The Fracture: Staying Human While Machines Learn to Think – Paperback

This book was born out of a personal and professional urgency – driven by encountering, every single day, innovations so disruptive they are staggering even for a technology enthusiast, and at the same time by realising that the magnitude of the change we are living through is often vastly underestimated.

As the founder and CEO of a technology company that has spent over a decade developing cutting-edge AI systems for financial markets, the author experiences their extraordinary potential every day, and argues that we are asking ourselves the wrong question. We keep asking what AI will do instead of us (which jobs it will steal, which texts it will write, which images it will create) and what it will take from us. But we forget to ask the most important thing: what AI will make of us.

AI is not a simple tool, the way the hammer or the washing machine were. It is something different: it is a mirror. For the first time in history, we have built something that reasons in a way similar to us, that reflects our logic, our patterns, our prejudices. And what we see reflected back does not always please us: we see our biases, our cognitive laziness, the mechanical nature of many mental processes we believed were “magical” but that have turned out to be computable, replicable, reducible to numbers.

The book is divided in two parts. In the first, the author describes the head-on trauma we are experiencing: the collapse of human exceptionalism. We must accept that our logical and rational “intelligence” is no longer an impregnable stronghold. It is a painful moment, similar to when Copernicus displaced us from the centre of the universe, but it is a necessary passage toward becoming adults. In the second part, the author explains how to rebuild. If we can no longer compete with machines in terms of speed and computation, on what can we ground our identity? The answer proposed by the author is not a Luddite rejection of technology, but rather a new ethical and existential posture. A digital amor fati that allows us to use these tools without being used by them, rediscovering the value of responsibility, presence, and slowness.

The book offers numerous stages and prompts for reflection, certainly not predictions about what the world will look like in ten years, and an invitation to stop, to step aside from the frenzy that surrounds us, and to ask ourselves not “what can I do?” or “what do I want to achieve?”, but “who do I want to be?” because all the choices we make in setting boundaries for AI – what we entrust to machines, what we keep for ourselves, how we raise our children – are not technical choices. They are human choices. And to make them well, we first need to know who we are.