An old Soviet science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky about contact with the incomprehensible, and what it has to say about the AI race we are running today.

McLuhan in 1964 said machines extend humans and remake the humans who use them, set against Samuel Butler's 1863 letter arguing the machines would outlive their makers.

Debord's 1967 argument that modern life is lived through mass-produced images, read in 2026 when the apparatus runs autonomously and the user is the one making the images.

Vonnegut's 1952 novel Player Piano, about an automated America where the displaced are provided for and miserable anyway, read in 2026 as AI begins automating the knowledge work.

Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 novel about four people who descend into a structure they cannot agree how to name — and what their disagreement says about every word we have brought to the AI encounter.

In 1865 William Stanley Jevons argued that the more efficiently coal was burned, the more of it Britain would burn. The same mechanism is now eating AI's promise to give us our time back.