FRONT MATTER

A note before the book begins

I am not a researcher. I am not an engineer. What I can tell you is what it looks like from the seat of someone who ran a company for a long time, backed other people's companies for a long time, and practised — intuitively, without a name for it — the pattern this book is going to argue is missing from how we train machines.

This is not a book of arguments. It is a book of scenes. The argument is inside the scenes. If the scenes do their job you will close the book knowing something you did not know when you opened it, without having been told. That is how this kind of knowledge has always been passed.

There is one sentence underneath all three books. I did not have it until I had written the first two.

I designed the concept, the feeling, the vision of the building. The machine built it.