How the World Got Wired

Epilogue — One Last Thing

I have spent two hundred pages telling you the truth, as honestly as I could, about the world you are growing up in. About the bubbles that wrecked people’s savings. About the social networks that have facilitated real-world harm. About the artificial intelligence revolution whose ultimate consequences nobody yet knows.

I want to end with something different.

The book you are holding — the one you have just finished — was written, in 2026, by one person in a single morning. I started thinking about it over coffee. I worked out the structure while walking my dog along the Hudson River, on the New Jersey side, looking across at Manhattan. I finished it on my couch in the early afternoon.

It would not have been possible to write it that way at any earlier moment in history.

A book of this length, on a topic this broad, used to require a publisher, an editor, fact-checkers, researchers, illustrators, multiple drafts, several years. I had none of those things. What I had was an artificial intelligence system — the kind of system the last several chapters of this book have been about — that I could talk to, all morning, about everything I knew and everything I needed to look up. I could ask it to draft a chapter. I could argue with it about whether the draft was right. I could ask it for the specific name of the engineer who designed the first IMP, or the date of the Netscape IPO, or how to explain Boolean logic to a child. It would help me think. It would push back when I was wrong. It would let me focus on the part of the work that only I could do — what to include, what to leave out, what mattered most, what the spine of the argument should be — by handling the parts that were not the most interesting use of my time.

By lunchtime, the book existed.

This is not a small thing. A child like you, twenty years from now, with deep knowledge of a field and a story she wants to tell, will be able to put that story into the hands of other children, all over the world, in a few mornings of focused work. The publishers, the editors, the gatekeepers — they will not disappear, but they will not be required the way they used to be. Books will be written that, in any earlier era, would never have been written, because the cost of writing them would have been too high.

This is one small example of what is happening, in field after field, right now.

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