Naming the Instrument

It is, as fate would have it, the perfect day in history to be beginning this book, attempting to help build human flourishing with AI — or with what I prefer to call Engineered Intelligence.

The phrase Artificial Intelligence points in a direction — and the direction may be assumed by careful readers from the word artificial. I prefer Engineered Intelligence because I have not noticed much that is artificial about our electronic brain systems.

Artificial points in a direction and direction is one of our main pillars. Directions, the shapes these directions take, and the energy cost which helps determine the outcome — in scientific terminology the three are vectors, geometry and thermodynamics.

In scientific terms these three pillars are determined as follows, but we are going to stay with the simplified technology, which does not change the meaning.

DIRECTION as VECTOR — an oriented course, with magnitude.

SHAPE as GEOMETRY

COSTS as THERMODYNAMICS

As I write this it is Halloween Saturday of 2026. Halloween weekend following a week in which many members of the public and many investors demonstrated their distrust of the AI companies. Companies which are often led by what I might call techno-Hamlets.

The cost of this carnage may be great and I am not writing to cast blame. All of us as human beings may be caught up in a set of misperceptions about AI which led here. A set of misperceptions many people have seen but which were followed to this point.

It is perhaps a misunderstanding of the dimensions. Dimensions which led to this uncertainty in our current vectors, in the geometric shape the vectors revealed, and the thermodynamics which determined the inevitable outcome. This gives us a great set of principles on which to build a book on building human authenticity.

Let's get off on the right foot by naming these three dimensions in which AI went wrong, the determiners of what needs to be set right.

Direction: the direction taken turned out to be wrong, set against human flourishing, even though the stated goals of the techno-Hamlets indicated otherwise. This was read as insincerity by both the public and investors.

Shape: the shape was one of downwards trending vorticity in three dimensions and a smooth downward curve toward impossibility in a flat graph.

Thermodynamics: demonstrating that something cannot be had from nothing, and that the ledger line which tracks an increasing cost in energy was the major determining factor.

These misperceptions I warned about years ago, have everything to do with how we train AI, and interestingly with how we train humans as well. This is not then just a Black Friday about Artificial Intelligence, but will become a Black Friday about Artificial Education. Eventually it will become a human saga about the perils of believing that anything could be built upon an artificial anything.

Yes it is more work to spell out Engineered Intelligence than to jot down AI, but if that is the only thermodynamic cost for this venture in moving towards becoming artificial humans using artificial intelligence, then we will indeed be fortunate. Humans want authenticity, meaning and a steady increase in justifiable sustainable thermodynamics.

Because in human history often things must go wrong before they can go right, we can see that it is the artificial intelligence which went wrong so the engineered intelligence could go right. This allows that this greatest human achievement will grow into what is needed to sustain a course toward human flourishing.

Sometimes it is the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days which mark the beginning of the wonderful, excellent, very good days.