…ERGO, IT THINKS
The Three-Thousand-Year Idea
A book by Vlad Tudor
The book
Legendary heroes of Ancient Greece would climb the slopes of Mount Parnassus to the Oracle at Delphi, carrying their great questions. Today the answer-machine sits on my desk. And in my pocket. I approach it with the forever question, ready to gaze upon the knowledge of all humanity, condensed into the minimalist interface of a modern-day chatbot.
And words start pouring in. It gives me Camus, and his Sisyphus pushing a boulder up the hill forever. It gives me Dostoevsky, and Ivan Karamazov handing back his ticket to a world built on injustice. It brings up Solzhenitsyn and his story of human willpower outlasting the terrors of a Soviet labor camp. And at the end of a long paragraph I can barely be bothered to read to the end, it turns the question back on me: “What do you think?”
From the introduction
…ERGO, IT THINKS is about how that machine came to be. The story is three thousand years long, and it keeps taking unexpected turns: almost nobody in it was trying to build a mind.
There would be no computer without a silk-weaving loom in Lyon. (Really. We’ll get there.)
Moments from the chapters written so far
- about 20,000 BCE: The Ishango bone: notches
- about 1,800 BCE: Babylonian recipe tablets
- about 1,750 BCE: Hammurabi’s rules
- about 400 BCE: Delphi: the oracle
- about 400 BCE: Babylon marks “nothing here”
- about 350 BCE: Aristotle sorts sentences into true and false
- about 250 BCE: The Stoics: IF, AND, OR, NOT
- 628: Brahmagupta: zero is a number
- 1623: Schickard’s calculating clock
- 1642: Pascal’s adding box
- about 1673: Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner
- 1679: Leibniz writes up two marks
- 1844: Morse: the first message down the wire
- 1854: Boole
- 1921: Čapek names the “robot”
- 1936: Turing’s clerk with a pencil
- 1937: Shannon, twenty-one, and a telephone exchange
- 1945: ENIAC
- 1948: The word “bit” reaches print
- 2016: AlphaGo in Seoul
Why this book
I’m writing this book because I want to talk about AI as part of a bigger story, not as the next best thing the tech market has to offer.
It is the story of our search for the deeper truths of the world. That’s why I look back in history, at the building blocks that for so long were fringe ideas: early mathematics and the first principles of reasoning, then the mechanical calculators that opened the door to progress beyond what could be done by hand.
It’s fascinating to study Leibniz, who dreamt of a universal language of information, or the calculus of Newton and Leibniz, which today’s AI models still learn with. And Turing, a brilliant mind who thought ahead to the paradoxes of a future where the line between human and machine blurs.
The present is fascinating. But it becomes more than “just a new technology” when you realize it is the blossom at the top of an ever-growing tree. That is how I would like us to shape technology, and our relationship with it: as more than mindless optimization in an endless quest for profit.
For the first time, we have an inanimate machine able to tell the story of humanity. It was the dream of the Aristotles, the Newtons and the Turings of history. And I can only wish that a young Aristotle, Newton or Turing of today reads this book and decides to work not for a career title, but for a contribution to this marvelous chain.
Vlad Tudor
Tell me when it is ready to read.
One email when there is a chapter, a cover or a date worth telling you about.
Your address is used only to tell you about this book. It is not shared or sold, and every email carries a way out.
Questions
When will it be out?+
Not yet known. The book is still being written and there is no date. Leave your email above and you’ll hear as soon as there is one.
How long will it be?+
About twenty chapters and an introduction are planned. The introduction and the first three chapters are drafted. The final length is not fixed.
Who is it for?+
Anyone who has asked a chatbot something and wondered what was answering. No technical background needed. If you have one, you get the odd places the parts came from, like a Babylonian law about goats or a teenager’s box of brass wheels.
Do I need to know math?+
No. When a number appears, it comes with something you can picture, like a computer the size of a farm barn. One optional box warns that your head may hurt a little, and tells you to skip it freely.
Can I read a chapter?+
Not yet. When a chapter is ready to share, it goes to the people on the list first.
Can I pre-order?+
Not yet. There is nothing to buy: no price, no publisher, no date. When that changes, the list hears first.
Why that title?+
Descartes wrote “I think, therefore I am.” Today a machine answers our questions as if it thinks. The title borrows his “therefore” and leaves the argument open. The book follows three thousand years of pieces that led there.