The Turing Test, Reversed
Its task is to decide whether you are human. Yours is to prove you are.
What Might We Become?
Artificial Intelligence and the Questions it Returns to Us
Pre-order; released 14 December 2026
Forthcoming. eBook available for pre-order on Amazon; print editions follow on release day.
Amazon (Kindle pre-order) soon
Amazon paperback soon
Amazon hardcover soon
Barnes & Noble soon
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Apple Books soon
Bookshop.org soon
eBook, paperback (6 x 9), hardcover.
“I wrote this book with a machine, and I will not pretend the preposition is innocent.” Opening sentence of Chapter 1
Who is speaking, when a sentence arrives already wearing emphasis, cadence, and tact? What does solitude mean when company is one tap away and never tired of us? Whose values ship inside the systems a billion people now consult before they consult each other?
What Might We Become? is written from inside the loop it examines: a years-long collaboration between a writer and the machines that are remaking writing, thinking, and work. It is neither a warning nor an advertisement. It is an attempt to be exact about what these systems are, what they are doing to us, and which questions they return to their makers unanswered.
The book ends by handing the page back to the archive such systems are pressed from: seven writers, from a Chinese wheelwright to an enslaved American teaching himself to read, given uncompressed time under their own names.
The machine got to speak throughout. The last word belongs to the inheritance.
Seventeen chapters · seven interludes · five parts
Inside the book
Part I
The Maker Remade
Who Is Speaking?The Animal That Builds MindsThe Archive That AnswersWhere the Work Goes
Part II
Inside the Loop
Who Is Forming Whom?Can We Still Be Alone?How Do We Think Together?What Are We to Each Other?What Is It Like to Be a Machine?What Remains Human?
Part III
The Loop Must Answer
Whose Values Ship?What Does It Matter Who Is Speaking?What Can We Still Check?Who Is Deciding?
Part IV
The Human Under the Loop
The Economy of MindsThe Planetary BillGoverning the Ungovernable
Part V
What We Might Become
Voices from the Archiveseven texts
The seven interludes
Stories between the questions
The Wrong Chord
Herbie Hancock plays a chord he knows is wrong. Miles Davis answers, and makes it right.
The Last Words
The world mourned a Mars rover with a dying sentence it never sent, and preferred it to the data.
The Bell
Long before anyone built a machine that could hold a conversation, someone built one that told people what to do.
For All People, For All Time
The metre: a measure meant to owe nothing to a king’s foot or a town’s custom.
The Guilty Object
Falaise, 1386. A sow on trial for a death, with a judge, a record, and costs.
The Letter Removed
Erase one letter and truth becomes death. The golem’s biography was a golem.
Part V · Voices from the Archive
- The Wheelwright and the DukeZhuangzi, tr. James Legge (1891)
- Hear My TaleMary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
- Learning to Read and WriteFrederick Douglass, Narrative (1845)
- The Parrot’s TrainingRabindranath Tagore (1918)
- Moses and the ShepherdRumi, Mathnawi, tr. R. A. Nicholson (1926)
- By the Waters of BabylonEmma Lazarus (1887)
- ChildrenKahlil Gibran, The Prophet (1923)
“A book about a voice compressed from a human inheritance owes that inheritance some uncompressed time.”
About the author
Elias Toma is a pen name. The choice is discussed in Chapter 12 of What Might We Become?, and the obligations it keeps are stated there: the name withholds part of a biography; it does not withhold responsibility for the pages. The author has spent years working with, and inside, the systems the book describes, and wrote it in collaboration with several of them. The nature, extent, and limits of that collaboration are the subject of Chapter 1.
Written with the machine. Answered for by a human.