BIOLOGICAL AI - Ed Afonso

At dawn in his Maryland yard, Ed Afonso watched his Shih Tzu BeBe run her "morning diagnostic" - nose down, senses sweeping, deciding in seconds what kind of day it would be. It hit him like a 3 a.m. outage call: the dog, the network he'd kept alive for twenty-seven years, and the artificial minds now waking up around us all run the same loop. Sense. Decide. Act. Reroute when it fails.

Ed isn't a biologist or an AI researcher. He's a headend technician who spent twenty-seven years keeping Comcast's network alive through storms, outages, and every night shift in between. He knows what a system looks like when it's failing - and what it looks like when it boots back up clean. It turns out the body does the same things networks do.

BIOLOGICAL AI is his tour of the two operating systems shaping our future: the biological one (brains, memory, the immune firewall, the code of DNA) and the artificial one (neural networks, machine memory, CRISPR as a code editor, brain-computer interfaces) - and the strange, accelerating moment where the two start to merge.

Funny, cinematic, and written in plain language, this is the book for anyone who's ever wondered what's actually going on inside the machine - whichever machine you mean.