I got the manuscript back from my publisher for my book on artificial intelligence and I’ve been asked to make some changes. (I expected that.) What follows is my revised introduction to the book.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
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When I was ten years old or so I was a Boy Scout. You might recall that the motto of the Boy Scouts was, “Be Prepared.” (I speak in the past tense because the Boy Scouts no longer exist—they were replaced by something androgynous called, “Scouting;” they hadn’t prepared for a world turned against boyhood—but that’s a subject for a different book.)
When I went on my first and only Boy Scout camping trip I failed to prepare for the snow that fell the first night. It had been unusually warm the day we arrived, and we even played touch-football in shirtsleeves. The next morning there was 6 inches of snow on the ground. That was the morning of a 5-mile hike, and all I had for shoes were a pair of canvas sneakers.
It was icy, slushy snow at first and my sneakers and cotton socks acted like sponges and were soon saturated. But as the elevation climbed during our trek things went from bad to worse and the water in my shoes went from freezing to frozen. I thought the trail would never end, it felt like I came close to frost-bite, but I’m happy to report I still have ten toes.
To prepare for the unknown you need a little imagination, and I hadn’t imaged a change in the weather.
Maybe I’m a glass-half full guy, but that’s because I don’t want to be left with an empty glass. Back in 2006 I was a Cassandra and I made some money warning people that the end of the real estate market as we had known it was nigh. I took my own advice and sold my commercial real estate and then I sat on my small mound of cash and waited for the end of the world. It nearly did.
It wasn’t guess work and I wasn’t the only person to read the signs. Everyone who did had more in their glasses after the subprime mortgage fiasco. But most people were poorer—some people were ruined financially.
Similarly, I wrote my book, Man of the House because I saw signs that a Woke tsunami was about to wash over the western world. I hadn’t heard a voice in the night. I had lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for a decade and I even spent time at Harvard Divinity School. During those years I was surrounded by people who would soon be employed by public schools, departments in the government, and every human resource department in corporations with more than 100 employees. Since I knew those people, I could say to people who didn’t, “Prepare! Build a shelter that can withstand the tide!”
And now here I am once again to say, prepare for the worst.
Perhaps I was lucky when it comes to the real estate crash of 2008 and the insanity of Black Lives Matter (among other things). I can live with that. I’d rather be lucky than good, as the saying goes. But maybe I read the signs correctly.
Another saying goes, “Third time’s a charm.” Maybe this attempt to imagine things taking a turn for the worse will prove prescient. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I’m preparing for the rise of Artificial Intelligence because I don’t want it to empty my glass. This book explains how I hope to do that.