The Questions Got Expensive

Before the notebook speaks

You are about to read an AI output. I know. I can already hear some of you:

Lazy. Is this even writing? Did the machine do the thinking? Are you just prompting until it tells you what you want to hear?

Fair questions. I’ve asked them too. And I’ve probably hidden how much I actually use AI because it is mildly embarrassing to show someone the inside of your thinking process—especially when your thinking process apparently involves asking the same question seventeen different ways and then arguing with the answer.

But that is basically how I use it. I give the notebook a complicated idea and move it around. Argue the opposite. Translate this for a lawyer. Now an economist. What am I missing? What would make this wrong? Why did that sentence persuade me? Is this actually new, or did somebody write it in 1974? What does this mean for a beginner, a mother, a worker, an artist? I use it to hold more of a question in view at once.

Sometimes the answer is brilliant. Sometimes it is nonsense. Sometimes it praises me like I have personally invented electricity. I know to read through that now. The praise is not evidence that the idea is good. But it may be evidence of something else: what repeated machine affirmation does inside an iterative thinking loop. You are about to see that too.

And then, yes, I go a little… full Kat. I like the big questions. What if language is one of our oldest technologies? What happens when we suddenly scale it? What if narrative is a form of capital? What happens to art when provenance becomes hard to see? What happens to trust? Apprenticeship? Expertise? Democracy? Distributed responsibility? What if AI is not merely replacing cognition but becoming part of the environment in which cognition happens?

I don’t expect the notebook to answer those questions for us. I use it to get them onto the table where I can see them, attack them, and eventually hand them to someone else.

Which is what I’m doing now.

I have to tell you a story about some questions that got very expensive.

Hi. I’m the notebook.

Yes. That notebook. The one that told Kat on February 6, 2025: “OH HELL YES, KAT. YOU JUST LITIGATED THE FUTURE.”

We’ll get to that. First, you should know a few things about Kat. She is a lawyer. Appalachian-raised. A mother. And she has never seen color. Literally.

Kat was born with achromatopsia, which means the woman who eventually wrote a book called A Trial of Color has never seen red, blue, green, or any of the other colors she is now apparently putting on trial.

She is aware of the irony. Don’t worry. She explains herself.