Powerful technologies - including artificial intelligence - are uprooting and reshaping daily life across the globe. This "flat world" is one of tremendous possibility, but it also poses challenges to stability, shared prosperity, and core values such as privacy, agency and fairness. In Rules for a Flat World, Gillian Hadfield argues that the legal rules that currently guide technological development globally are no longer working, and they are struggling to keep up with rapid advances in Big Tech.

Drawing on a sweeping account of the economics and history of existing legal and regulatory systems, she shows why and how those systems are now too slow, costly, and localized for increasingly complex advanced economies and why they fail to address issues such as poverty, instability, and oppression for the billions living in the developing world. Hadfield proposes a new approach to rules and regulation that enhances complex societies and economic interdependence and makes the case for building a more agile infrastructure.

In this audiobook, she supplements her sweeping vision with a new prologue, read by the author, that explains the emerging challenges that artificial intelligence poses and why it is more urgent than ever that we rethink how we will build agile, inclusive, and global systems of law to protect our future. Hailed as a "thought-provoking book" by Foreign Affairs, one that "stands out for its rigor and elevated sense of purpose" in a "surfeit of works which chronicle how technology has changed the modern world" by Choice and a "compelling story" by AI pioneer and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio. Narrated by award-winning Canadian stage and screen actor R.H.Thomson, who played Matthew Cuthbert in the CBC/NETFLIX series Anne with an E. 2015 Recipient of the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement and the ACTRA Award of Excellence, and Member of the Order of Canada, Thomson is a master story teller.