How the World Got Wired · Epilogue — One Last Thing

A Few Things

Before I sign off, I want to leave you with a few small pieces of advice. They are not specific to AI. They are about how to live, as a person, in a world that is changing quickly and that will keep changing.

Learn the math. Not because everyone needs to be a mathematician — most people do not — but because mathematics, learned slowly and carefully, is the closest thing the world has to a key that opens doors. It opens doors in physics, in computing, in economics, in biology, in artificial intelligence, in music, in art. If you can stand the slow work of understanding what mathematicians actually mean when they say things, an enormous number of fields will be open to you for the rest of your life. The math this book has gestured at — the linear algebra that makes neural networks work, the probability that underlies modern statistics, the calculus that runs beneath almost everything — is genuinely teachable. If it has come hard to you, do not give up. Almost everyone who has ever learned it found it hard. (I am, I should mention, working on another book for you about exactly this.)

Read primary sources. When somebody famous says something dramatic on the news, about AI or about anything else, try, when you can, to find what they actually wrote or actually said. The summaries you see are almost always somewhat wrong. Sometimes badly wrong. The habit of reading the actual source — the actual paper, the actual transcript, the actual press release — is one of the most valuable a person can have. It is also rarer than you might think.

Build things, not just consume them. The kids who grow up most able to think clearly about technology are the ones who, at some point, have tried to make a small piece of it themselves — a tiny program, a web page, a simple model, a circuit. You do not have to become an engineer. But the brief experience of trying to build something, watching it not work, and figuring out why will give you intuitions that no amount of reading can. The tools to try this, right now, are better and cheaper and more accessible than at any moment in history. Many of them are free.

Be skeptical of easy stories. Especially the easy stories about how everything is terrible, or how everything is wonderful. The world is almost always more complicated than that. The thing to distrust most is the feeling of certainty — in yourself or in others — that a complicated question has a simple answer.

Take care of your attention. Your attention is one of the most valuable resources you will ever have. You read in Chapter 16 about how many companies are designed to capture it. They are very good at it. The choices you make about how much of your time you give to screens, and what you look at when you do, are some of the most important choices you will make. They are also choices the people who design the screens do not want you to think about. So think about them.

Find mentors. Not famous people, necessarily. The most useful mentors are often older people already in your life — relatives, neighbors, teachers, family friends — who happen to know something well, and who have time to talk. Most of them, if you ask them real questions, will be delighted to answer. People underestimate how much of human knowledge is still transmitted, in every era, by an older person sitting down with a younger one and explaining something patiently. The internet has not replaced this. AI has not replaced this. Don’t let yourself be cheated of it.

Be patient with yourself. You are going to grow up in a world where artificial intelligence can do, in seconds, things that took the people in this book entire careers to do. This will, sometimes, make you feel that your own slower learning is pointless. It is not pointless. The work you do, slowly, by yourself, builds something inside you that is yours forever, in a way that an AI’s output cannot be. Do not let the speed of machines make you feel that your pace of becoming a person is too slow. It is exactly the right speed.

Take Care

I will, almost certainly, live to see most of it — into the second half of this century. You’ll see all of it, in real time, with your own life happening inside the answer.

Pay attention. Stay curious. Read carefully. Be skeptical of easy stories — including, especially, the easy story that everything is terrible.

The world that produced this book — me, on my couch, in 2026, working with a system that did not exist when I was your age, writing for kids I’ll meet (and, in some sense, already have) — was unimaginable, in detail, even five years before it happened.

The world that will produce your own life will be, in turn, unimaginable to me.

I am glad you are going to be in it.

Take care of yourself. Take care of the people around you. Take care of the world you have been handed.

That’s the whole book.

With love, Meira.

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