Hamish Hamilton wins 10-way auction for former OpenAI researcher’s ‘light through the tunnel’
Hamish Hamilton has acquired Your Life Without You by Zoë Hitzig, an economist, poet and former researcher at OpenAI.
Editorial director Hermione Thompson bought UK and Commonwealth rights, including serial and audio, in a 10-way auction from Beniamino Ambrosi at The Cheney Agency. North American rights were previously pre-empted by Amanda Cook at Crown and translation rights have been sold in Germany (Park/Ullstein), Netherlands (Bezige Bij), Denmark (Politikens), Italy (Einaudi) and Spain (Paidós). Your Life Without You is scheduled for publication in spring 2028.
Its description reads: “Artificial intelligence is set to be the most transformative technology of our lifetime. It promises to help us know more about ourselves and access more of the collective store of human knowledge than ever before – and the prevailing assumption is that more information is always better. But is that true?”
Your Life Without You argues that right now we are in the process of surrendering a core of opaque knowledge that is essential to our humanity and describes three cardinal relationships: first to the self, second to each other and third to the economy, witnessing how AI is being used to capture and codify all three. And, the publisher continues, it explains that while that information is far more useful to AI when it is completely transparent and accessible, it is far less useful to humans themselves in this form, “because our personal growth, our pursuit of love and friendship, and the economic mechanisms which protect us from exploitation all rely on the unknown”.
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Drawing from her professional experience at OpenAI and her research into privacy, equity and transparency in markets and algorithms at Harvard, “counterweighted by a literary and affective perspective sharpened through the practice of poetry”, Hitzig “examines the risks and the costs, both material and psychological, of embracing total information capture” and “sets out an alternative trajectory: to protect the innately human phenomena which give our lives their deepest meaning while redeploying AI to different and more socially constructive kinds of labour”.
Your Life Without You “offers a clear-sighted, authoritative and hopeful analysis of AI, rooted in the understanding that our own use of these technologies will determine whether they come to complement human life or to replace it”.
Hitzig was hired at OpenAI in 2024 to research the effects that AI would have on humans individually, interpersonally and economically. She resigned and wrote about the concerns that prompted her decision in the New York Times. She is the author of two poetry collections, Mezzanine and Not Us Now, which won the Changes Book Prize (selected by Louise Glück). Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, the Baffler and Artforum. She is the poetry editor of The Drift and is now a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, working on privacy, equity and transparency in markets and algorithms.
Hitzig said: “We are in an emergency. Too much of what matters about us is being detached from us, turned into information, and used without us. This predicament is strange and new but also enduring – I hope this book finds its place in the long unfinished conversation about how we can and must remain ourselves while making a life with and among others.”
Thompson commented: “Reading Zoë’s proposal feels like finding one lucid person in the middle of an asylum. In relatively short order, Silicon Valley has established a series of wildly distorted norms about how we live and what we value. It seems we have almost lost the language even to describe what the old norms used to be and why they mattered; the acceleration is happening so fast and so noisily that it can feel impossible to step back and see the trajectory, let alone to alter it. But Your Life Without You manages, miraculously, to cut through that noise. Powerfully sane, grounded by a formidable intellectual and moral integrity, it is the book I have been hoping for – a light to lead us all out of the tunnel.”
