communicate their thoughts to one another. The aim is to present a mosaic of views which will help make sense out of this rapidly emerging field. I asked the essayists to consider: (a) The Zen-like poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens, which he insisted was “not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations.” It is an exercise in “perspectivism,” consisting of short, separate sections, each of which mentions blackbirds in some way. The poem is about his own imagination; it concerns what he attends to. (b) The parable of the blind men and an elephant. Like the elephant, AI is too big a topic for any one perspective, never mind the fact that no two people seem to see things the same way. What do we want the book to do? Stewart Brand has noted that “revisiting pioneer thinking is perpetually useful. And it gives a long perspective that invites thinking in decades and centuries about the subject. All contemporary discussion, is bound to age badly and immediately without the longer perspective.” Danny Hillis wants people in AI to realize how they’ ve been programmed by Wiener’s book. “You’re executing its road map,” he says, and you just don’t realize it.” Dan Dennett would like to “let Wiener emerge as the ghost at the banquet. Think of it as a source of hybrid vigor, a source of unsettling ideas to shake u€Ep the established mindset.” Neil Gershenfeld argues that “stealth remedial education for the people running the “Big Five” would be a great output from the book.” Freeman Dyson Freeman, one of the few people alive who knew Wiener, notes that “Zhe Human Use of Human Beings is one of the best books ever written. Wiener got almost everything right. I will be interested to see what your bunch of wizards will do with it.” The Evolving AI Narrative Things have changed—and they remain the same. Now AI is everywhere. We have the Internet. We have our smartphones. The founders of the dominant companies—the compani