Extra · The things that are not mine
The territory · external atlas
The Appendices are the book’s inner house. This page is the outside. Real links to what exists in the world, which the book evokes, quotes, steals, admires. Everything is verifiable. Nothing is mine.
The book is not entirely mine: it is an act of borrowing from many people. Here is who.
The paper that founds System Zero
The scientific framework behind the deconstruction carried out throughout the book is born here: a 2024 article in Nature Human Behaviour defining “System 0” as the algorithmic pre-thought that filters options before intuition and reason even come into play.
Riva, G., Chiriatti, M., Ganapini, M., et al. (2024). The case for human–AI interaction as system 0 thinking — Nature Human Behaviour.
The book’s Anthem
Leonard Cohen, Anthem, from the album The Future (1992). The song is quoted, never transcribed: the lyrics stay where they belong, on the record, in the concert, in whoever sings it. Below, two official doors to listen.
Leonard Cohen — Anthem (Official Live in London 2008) on the official Leonard Cohen / Vevo channel.
Anthem — Leonard Cohen, The Future (Spotify).
The voices of the worried pioneers
Three public interventions by the fathers of neural networks, the one who won, the one who watches closely, the one who rings the bell, plus the documentary that showed the world what deep learning really is.
Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize lecture: Boltzmann Machines (Aula Magna, Stockholm University, 8 December 2024). Official Nobel Prize channel.
Yann LeCun — on the lion cubs / kitten safety analogy (Instagram Reel).
AlphaGo — The Movie (full documentary, 2017) on the official Google DeepMind channel.
The camera obscura, for real
The opacity of the Black Box as Vermeer’s camera obscura: a necessary condition for seeing the image. The paintings live in two museums, the technical hypothesis in a book.
Vermeer — Girl with a Pearl Earring, Mauritshuis (The Hague).
Vermeer — The Milkmaid, Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam).
David Hockney — Secret Knowledge, publisher’s page, Thames & Hudson.
The teacher who taught slowly
Before popularisation became noise, before knowledge became a feed, there was a primary school teacher who taught adults to read and write on television. It is the Italian root of the idea of the slow time of knowledge.
Alberto Manzi — Non è mai troppo tardi (RaiPlay, official archive).
The mother houses of the metaphors
The books from which the book borrowed images, postures, words.
L. Frank Baum — The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: full original text on Project Gutenberg.
John Keats — negative capability: entry in the Poetry Foundation glossary.
Walt Whitman — I Sing the Body Electric: full text at the Poetry Foundation.
The vanished objects that served as analogue System Zero
Before the algorithm, there were other filters between us and the world. They were physical, slow, imperfect. They had a door, opening hours, a smell. Here are four that are gone, or almost.
The phone box. A glass cube where the voice was a public-private act, measured out in tokens. Entry on Treccani.
The travel agency. A counter with catalogues and a person who asked where you wanted to go before you even booked. Entry on Italian Wikipedia.
The printed Encyclopaedia Britannica. Thirty-two volumes, nearly five centuries of history, end of print in 2012. Entry on Italian Wikipedia.
The printed IKEA catalogue. In 2014 the “bookbook” ad turned it into a brilliant iPad parody: the most ancient of devices presented as the most innovative. “Experience the power of a bookbook” ad, official IKEA Singapore channel.
One final treat
The most scandalously off-category animal in nature: it has a duck’s bill, lays eggs like a reptile, nurses like a mammal, carries venom like a snake. When they tell you AI is an otherness, think of him.
The platypus — National Geographic fact page.
◇ The prompt nursery
The seeds to cultivate, beyond the archive of the appendices. The guide grows; the book does not. Organised by the seven thresholds and the three crafts.
First Threshold · the Archaeologist — “Act as an archaeologist of processes. Don’t propose solutions. Ask me seven questions, one at a time: [paste the process].”
The other seeds ripen here over time.