What happens when a retired systems analyst meets artificial intelligence and refuses to stop asking questions?
At seventy-three, Linda N. Wonder thought she was simply learning how to use a new technology.
Then the questions started.
- How does AI actually work?
- Does it reason?
- Does it understand?
- Can it be trusted?
- Could it ever be conscious?
- Why can talking with it sometimes feel so strangely human?
- And what happens to people and society if the technology becomes as consequential as its developers believe it may become?
The deeper she went, the less the journey seemed to be only about artificial intelligence.
Questions about machines became questions about humans.
Part memoir. Part inquiry. Part Wonderland.
The conversations happened.
The questions happened.
The discoveries, disagreements, wrong turns, and moments of surprise happened.
Wonderland is how the journey felt.
Alice returns older this time, accompanied by an artificial-intelligence companion who can explain the path while simultaneously being part of the mystery.
Along the way there are White Rabbits carrying breathless headlines, troublesome words that refuse to stay inside their definitions, Cheshire Cats offering maddeningly reasonable answers, and one older woman trying very hard not to mistake either wonder or fear for evidence.
A different kind of AI book
This is not a book written to prove that AI will save humanity.
It is not written to prove that AI will destroy it.
It is the record of someone encountering a powerful new technology, testing what she was told about it, changing her mind when the evidence required it, and discovering that some of the most interesting questions did not yet have clean answers.
The guide is useful.
The guide can also be wrong.
So the map gets tested. Again and again.
And reality gets the final vote.