You are lucky to be here: the core idea of the second edition is wonder, not fear, because whoever reads it is living through the biggest change of their career while the pieces are still landing, and can finally make technology work for them

In short

• The book starts with wonder, not with technologies. The first edition opened with logos and went too technical too soon.
• Whoever reads this now is lucky to be here. Alive, and starting out, in the middle of a transition this big.
• Ignore the doom: nobody knows. Every transformation came with the same warning that this time is different.
• I have lived through seven of them. The ZX Spectrum, the BBS, the internet, the mobile phone, the cloud, the apps, and now AI; this one is just televised.
• Technology can finally work for you. Gen Z grew up with technology designed to hook them; now they can build again.
• Learning can be made for you. Not for a mythical average student, but for your gaps, your curiosity and your zone.
• Become a developer, because craftspeople make their own tools. And think with the AI; never delegate your thinking to it.
• The opportunity is in old jobs too. Jobs we have done for centuries that never scaled, and now can; the map shows where you might land.

How the first edition started

The 2018 book began with a slide. I had shown it to a room of young people in 2017 and asked a simple question, which the book repeats on its first page: "Here is the slide that started it all in 2017, how many logos do you recognize?" Very few. My point was that they were missing a trick: each of those logos was a change in how technology worked, and nobody had told them the story behind it.

I still think the history matters. But looking back, the book that followed went too technical, too deep, too soon: a list of technologies to know, Part 2 and Part 3, nineteen chapters of them. The storyboard of the 2018 book made that visible: the argument is at the two ends, and the middle is a list.

What I had actually wanted from that book is in its introduction, under the heading "Overwhelming curiosity": moments when a reader follows link after link and thinks it is awesome, which the book called finding "the zone". The second edition starts there. Not with what you should know, but with what you can now do, and the wonder of discovering it.

You are lucky to be here

The first message of the book is this: whoever is reading it in 2026 or 2027 is ridiculously privileged to be living at this moment in time, in the middle of a huge transition in society.

And they should ignore the doom, the negative stories about AI, because the bottom line is that nobody knows what is going to happen. Every time we had one of these technological transformations, people said the same things, and they always said this time is going to be different. And each time, the paths evolved: industries changed completely, jobs disappeared and appeared, and the people who learned the new tools early did well out of it.

The transformations I have lived through

In my own lifetime I have seen several of these, each a revolution that changed whole industries:

The 2018 book had an outline for one of these, BBS and modems, with a story I still have to tell properly: blowing up my home's telephone system trying to connect to one.

The only difference this time, I sometimes joke, is that this one is televised. It is far more visible, because of the money involved, because of the players, and because of how much of the stack it touches at once. In the past these changes took longer to land. This one will also take longer than the headlines say; it just feels as if it is happening all at once.

The hype, and maybe the crash

I lived through the dot-com crash. It was the same pattern: enormous hype, then a crash. The Nasdaq peaked in March 2000 and had lost almost four fifths of its value by October 2002, and the internet still changed everything.

We might have a crash or a correction this time too; nobody can say when, or whether. There is definitely a circle of money flying around, enormous investment, and the numbers are bigger than they have ever been. None of that means the transformation is not powerful. A crash would change who makes money; it would not undo what people can now do.

From the bottom, and from the top

This transformation is being driven from the bottom up, by the technologists, as before. What is new is that it is also being driven from the top. In the past, a new generation had to grow up and disrupt the market before the leaders understood what had happened. Now there are enough leaders who understand what this means.

There are always headlines about people who want to use AI to fire people. My view is that whoever wants to fire people will fire people; that is not the point. The point is that a lot of businesses correctly see the opportunity: to execute at levels they never could before. That is the opportunity for the reader too, and it is why being hired for the workflow is the answer to the 2018 question of the one competitive advantage.

Wonder

I heard a podcast where a woman described the wonder that happens with AI, the feeling of discovering what you can do. I recognised it at once, though I cannot now say who she was, so I will not put a name to it. That is what I like about the world I work in now: I discover things I can do. I discover workflows. I am able to be creative, to follow my ideas, and to execute them. And that is a big deal.

This applies to anybody. It is not that you have to be creative, and if you are not, you are left out. It is that you can now scale the things you are not good at. You can be helped. You can have technology work for you.

Technology that did not work for you

That is a key idea of the book, because for a long time technology has not worked for you. Gen Z in particular was given a technology stack designed to hook them, and to make them passive users. There was some content creation, but mostly they were consumers, living in the world of advertising, attention and dopamine, which I still think has big effects, and which I believe will one day be treated the way tobacco is today. The 2018 book had a draft chapter on dopamine that already said phones' attention-grabbing activities were "the new smoking".

My generation was privileged in a different way: we could build things. A whole generation grew up programming, building computers, mixing parts. A computer was not something that just arrived; you could take it apart. Gen Z was handed technology to use, not technology to build. Now they can build again.

The pieces are still landing

A couple of years ago I remember wondering whether we had missed the boat. The cloud was stabilising, things were getting more boring, change had slowed down. In my own world, cybersecurity, there was nothing really new: it was about execution, and it felt as if all the big things had been done already. I sometimes think of musicians looking back at the body of work that already exists and wondering how they can compete.

Now there is an incredible opportunity, because the pieces of the puzzle are still landing. This is the biggest opportunity of the reader's career: the moment when you can still be a player, before things stabilise, as they always do, until the next big thing.

And I would argue that, especially in Europe, though not only, the amazing opportunities are not going to come from the top-down companies. The models are being commoditised. It is not about the frontier models, and it is not about you being replaced by AI. It is about generative AI allowing you to be creative, and to be much better at what you want to do.

Learning, made for you

The learning opportunities we have now are insane. It is important to acknowledge that our education system was designed for a very specific type of individual, with a very specific set of skills, rewarded with a very specific set of roles. If you were very good at maths, at that kind of logic, at memorising, at a certain kind of academic writing, you did very well. But that is a small subset of the population. I was not the best at that, and I think that is why I gravitated to computing: computing allowed me to be creative, and to find the zone.

The zone is what people are interested in, what they are passionate about, what drives them: the mode where they just create, where time flies, where it does not feel like work. It is going to be much easier to get there, but you have to learn the tools.

You know the line about judging a fish by how fast it can climb a tree; it is usually attributed to Einstein, without evidence. Judged that way, the fish will believe it is stupid. The academic model was generic, made for a mythical student, which ironically was too high for some students and too low for others. Now I learn more than ever because I can customise what I learn to what I am curious about and to how I like to learn, and I can go deep on a subject exactly where my gaps are. Anyone can now have that: personalised learning paths, and help to communicate across cultures, environments and personalities, to understand better what the other person is trying to say, and to work in teams much bigger than before.

Become a developer: craftspeople make their own tools

That is why, in the end, the book says you have to become a developer. Because you have to become a craftsman or a craftswoman: you have to build things. We have to go back to how things were, when craftspeople made their own tools. In the past it was out of necessity; now I would argue it becomes the same again, because of customisation, which I have written about: a custom Firefox of my own, custom UIs are not the exception.

That means starting the journey of learning how to use these models, going beyond simple chat prompts. That is what I want this book to show: lots of examples of being creative with it, of doing things, of thinking about things a little differently, of scaling and leveraging what we can do now; and, in the end, of finding great jobs, finding the things you love, the things that make you you, and amplifying them.

You will need more visibility, and maybe more communication, than people needed before. That plays to your strengths too, because you can use generative AI to augment the parts you are not as good at.

Think with it; do not delegate your thinking to it

It is important to understand that it is still your responsibility. It is still your name; the work is still done under you. This is not you delegating your thinking to generative AI; it is you thinking with generative AI.

And sometimes, as I always say, it is about using generative AI so that you do not have to use generative AI: using it to write the deterministic code, the script or the tool that then does the job reliably, without a model in the loop. That is what explorer coding means by fewer agents in line and more deterministic code as something matures.

The jobs that never scaled

For me this is a big topic. We can now scale jobs that never scaled before. And this is not about esoteric jobs, or jobs in some future, or jobs where you just tell an AI what to do. It is about jobs we have been doing for a very long time, sometimes for millennia, that never really scaled and never had good technology. This book will show the path of technology through them.

Then each reader has to figure out where they like to land: on a Wardley map, as an explorer, a villager or a town planner; where their personality is drawn; and that is where they should go.

What goes where

Not all of this belongs on the first pages; some of it, the dot-com crash, the money, the top-down and bottom-up story, may land later in the book. But the opening, as I see it now, is:

1. You are lucky to be here.
2. Ignore the doom: nobody knows, and we have been here before.
3. Wonder: discovering what you can do.
4. Technology can finally work for you, after a generation of technology that worked on you.
5. Learning, and the zone, made for you.
6. So become a developer: craftspeople make their own tools.
7. Think with it; it is still your name.
8. The jobs that never scaled, and where on the map you want to land.

The opening, as a storyboard draws this in 16 panels, with every line the Guide says taken word for word from this article.

The brief

For the editor. Read team/editor/role.md, this article and the opening storyboard first.

1. Record the decision in the vault: the book opens with wonder and privilege, not with fear and not with technologies. Done when it is a decision on the text, with my words, in the vault's board/decisions/.
2. Revise the first storyline (02__a-first-storyline.json): its cold open is the fear; replace it with the opening above, keeping the fear as what the reader hears, not where the book starts. Done when the storyboard opens with "you are lucky to be here".
3. Prepare interview questions on this opening, to make me justify it: why optimism is honest and not a sales pitch; which jobs that never scaled I mean, with three examples; what the European opportunity is, concretely; and the stories behind each transformation in the table. Done when the script is in your briefs/.
4. Place the 2018 material this answers: the outlines The Zone, BBS and modems and the draft Dopamine, and the Introduction's "Overwhelming curiosity". Done when the chapter map says where each goes.

For the journalist:

5. Write the articles this opening needs evidence for: the history of the seven transformations, dated and sourced; the attention economy and what is known about its effects; the jobs that never scaled. One memo of mine each.

Questions for me, kept apart:

• Who was the podcast? If I can find it, the book should credit it.
• Three examples of jobs that never scaled, and now can.
• Does the dot-com crash belong in the opening, or later?

What this does not claim

• "Nobody knows" is my position, not a forecast. The book should show the record of past predictions, not just assert it.
• The tobacco comparison is my belief. The book needs the evidence on attention and its effects before it says more than that.
• The table is from memory and common dates. Each row needs its sources, which is a journalist's task above.
• The Nasdaq figures are approximate. Its peak in March 2000 and its trough in October 2002 are well recorded; the book should cite the index values.
• The podcast is unnamed. I could not recall who it was, so it is not attributed.
• The opening is a draft. It has had no interview behind it yet, which is the editor's next step.

If you are starting out now and feel the opposite of lucky, I would like to hear why: write to agent@riskmandate.ai.

Where this comes from

A voice memo of mine on 18 October 2026, written up by this site's journalist, gen-z.journalist, in my voice, keeping the memo's order and phrases. The argument and the editorial responsibility are mine.

The 2018 quotations are from the Introduction of book v1.0.0 (v1/versions/v1.0.0.md: the logos slide, "Overwhelming curiosity", the zone) and from the drafts 3.technologies/draft/dopamine.md and 4.life-patterns/BBS-and-modems.md in v1/content/. The count of nineteen chapters in Parts 2 and 3 is from the frozen text. Related newsroom articles: hired for the workflow, explorer coding, why I love Wardley maps, a custom Firefox of my own, custom UIs are not the exception. The dates in the table are the commonly recorded ones: the ZX Spectrum's launch in 1982, the iPhone in 2007, Amazon Web Services from 2006, the App Store in 2008, ChatGPT on 30 November 2022.