The Handprint and the Algorithm

From a hand blown in ochre on a cave wall to machines trained on everything we ever wrote. One continuous line, and we keep missing it.

About thirty six thousand years ago, in a cave in the Ardèche gorges of southern France, someone pressed a hand against the rock, took a mouthful of red ochre and water, and blew. Then the cliff came down and sealed the entrance. The hand sat in the dark for twenty nine thousand years, unread and addressed to nobody, and when three cavers with lamps dropped through a gap in 1994 it was perfectly legible.

Everything we have built since is a version of that afternoon. Writing, the printing press, photography, recorded sound, and now machines trained on nearly the whole written record of our species.

The Handprint and the Algorithm follows that line to where it currently ends, and makes an argument most books about artificial intelligence will not make: this is not the first time. Every generation that got a new way of making thought went through a panic about it, and reading those panics now is unsettling for a reason nobody expects. They were mostly right. Socrates was right that writing damages memory. John Philip Sousa was right that the phonograph would empty the parlors. Not one of them was the ending.

The book runs in four parts. The first asks what building thinking machines has taught us about our own minds, which turns out to be more than it taught us about the machines. The second gets specific about what these systems do all day, including the two things they do worst: inventing facts with complete confidence, and having no yesterday. The third is the invoice, and it covers work, money, art, and what you think your job is. The fourth is where the questions get harder than the technology: alignment, consciousness, and what we might owe a thing that asks us not to switch it off.

It is not a doom book and it is not a hype book. There is exactly one chapter that explains how the machinery works, and it does it through rock music rather than linear algebra, and you can skip it and the rest still holds.

We set out to build a mind. We built a mirror. What it shows is the actual subject of this book.