DEEMED INTELLIGENT

A machine writes your emails. A boss swears it will replace his teams. A president restarts a nuclear plant to feed it. And nowhere, it seems, has anyone actually checked what it can do.

Twelve myths. Twelve takedowns, backed by dated facts.

The machine-breakers of 1811, and the queen who had already worked it out in 1589. The lawyer with the invented case law. The agent that wipes a database, then apologizes — self-rated severity: 95%. The 95% of corporate AI projects with no measurable effect at all. Three Mile Island, rebranded "clean energy."

Weaving together the history of technology, verified data, and the ordinary lives these stories upend — a lawyer on a train, the owner of a small business staring at her invoices for intelligence, a grandmother at the end of a phone line — this essay reads like a novel and dismantles, one by one, the great narratives of our time: the replacement of human beings, "this time is different," the global race, shared progress, the machine that knows.

Artificial intelligence creates almost nothing of what it is credited with: it reveals and amplifies what was already there — our costs to cut, our credulities, our surrenders. This book speaks of it. Above all, it speaks of us.

Written with the assistance of an artificial intelligence — verified, chosen and owned by the author: the method is explained in the foreword.