illuminating manner.

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Comprehensive and crucially important

I highly recommend ‘Freedom to Think’ to anyone working or just interested in tech. Susie expertly explains the historic struggle to protect our most fundamental right, with examples from Socrates to GPTs. The author brings an incredibly depth of knowledge citing the cases and current developments influencing how technology continues to shape our thoughts and access to information. Susie also brings examples and advice for how invasions of freedom can be prevented. With rapid increase in AI capabilities to tailor online content this book is a must read to best prepare.

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An important subject hijacked by ideology

According to Alegre, Freedom to Think is the most important freedom we have, but, it seems, only when we think like her. According to Susie, the internet is taking away our freedom to think because it is clogged up by people who are opposed to Coronavirus vaccines and who like Donald Trump. The narcissism and utter lack of self-awareness in this position is breathtaking, and in my opinion, completely undermines her argument.

The book presents the history of thought viewed through a contemporary Feminist lens, and the early chapters deal disproportionately with the maltreatment of women (witchcraft trials etc.). The Church was certainly repressive, and was dominated by men, but witch-burning (terrible as it was) was not so much about suppression of the freedom to think, as with fear of the other, and with social and economic control. Furthermore, while the act clearly involved misogyny, it is at least arguable that people of either sex who ratted on their neighbours for the sin of Witchcraft were just as much victims of Catholic social repression as those who were burnt. The Inquisition also tortured and murdered thousands of men for holding allegedly heretical views but they, apparently, are barely worth mentioning. To be fair, she does mention the travails of Galileo, and there is no doubt that the Church did a great deal to suppress heterodox opinions, but to ascribe so much of its philosophy to misogyny is a very narrow and highly partisan reading of history. Later on, there is a very poignant section on the love between JS Mill and Harriet Taylor, but even here, Taylor's infidelity with Mill is justifiable because her husband was a "boring man". Why say that at all? One can only hope for his sake that Mr. Alegre, if he exists, is more interesting...

Moving on, Enlightenment values, we are told, were not in fact adumbrated by dull 17th/18th century white men like Locke, Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau, (whom we now know, in these more Enlightened times, were simply a bunch of misogynistic racists) but by an Ethiopian philosopher called Zera Yacob, who developed his ideas while hiding from religious persecution in a cave for two years. Yacob of course had the advantage of having dark skin and being opposed to slavery long before such views were common, so even though few have heard of him or his work, that makes him the true founder of enlightenment thought...apparently.

After the first chapter, the book is so infused with Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) ideology as to be almost unreadable, unless of course that's how you already think. The DIE religion (because that's what it is) has done more to destroy people's freedom to think than almost anything else in contemporary culture. It proclaims values which it maintains are self-evident and purports to value diversity and inclusion, yet, exactly like the Medieval Church, treats anyone with divergent values as a heretic. We don't burn heretics these days (although that may not be far off) but you can certainly lose your job because you question, for example, the rationality of hiring employees (or Supreme Court justices) on the basis of ethnicity or gender, rather than, say, competence. The exchange of views and opinions in conversation helps us think, in fact, it is the way most people think most effectively; if you forbid people to express their true thoughts because they are socially unacceptable, not only do you stop them from thinking, you force them to repress their feelings. Repression doesn't make those feelings go away, it just concentrates them underground until they emerge elsewhere, often in far more destructive forms. Want to understand what led to Trump and Brexit? Well, 20 years of DIE has made a huge contribution to this kind of social neurosis,.

My disappointment with this book is enormous. Alegre is quite right that the freedom to think is being destroyed by big-tech platforms and by vested financial and political interests, but the philosophy she appears to embody in her writing is part of the means whereby this is being done. She is very clear that Trump supporters are reprehensible (Really? All of them?), as are people who don't want Covid vaccines. I find this position absolutely astonishing in a book entitled, Freedom to Think, particularly from a human rights lawyer. Either you have freedom to think, no matter how ghastly you may find someone else's thoughts, or you don't. And isn't one of the principles of justice that everyone is entitled to a defence?

This is a critically important subject, far too important to be used as a vehicle for getting your ideological rocks off! Shoshana Zuboff's excellent "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" addresses some of the same issues, as does Matias Desmet's recent (and utterly brilliant) "The Psychology of Totalitarianism", in ways that are far deeper, less clouded by ideology and less riddled with obvious biases. If you want to write a book about racism, fine, a book about misogyny, fine, but don't shoehorn these subjects into a book about a subject that is extremely complex and, arguably, more important.

On the plus side, she does read her own work very well. It's (usually) good to hear books read by their authors, who understand the tone and cadence of the words they wrote better than most readers can.

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