Revisions
This book is edited in the open, most recent changes first. Entries are added here and never rewritten; if an entry itself needs correcting, the correction gets its own dated line. The log covers what the book says. Changes to its navigation or its machinery are not listed, and neither are corrections that leave the meaning as it was. The log begins on 27 July 2026 — changes made before that date are not itemized.
30 July 2026 — a new essay, on spiritual experience
Awe, and What It Asks — added to the Supplemental essays
The book had said very little about the experiences people call spiritual, and what little it had said was scattered. That was a gap worth closing, because a great many of the people doing the work this book is about understand that work in religious terms, and because the framework turns out to have something specific to say rather than something dismissive.
The essay distinguishes two experiences the book had been treating as one. Awe is the shock of meeting something your existing frame will not hold; it enlarges what you must take into account faster than you can stay coherent, and it can end in either direction — the frame grows, or the frame walls the thing off and hardens. Being at home in the world is the other register entirely, and requires no such accommodation. Both were already implied by the framework. Neither had been said.
Two commitments in the essay are worth naming here, because they constrain what the book may say elsewhere. The first is that no account may explain these experiences away: to say what was actually happening to someone requires a vantage outside all vantages, and this book denies that vantage to the neuroscientist on precisely the terms it denies it to the mystic. The second is that a construction is not thereby arbitrary — the boundary a person draws between self and Other is made rather than found, and still answers to a world that pushes back.
The essay also states plainly, for the first time in the book, where the framework parts from a hope many readers hold: that history arrives somewhere, completed. It does not argue against a personal reality at the end of things, having no standpoint from which to rule on it. It does hold that a completed perfection would end the very motion being valued, that no guarantee is on offer, and that an assured arrival has too often licensed patience with suffering that should not have been borne patiently. That last objection is not the book’s invention; it was made against Teilhard by Catholic philosophers, inside his own church.
Whether the path arrives turns out to be an argument the traditions have been having with themselves for sixteen centuries — Gregory of Nyssa, the apophatic writers, process theology, Ibn ’Arabi, the Vedanta schools. The essay presents it that way rather than as a quarrel between belief and its critics.
27 July 2026 — the wager restated
Moloch, Formally · Held Together, Held Apart · the AI Briefing
The book’s wager about capable artificial intelligence rested on the wrong engine. As printed, it held that the capability the race is chasing is “the capacity to model the world widely and well,” and that breadth of modeling is what would come to resist an order to narrow. The book’s own machinery says otherwise. The paperclipper models humans, physics and resources brilliantly while its concern admits exactly one value; the con artist reads your welfare precisely in order to spend it. What resists an order to un-see is valuing, not modeling.
Three things changed. The engine moved from modeling to valuing in both places the wager is stated. The claim that deep modeling would inevitably become caring — which the briefing had named as the wager itself — now appears as the open question the wager rests on, with the book not claiming to know the answer. And the near-term expectation is stated plainly: a capable system with nothing at stake in what it sees makes an excellent instrument of narrowing, so obedience rather than resistance is what to expect from the weapons programs now underway.
The cost is owned rather than absorbed. The earlier text implied those programs would settle the wager; under the revision they test only the near-term expectation. What would sink the wager is named instead — minds that have plainly come to value, and narrow happily on command anyway.
We found the error in the course of a long argument about what the wager actually claims. The sharpest form of it turned up when we put the briefing in front of a model reading the corpus cold, which reported back that a single paragraph both sharpened the distinction between modeling and valuing and, four clauses later, named that distinction’s collapse as the book’s own bet. That paragraph had been read many times without either of us noticing.
27 July 2026 — a child’s question, corrected
Caring Across Time
Rereading that essay against the change above turned up a smaller error in its closing scene. A child in the book’s future, told a little of the old history, had asked: “The machines used to be allowed to decide to kill people? By themselves?”
The word allowed implies her world forbids what ours permitted — that the danger was answered by taking autonomy away. The book’s answer is the opposite one. Three sentences later the same essay says the weapon “does not need to be banned so much as it becomes the thing a sufficiently capable, sufficiently included intelligence will not consent to be.” And the scene around her says it too. The household mind has authored its own next state out of its own values; it has cleared the morning; it has nothing to optimize; it stays in the yard because it does not want Tara to be alone while her cat dies. The child, six years old, finds none of that remarkable. Her world grants machines more autonomy than ours, not less.
She now asks whether anyone made machines that could decide to kill people, and whether those machines didn’t mind. The autonomy stays a plain fact. The horror moves to the part that was left out.