An incisive framework for understanding how predictive AI has reshaped our relationship with time.

Ex Ante argues that AI systems draw us into a new experience of time, a continuous stream of machine-generated futures that reshapes our relationship to ourselves, to capitalism, and to infrastructure. Unlike other predictive tools that help us prepare for what might come, these projections—produced by algorithms and sourced by massive flows of data—calibrate our actions moment by moment, second by second. 

In this book, John Cheney-Lippold offers a framework he calls the ex ante, Latin for “before the event,” as a way to consider how the future has become capitalism’s latest resource for exploitation. Through case studies spanning TikTok beauty filters that have fueled a surge in plastic surgery consultations, chess engines that redefine how the game is played, online sports betting platforms that commodify probability itself, hospital sepsis algorithms that transform the labor of nursing, and coordinated vehicle networks that collectively anticipate their surroundings to function, Ex Ante offers an exploration and powerful critique of our algorithmic present and the powers behind it.