Inside the Notebook Is Going Outside

I wanted a notebook that could answer back.

I may have gotten a little carried away.

Nearly three years later, I have a courtroom memoir, an interactive software prototype, an expanding collection of research questions, several artificial intelligences with strong opinions about my writing, and enough flowcharts to require their own exhibit index.

And now, apparently, an audio announcement.

Welcome to Inside the Notebook. The written episodes are already underway. I’m experimenting with the idea of turning the series into a podcast, so I decided to make a little introduction.

Naturally, I used three AI-generated narrators. None of them is me. Which, if you know anything about what I’ve been working on, is rather funny.

The series follows the ideas, experiments, questions, mistakes, and discoveries that emerged from my Interactive AI Notebook—and what happens as I begin taking those ideas outside the conversations that helped produce them.

I’ve spent years asking machines to help me imagine what other people might think. What would a researcher say? A philosopher? A lawyer? A critic? What might I be missing? The answers could be fascinating, useful, completely wrong, or suspiciously flattering.

But an imagined audience is not an actual audience.

A room can look crowded before anyone arrives.

That’s where The First Move comes in. I’m preparing to share selected research materials with people and organizations working on artificial intelligence, human judgment, learning, and the future of these technologies. I don’t know who will respond. I don’t know what they’ll say. They may disagree, correct me, offer new questions, or never answer at all.

And that’s the interesting part.

The written series will continue regardless. Whether it becomes a full podcast remains to be seen. For now, here’s a little audio introduction to the world inside my notebook.

My memoir, A Trial of Color: Making the Case for Human Judgment in an AI-Accelerated World, arrives November 11. But Inside the Notebook is about something that hasn’t happened yet.

What happens when the ideas leave the page? When the imagined critics encounter actual critics?

The machine can imagine the room. But the world still gets a turn.