Thinking has a physical price. Volume II opens the hood of the machines that talk: data, joules, benchmarks, and what remains human.
On a lab bench, a dish of human neurons learned to play Pong. That experiment really happened, and the way the world told the story, half miracle, half horror film, is exactly why I wrote this book. Because the gap between what was actually on the bench and what you felt when you heard about it is the same gap that separates almost everyone from artificial intelligence today. We do not lack information about AI. We lack a method for looking at it. "The Machine That Thinks: The Dawn of a New Intelligence" is Volume II of my trilogy "The Architecture of the New World: From Code to Matter". Volume I followed money and found that it was, underneath everything, a ledger and an energy claim. This book follows thought and arrives at the same place: thinking is a physical act, it consumes energy, it obeys thermodynamics, and once you…