I had also spent those weeks with an AI at my elbow, and it had been indispensable. The fashionable worry is that AI is making us stupid, that every delegation is a small amputation. I felt AI was a modern-day philosopher’s stone, imbued with the power to transmute machine into mind. That is the third principle, and the one the AI industry is spending a decade trying to engineer away. The philosopher’s stone of AI is never going to be found inside the machine.