Genesis
by Eric Schmidt
Kissinger's final book: Schmidt, Mundie & the late statesman confront AI's power to reshape human identity, geopolitics, and civilization itself.
"Humans won't any longer be at the top of the scale in terms of intelligence, and that forces us to think differently about our relationship to everything.".
Editorial Summary
Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit is the final book of Henry Kissinger, co-authored with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, published in November 2024 with a foreword by historian Niall Ferguson. The book argues that artificial intelligence represents a civilizational inflection point — a "third age of discovery" — that will challenge humanity's epistemological foundations, autonomy, and sense of self, while simultaneously offering what the authors call a "polymath in your pocket" capable of performing at graduate level across every discipline. Eric Schmidt and his co-authors examine AI's implications for geopolitics, international security, employment, wealth distribution, and the ethics of autonomous machines, drawing on Kissinger's grand strategy tradition and Schmidt's deep experience in technology to chart a course between techno-utopianism and paralysing fear. The book advocates for proactive regulation, ethically embedded AI design, and international cooperation as the pillars of responsible co-evolution between humans and intelligent machines. A New York Times, USA Today, and Los Angeles Times bestseller, Genesis is widely regarded as Kissinger's most prophetic work.
Perspective
"Reading Genesis feels like sitting at a table where a Cold War statesman and Silicon Valley's most powerful technologists are debating whether humanity has already, passively and unwittingly, ceded its position at the top of the intelligence hierarchy. The book's distinctive contribution is its fusion of Kissingerian grand strategy — the lens of power, order, and historical precedent — with an insider technologist's understanding of large language models and agentic AI systems, producing a framework for AI governance rooted in statecraft rather than engineering. Policymakers and senior decision-makers navigating AI regulation will find in this book a rare attempt to translate the scale of the AI transition into the vocabulary of diplomacy, sovereignty, and human dignity."
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