I Apparently Wrote a Book
- Rich Washburn
- 11 hours ago
- 3 min read
I'm in that strange period where I've finished a book but haven't really published a book.
A few people are reading it. I'm waiting for feedback. I'm trying very hard not to touch it every fourteen minutes.
And people keep asking what it's actually about.
The title is We Aren't the Only Mind in the Room Anymore: What Artificial Intelligence Is About to Teach Us About Being Human.
Which sounds very deliberate...The truth is less impressive.
I started pulling on a weird question.
Humans have spent thousands of years building tools that move pieces of ourselves into the world. Writing extended memory. Mathematics let us manipulate things we couldn't hold in our heads. Maps externalized navigation. Institutions distributed knowledge. Computers externalized calculation.
Civilization became enormously more capable because no individual had to carry the whole thing anymore. Then AI showed up. And I started wondering if something different had just happened.
Because this tool doesn't merely store something for us. It answers back.
It can hold a question while you move between fields. It can translate one domain into another. It can help somebody wander outside the intellectual room they normally occupy and sometimes bring something useful back.
So I became less interested in the question everyone asks: What is AI going to become?
And more interested in this one: What happens to us when this becomes normal?
That question somehow turned into Plato's cave, Bell Labs, specialization, attention, work, identity, creativity, cognitive sovereignty, meaning, and about 280 pages of me trying to figure out what I was actually looking at.
Then something interesting happened.
I started running into serious researchers coming at pieces of the same question from completely different directions.
Stanford cognitive scientist Judy Fan, for example, studies what she calls cognitive tools: the representations and technologies humans create to change how we think, learn and understand things we otherwise couldn't easily see. Her examples stretch from the number line and Cartesian coordinates to scientific drawings and data visualization.
Her work is rigorous cognitive science.
Mine started with a Mumford & Sons song and Sean Connery. So let's maintain some perspective.
But underneath those very different approaches is a surprisingly similar idea: Humans don't just think.
We build things to think with and those things change us too.
AI may be a particularly important turn in that old story because the cognitive tool has become interactive. The notebook talks back...The library follows the question...The hallway between disciplines can increasingly come to you. And suddenly my harebrained question doesn't feel quite as harebrained.
I don't think I found the answer. That really isn't what the book claims.
What surprised me while writing it was realizing how many smart people seem to be approaching different edges of the same territory: cognition, expertise, creativity, judgment, authorship, agency, and what happens when another cognitive process becomes part of ordinary human life.
That feels like a much bigger conversation than whether AI takes somebody's job.
The book is simply my attempt to enter that conversation from where I happen to be standing.
Maybe I got parts of it wrong. That's why people are reading it before I put it out into the world. But I'm increasingly comfortable with one thing: I think the question is real.
And that was enough reason to write the book.
Rich Washburn is a technologist and strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and capital. He is Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.
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