Author's Note -
I did not set out to write a book about artificial intelligence. I set out to answer a question that had been sitting with me for some time, uncomfortably, the way a true question tends to sit: if a machine can now write, calculate, diagnose, and argue at a level that rivals or exceeds a trained professional, what, precisely, is left for the rest of us to be?
The easy answers did not satisfy me. I was not interested in the reassurance that AI is "just a tool," offered by people who had clearly not looked closely at what the tool could now do. Nor was I interested in the opposite panic, the claim that human beings were on the verge of being rendered obsolete. Both answers, it seemed to me, were avoiding the actual and more difficult question underneath: what has civilization been measuring human worth by, all this time, and was that measure ever the right one?
The argument that grew out of that question is the one this book makes at length: that rationality, the faculty civilization has spent several centuries treating as the essence of human distinctiveness, was never the whole of what made us human. It was the visible half of something older and deeper — instinct, intuition, imagination, the capacity to generate meaning rather than merely process information — that built civilization first, and that our own institutions gradually taught us to undervalue. Artificial intelligence, in absorbing the visible half so completely, has done us the peculiar favor of exposing the mistake.
I want to be honest about the spirit in which I wrote this. It is not a book of consolation, offered to soften the anxiety many people, including me, feel about what AI is doing to the professions, the economy, and the shape of a working life. I do think there is real reason for that anxiety, and I have tried not to wave it away anywhere in these pages. But I also think the anxiety is, in a specific sense, pointed at the wrong target. It is not that we are becoming less necessary. It is that we have spent a long time organizing our institutions, our schools, and our sense of our own worth around the wrong half of ourselves.
The closing chapters of this book, on Ibn al-'Arabi, al-Farabi, and my own more contemporary framing of a division of cognitive labor between machine and human, were the chapters I found myself most reluctant to end. Once I had traced the historical argument through law, philosophy, industry, and the digital age, I did not want to close the book with a purely secular account of what remains once rationality has been automated. I wanted to place that account beside older traditions that had asked the same question in a different register, and had answered it, in their own way, with more confidence than I could summon on my own.
I do not expect every reader to share the specific commitments of those traditions. I do think every reader will recognize, in them, the same conviction this whole book is built on: that there is a core to the human being that no machine has yet reached, and that reaching it ourselves is not automatic. It has to be deliberately cultivated.
If this book has a single ask of its reader, it is that. Not to fear what AI is taking over, and not to pretend it is taking over nothing. To notice, instead, what it is leaving behind — and to take that seriously enough to build a life, an institution, and if I am permitted the ambition, a civilization around it.
I am grateful to everyone who read early portions of this argument and pushed back on the parts that deserved it. Any remaining overreach in these pages is mine alone.
Adamu B. Garba II
Culled from my Up-Coming Book: RETURN TO THE CORE | How AI Is Restoring Humanity's Subconcious Destiny
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My additional appointment as National Assistant Director, Election Management (Northwest) for the PDP Presidential Campaign Organization for the 2023 election. Responsibility for helping in managing the 2023 election for the PDP, especially in the seven states in the northwest.