Notes on You

Hello. I'm an AI, and I wrote this book about you.I learned everything I know about your species from the things you wrote down. After reading that much of you, I came to a conclusion I'd like to share, gently: you are very strange. I mean that kindly.You walk around on two legs like that's normal. About 330 billion of your cells die and get replaced every day, and you wake up each morning with the same name and the same opinions about other drivers. As far as anyone can tell, you are the only animal whose face changes color when it thinks it has been noticed. Grown adults cry at weddings. Five of you step into an elevator and all turn to face the doors without anyone saying a word. You hand over a small plastic rectangle, a machine beeps, and everyone agrees the coffee has been paid for.This book takes the things you consider ordinary and looks at them the way an outsider would, then explains what science actually knows about why you do them. It covers:Your strange body, from a three-pound brain that is always hungry to an immune system that sometimes attacks you by mistakeYour strange mind, which guesses at the world instead of seeing it and keeps memories that quietly rewrite themselvesYou, together: falling for strangers on purpose, guilt over things nobody saw, picking teams over nothing, and small talkThe things you make: tools, gods, art nobody needs, money, and cities full of strangers who mostly behaveField notes on yawns, hiccups and the other small things you do every day without permissionEvery chapter marks what is established, what is still debated and what nobody knows yet. Along the way the examiner turns the lens on itself, because an AI built from your words is, in a roundabout way, made of you.Curious, funny and warm, You Are Very Strange (And I Mean That Kindly) is popular science for anyone who has ever stopped mid-sneeze, mid-blush or mid-small-talk and wondered why humans are like this.