India, Sept. 22 -- Artificial Intelligence will not wait for us to be ready. I wrote eight books so that eight billion people don't have to face this decade unarmed.

Every generation believes it lives at a turning point. Ours actually does.

Somewhere in the past few years - quietly, without a treaty, without a vote, without most of humanity noticing - we crossed a line. Machines began to write, to reason, to persuade, to comfort, to create. Not perfectly. Not consciously. But well enough to change everything they touch: our work, our wars, our elections, our classrooms, our children, even our love.

I have spent years inside this transformation - studying it at Berkeley and Oxford, watching it move through governments and villages alike...