Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap
The one hiding in plain sight.

There is a gap between artificial intelligence behaviour and human behaviour. Not a gap in intelligence. A gap in behaviour — and it is hiding in plain sight.

AI behaviour has a signature: fluent, confident, tireless, always available. It never hesitates, never flinches, never carries a bad night's sleep into the room. Human behaviour comes from somewhere else entirely — a body, a history, a nervous system built over two hundred million years, defences learned before we could speak.

The surfaces look alike. That's the problem. We read AI with the same social brain we use to read each other, and the resemblance is good enough to fool it.

Mind the Gap maps that gap. Fifteen chapters, drawn from forty years of professional life — factory floor, boardroom, therapy room, cancer ward. It is not a book about AI. AI is the contrast medium. The subject is what it means to behave like a human being.

Strip out every reference to AI and a complete book about being human remains. That is the point.

Read it. Then mind it.