Before you enter

A Wunderkammer in book form

I could have written a manifesto. I even had a few convictions, but while the book was being made they asked to be heard again.

I kept a notebook instead, full of the things I would not keep quiet about and the things I came to know. It is a book of scraps and lived moments; there are as many of them as there are intelligences, but none of them is artful or artificial.

Inside went a teaspoon chosen over five minutes, a paper in Nature Human Behaviour, a cat that was never Turing’s, Keats, Mario and a message that arrived during a lunch break. Lunch breaks still enjoy a certain epistemological freedom. Afterwards the meetings start again.

A.I. Confidential is a Wunderkammer in book form: a cabinet of wonders where thoughts, memories and phenomena of technology sit close enough to disturb one another. Now and then they produce an idea. At other times someone has to open a window.

I tried to give these encounters a shape. The result includes three paths, a few doors and a teaspoon. The furnishings may be affected by your presence.

A certain confidence

Here I call it the Confident Attitude: the willingness to be transformed by the encounter with AI while continuing to distinguish, to choose and to answer for one’s choices.

It takes a trust solid enough to withstand a few questions. Including questions about oneself.

You can find an answer useful and still contest it. You can change your mind without treating it as a reputational incident. You can discover that a machine helped you think something you would not have thought on your own. Then it remains to be seen whether that thought holds. That is the part for which we have not yet found a satisfying button.

Artificial otherness deserves attention precisely when the conversation feels familiar. It speaks our language beautifully. Certain contracts also speak our language beautifully; we read them again anyway.

Doubt, with some practice

Keats called it negative capability: being able to remain in uncertainty without rushing towards an explanation.

My daughter practises in front of two seemingly identical teaspoons. I, who have read Keats, occasionally tell her to hurry up.

The book begins from this discrepancy too.

I would like to understand how to keep the time of judgement when everything invites us to produce an answer. How to notice a delegation before it becomes a habit. How to let something change us without handing it the keys as well.

The objects remain available

These memories may end up in the artificial ouroboros: what we write goes back to feed systems that will produce more things to read. Perhaps one day I will find my teaspoon in a presentation on productivity. I hope at least they give it a dignified role.

Meanwhile, I have put it here.

The book’s anthem is a song by Cohen. There is a crack, and here it has also become a door.

The opening has become a threshold, which presupposes an attitude and asks for a certain disposition and a good deal of patience; and if you have none, never mind.

Enter. Take what you need. Move something, if you must.

If you leave with a better question, the chamber has done its work.

Just check that you have your teaspoon. We have no cloakroom.

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