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Humanity now possesses the most powerful general-purpose technology in its history. Artificial intelligence can model climate systems, accelerate drug discovery, optimize food and water resources at continental scale, and extend high-quality education to populations previously excluded. The tools are ready. The institutions are not.
The New Renaissance: AI, Complexity, and Governance is the book that explains why—and proposes what to do about it. The central argument is that the defining failure of this historical moment is not technological but epistemological. We are applying three-hundred-year-old Cartesian frameworks—hierarchical, component-based, top-down approaches—to problems that are fundamentally complex, adaptive, and emergent. This mismatch is why the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals stall, why healthcare costs threaten U.S. solvency, and why the world’s most powerful institutions reliably produce diminishing results on the most important challenges.
The solution is not more data or better algorithms. It is a new cognitive architecture—one grounded in complexity science, polycentric governance, and Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI). ACI is where artificial intelligence complements and enhances human insight rather than replacing human judgment. This book formally connects the science of complex adaptive systems, the Nobel Prize-winning governance theory of Elinor Ostrom, and the frontier of AI research into a single coherent framework for action on the 21st century challenges that matter most.
Robert H. Hacker teaches and writes at the intersection of AI, complexity science and institutional design. He brings not only an intellectual perspective but twenty-five years of experience building organizations in conditions of genuine complexity and volatility—conditions that most AI commentators observe from a distance.
Hacker is Senior Director and Co-Founder of StartUP FIU at Florida International University, an R1 Hispanic-Serving Institution, where he has trained more than 30,000 students, faculty, and community members in research, innovation, entrepreneurship, and AI. His formal training in philosophy and finance enlivens this book.
From 2009 to 2013 he ran One Laptop per Child at the MIT Media Lab, directing operations and device development, and distributing nearly one million computers to K–12 students in the developing world. Before that, he spent a decade in Indonesia as Vice Chairman and CFO of Matahari Department Stores, scaling the company from $40 million to $1 billion in annual revenue. In Indonesia complexity and volatility were the permanent features of the landscape that initiated his interest in complex systems. Before Indonesia, Hacker did consulting and technology licensing in Japan and arranged the first license for a Japanese consortium to offer Internet service in Japan.
He has received and supported more than $45 million in federal, NGO, and corporate grant awards, spoken at TEDx and published two previous books on artificial intelligence. He was a founding instructor for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, has worked in over sixty countries and has direct experience with the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and UN development programs.