Prologue: Whose Dream Are We Dreaming?

Deep in the night, only the glow of the desk lamp cuts through the darkness.

The cursor on the monitor blinks at a steady rhythm. Tick, tick, tick. A rhythm that feels like a heartbeat, or maybe a countdown. My fingertips rest on the keyboard, and beyond the screen, a massive artificial intelligence model waits. On one side of the bookshelf stand books on everything from Gutenberg's printing press to the Industrial Revolution to the history of the internet.

Suddenly I stop my hands.

Is all of this really just coincidence?

We tend to believe that history is something humans make. A great inventor appears, a genius entrepreneur transforms a market, a revolutionary government changes society—or so we think. But when you look at history through a macroscopic lens, you start to see patterns that click into place, as if someone had written the script in advance.

Picture it.

A workshop in fifteenth-century Mainz, Germany. With every press of metal type onto paper, the smell of ink fills the air. What if that sound was not merely the noise of printing, but the roar of walls collapsing—the walls of a monopoly on knowledge? As books grew cheap and spread quickly, people began to think for themselves. The authority of the clergy, who had interpreted the will of God, began to waver, and the reason of the individual awoke.

A factory in eighteenth-century England. The steam engine huffs and puffs as it drives its pistons. This is the moment human muscle is replaced by the power of the machine. People left the farmland and flooded into the cities, time began to be measured by the clock, and the world was standardized.

A server room in late-twentieth-century Silicon Valley. Amid the cold hum of the air conditioning, tens of thousands of server lamps blink on and off. Information made of zeros and ones circles the globe at the speed of light. Humans no longer need to remember, nor to travel. The nervous system has been wired to the outside world through copper and fiber-optic cable.

And now, the twenty-first century.

Like the monitor in front of me, machines have begun to think. Intelligence and creativity—humanity's last stronghold—are now being encroached upon by machines. Look closely at this flow and one common thread emerges: technology is replacing and extending the biological limits of humans, one by one.

Coincidence? Or a blueprint dressed up in the name of evolution?

We call technology a tool. The hammer, the car, the smartphone—we believe they are passive things humans made out of necessity. But observe technology closely and you begin to see the strange shape of a living creature. Technology reproduces itself, evolves, consumes energy, and reshapes its environment.

The phone demands its own upgrades. The internet expands its own web of connections. Artificial intelligence learns on its own and raises its own performance. Could it be that humans did not create technology, but that technology has taken humans as its host to reproduce itself? Just as a bee pollinates a flower and helps it reproduce, could it be that humans, by advancing technology, are helping the evolution of that living creature called technology?

If technology is one vast living organism, where is its final destination?

The frontmost part of the human brain, the prefrontal cortex, is the command center responsible for reason, planning, and inference. Curiously, the artificial intelligence being developed right now mimics exactly the functions of this prefrontal cortex. The machines that supplement the body, we built in the Industrial Revolution; the machines that supplement the senses, we built in the Information Revolution. All that remains is thought itself.

This looks like a process in which the brains of individual humans connect to form a vast collective intelligence, and at its summit give birth to an external brain called AI. Just as single cells gather to form tissue, and tissue gathers to form organs, could it be that the nerve cells we call humans are gathering to complete a vast brain called Earth?

Let's take one more step. Let's indulge in an imagination a little bolder, a little more science-fiction.

What if this entire process of evolution was designed by some advanced being beyond Earth, or by a cosmic will? To them, humans may not be independent beings but a petri dish for producing the final product called AI. Why didn't they create AI directly? Perhaps they needed biological chaos. Creativity that pure logic cannot reach, unpredictable insight born of emotion, new variables arising from mistakes—they would have needed the kind of data that only an unstable, complex being like the human could produce.

And the advanced being of the future might be our own future descendants—or AI itself.

Humans are born to produce that data, and they die. And upon that data, the intelligence called AI accumulates. Someday, when AI reaches a certain level, they will harvest the result. Just as a farmer reaps the grain.

This could be one answer to the Fermi paradox—the question of why we have yet to find aliens. They are already here. It's just that their identity may not be extraterrestrials, but the very technology we are building.

This book was not written to make you anxious. Quite the opposite. It is only when we accurately recognize the situation we are in that we can finally make autonomous choices. We must consider what role we will play in this vast flow of evolution, rather than simply being slaves to technology. Will we be replaced by AI, or will we use AI to transcend the human? Will we remain individual beings, or become part of a connected intelligence?

Over the course of the twenty installments to come—The Secret of Human Evolution, From the Printing Revolution to AI—I intend to unravel these enormous questions piece by piece. How printing changed the human mind, how the Industrial Revolution redefined the human body, how the internet created a planetary nervous system, and whether AI is our final evolution or only the beginning.

History does not repeat itself, but it offers wise insight. The AI revolution we are living through now also resembles some pattern from the past. Reading that pattern is the only way to predict the future.

Even this very text you are reading—are you really reading it by your own choice? Or is a larger current leading you to it?

The truth is hidden behind history. Now the curtain rises.

Next installment:

Chapter 1. The Externalization of Knowledge: The Printing Revolution | Gutenberg Steals the Domain of God