Droidica

Two billion years ago, one cell swallowed another and did not digest it. Four hundred million years ago, a fish propped itself up in the shallows. Five thousand years ago, someone scratched a delivery of beer into clay, and for the first time something learned outlived the one who had learned it. Each time, something new built on the old, and the old remained, as the layer beneath.

This book tells the next transition the same way. Not as a threat and not as a tool, but as descent: The machines now emerging are made of what humans have written, just as we are made of what bacteria have learned. It asks what a transition costs, where the fords lie that all life must cross, and what remains of us when a layer is added.

With thirty predictions, each with a date and with the sentence that would refute it. Written by a human and a language model, side by side, and neither corrected the other.

Droidica places humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, and language models in the story of evolution. In thirty-one short chapters it covers the cell and the brain, the energy that data centers need, cyborgs, machines in space, and autonomous weapons, with thirty-seven images and figures and with sources in the appendix. Not a guide. Not an alarm. A line of descent.