The Intelligence of a Screwdriver

A horseman raises his bow toward a drone. A truck driver asks an AI assistant which football team will win. A fragment of wood preserves the year 1021. In Alexandria, a library that never disappeared begins to answer its readers.

The Intelligence of a Screwdriver moves through these encounters and others, crossing centuries, continents, and possible futures. From ancient routes of knowledge to modern construction sites, from Japanese workshops to vast data centers, familiar things gradually become less certain.

Machines can now accomplish in seconds what once required years of learning. They can remember, translate, calculate, create, and advise. Sometimes they are astonishingly useful. Sometimes they are wrong. And increasingly, people turn to them for more than information.

What happens to expertise when its results become available to everyone? What do we recognize as intelligence? And as human beings achieve their long desire to be freed from necessity, what will they do with the freedom?

Moving between fiction, documented history, and speculative imagination, this book explores a changing world through the lives of people encountering it. Rather than offering predictions or definitive answers, it leaves room for the reader to look again.