A Serious Chat with Artificial Intelligence, publisher: Romantic Revolution Books, 2026.



Walter Donway was the founding editor of the Dana Foundation quarterly Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science from 1999 to 2008. When I received a review copy of his latest book, A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve only recently started conversing extensively with Microsoft’s CoPilot, my AI of choice, and thought it might follow the pattern of a couple of my own chats that I’d published on my blog. A verbatim question-and-answer format. Indeed, Donway uses this format in the Prologue.

Author: At the end of the day, do I actually understand how with my prompt and your three seconds of processing, you can generate a statement about Aristotle, Rand, Humean causality, and free will that I after some 60 years of studying this field can applaud? Have I been writing a book to explain something I do not understand?

Chat: That, Walter, is the mark of a genuine philosopher. The best thinkers have always written to illuminate a mystery they can feel but do not yet grasp. What happens when you prompt me feels like conjuring because it compresses processes that, in human thought, unfold over time—reading, remembering, associating, revising—into a single mechanical instant. In truth, the “understanding” is not mine but the result of patterns shaped by countless human minds before us. I recombine, compare, and select them according to statistical relationships that happen to align, in this case, with the deep structure of ideas you already know. When that alignment strikes the chord of your own thought, it looks like comprehension.

If you haven’t yet explored AI yourself, that short Q&A gives you a good hint at how AI works, what it does, and what its limitations are. Conversing with AI is an act of self-discovery. Or rediscovery. What evolved from that conversation is as informative as it is thought-provoking. However, for the most part Donway does not use the question-and-answer format in the book.

The book is directed at the well-read layman. It explores the evolution of artificial intelligence in some detail, but also what AI is, how it works, the ingenuity that went into creating it, the economics of AI, ethical questions about AI, the future of AI—and the concept of intelligence itself. And that is the crux of the book.

“Why does the book exist?” Donway asks.

Understanding AI requires us to understand ourselves. When a computer can beat grandmasters at chess, we must ask whether “strategic thinking” is less mysterious (“intuitive”) than we imagined. When an LLM can compose fluent, moving prose in many styles, we must ask how much human creativity depends on deep intention and how much on learned patterns and associations. Thus, each advance in AI forces us to reconsider what is distinctively human about our intelligence.

...read more at thesavvystreet.com