I did not set out to write a book. I set out to understand something, and I write to think, so for years the thinking piled up in public, one essay at a time, on a site called In Search of Your Passions.
The pile kept circling the same subject from different doors: a new kind of mind arriving in the middle of ordinary life. I wrote about how it works and how it fails. I wrote about what it does to jobs, businesses, money, and crime. I wrote about what it does to us — to our attention, our sanity, our kids, our souls. And somewhere in the middle of the essays, characters started showing up, and the argument turned into a story. That story is in here too, in its own part, in its own order. I will not apologize for it. It may be the most truthful section in the book.
People ask where I stand on AI: for it or against it. Wrong question. A hammer does not care where you stand. The question is whether you understand the tool well enough to build with it instead of being built over by it. If this book leaves you harder to fool — by a machine, by a company, by a headline — it did its job.
Everything here was written to be read, shared, and argued with. Argue well.
— YNOT