During his lifetime, Henry Kissinger did not type on a computer, he dictated his books. He does not communicate with machines - only with people. But in the summer of 2018, Atlantic magazine published his article in which he defined the entry of artificial intelligence into our lives as the end of the age of reason, and everyone started talking about it. What Kissinger wrote resonates not because his thesis is particularly original and completely unknown, but because the challenge comes from him. He has earned himself the status of the man who understands the modern world, and the reason he understands it is because he is not part of it. He may not know what's coming, but he knows better than anyone what's ending. And so for people like Eric Schmidt, the legendary CEO of Google, winning Henry Kissinger over to the project of writing the book becomes a personal challenge.

A new era is upon us today. In it, technology will again change knowledge, discovery, communication and individual thinking. Artificial intelligence is not human. He doesn't hope, he doesn't pray, and he doesn't feel. It has no consciousness or the ability to think. It is a human creation that reflects man-designed processes on man-made machines. Yet in some cases, at incredible scales and speeds, the artificial achieves results close to those hitherto achieved by human reason alone. Sometimes its results are astounding. As a result, it can reveal aspects of reality more dramatic than any we have ever considered.