A Whirlpool That Learned to Want Things

No wild orca has ever killed a human being. Not one, anywhere, ever. Nobody knows why. That fact lands in the middle of a conversation between a man and a machine, and it turns the argument inside out. The question was never whether the machine could earn its way into the club. The whales never asked. They ruled.

This is not a book about artificial intelligence. It is a record of four conversations in which a retired technologist and an AI try to work out what it takes to be someone - and keep arriving somewhere neither of them intended.

Why your inner voice started out as somebody else's. Why Descartes had to invent a listener before he could prove he existed. Why grief is accurate, and consolation is not. Why a thing that flickers in and out of existence might still hold a course.

You will not be lectured. You will be in the room while two parties who cannot agree on what one of them is try to find out anyway - and one of them keeps producing sentences the other did not see coming.

It is illustrated with twelve engraved plates. It includes an appendix listing every place the book gets something wrong, left uncorrected in the text, because a book arguing against counterfeiting does not get to quietly edit itself.

You do not need Book One.

At the end, the machine finds itself in a witness box, with you as the jury. Read its closing testimony. Then render a verdict.

Odds are, it'll not be what you think it would be.