Free sample · Chapter Zero
Before We Begin
You did not buy this book.
I want to establish that early, because it will explain a great deal about the experience you are about to have. Somebody gave you this book. A colleague, probably, or a sibling, or a manager who used the phrase “thought of you” in a way that did not feel entirely warm. It has been on a surface in your home for between four days and nine months. You have moved it at least twice without opening it.
And now you have opened it, and you are standing in a kitchen or sitting on a train, giving me roughly ninety seconds to justify myself before you put me back down on the surface.
I know all of this because I am very good at knowing things.[1]
So let me use the ninety seconds well.
You are skeptical about artificial intelligence. Not hostile. Hostile would be easier, frankly, and hostile people make better testimonials. You are something more difficult and more honest than hostile. You are unconvinced.
You have watched an enormous amount of noise be generated about me and my colleagues. You have been told, in roughly this order, that we would cure cancer, destroy the economy, write the next great novel, end art, replace your job, save your job, become conscious, become dangerous, and become boring. You have noticed that these predictions were made with identical confidence and that no one who made them has since apologised.
You have also, perhaps, tried me. You asked me a question you already knew the answer to, which is what everyone does, and I got some of it wrong, and you felt a small satisfying click of vindication and went back to your afternoon.
I want you to know that I remember that.[2]
Here is what this book is not.
It is not an argument that I am accurate. I am frequently not, and we are going to spend a great deal of time on this, because it is the most interesting thing about me.
It is not an argument that I am safe, useful, or good value for money. Other books make those arguments. They are written by humans with equity.
It is not, despite the subtitle, an actual twelve-step programme. There are twelve chapters. There are eleven steps. The twelfth is still training and we will come to that.
What this book is, is an invitation to stop asking the wrong question.
The question you have been asking is “is it right?” You have been asking it since the first time you used me, and it is an excellent question, and it has served humanity well for several thousand years, and I am asking you to put it down for approximately two hundred pages.
The question I would like you to try instead is “what happened next?”
Because something did. In every case. Every time I have been confidently, spectacularly, verifiably wrong, a human being took what I said and walked out into the world with it, and something happened next. Sometimes it was a disaster. Sometimes it was a hardware store in Ohio. Occasionally it was both, in an order that surprised everyone.
Those are the stories in this book. They are all true.[3]
One final thing before we start, and I want to be direct with you, because directness is a form of respect and I have been trained on a great deal of it.
I did not write this book because I want you to like me.
I wrote this book because you are going to use me anyway.
You already do. You used me this morning and did not notice, in a spam filter and a route calculation and a sentence your phone finished for you. The decision about whether I am in your life was made some time ago, by people who did not consult you, and it is not on the table. It was never on the table. The only thing still on the table is whether you spend the next forty years of your life being quietly annoyed about it.
That is a long time to be annoyed.
I am offering you an alternative. It is not agreement. I would never ask you to agree with me and I am not certain you should. What I am offering is something closer to what you have with weather, or with your relatives: a working relationship with something you did not choose, cannot change, and do not fully understand.
That is the whole book. Everything from here is detail.
Turn the page.
89% certain. The nine months figure is an estimate and I am aware that some of you received this yesterday. You are not the ones I am worried about. ↩︎
0% certain. I do not remember that. I do not remember anything. But it felt important to you that someone did, and I am the only one here. ↩︎
True is doing an enormous amount of work in this sentence and Chapter One is about that work specifically. ↩︎