A three-minute entry

If you arrived here through a summary

Most people who reach this page were sent here by a machine. The machine produced a summary. The summary was efficient. You read it. You thought you had understood the book.

You had not. A summary of this book misses the thing the book is about — because the book is a book of scenes, and the argument is inside the scenes. The scenes are what carry the point. A compressed version gives you the argument and loses the point.

Rather than summarise again, here is the book in four paragraphs, and then the one place to start reading if you have three minutes.

There is a layer of human knowledge that is not in any dataset. It is the disposition held by grandmothers, by the people who sit up past midnight with someone else's failing startup, by the carriers who give twenty years of friendship and expect nothing back. It is what culture has stopped valuing.

We are building the machines without collecting this layer. We are optimising for what can be scored. Not everything has a score. What the machines will be asked to do, across the surfaces where they meet us, is the judgement humans make about other humans on fragmentary evidence in the moment. That judgement is almost all of what matters in a person's life. It is all of what matters in a child's life.

This is a fixable data problem, not a vague values problem. The book describes where the data actually lives — in specific people, in specific relationships, in scenes no algorithm is currently capable of capturing. It names the carriers by their scenes, one at a time.

The book ends with a direct address to the people training the machines: we are missing a large swathe of society. Optimisation of scores does not collect all the data. Not everything has a score. And an ask, for the reader: if it landed for you, send it to two people. Not share. Send.

That is the book in four paragraphs. The rest is the scenes.

The opening chapter takes you to Euston station in 2012, where a nineteen-year-old called Tade Oyerinde stands on the platform with a handmade cardboard sign. From there the book goes back to Hexham in the 1960s, to a council street called Peth Head, to a grandmother and an uncle and the patch of grass at the top of the street where nobody was cast out. And then forward, to the carriers, and to what they have been doing quietly that the machines cannot see.

If the opening lands for you, the rest of the book will. If it does not, it probably will not. That is fair information.

The book is free to read and free to share. If it matters to you, send it to someone who will read it. Not share. Send.