What does it mean to remain fully human in an age of intelligent machines?
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming human life, reshaping power, identity, community, and the nature of work itself. As machines surpass us in calculation, prediction, and analysis, a deeper question emerges: Is intelligence reducible to rationality alone?
In
My Pet Shark, L. Bryan Williams argues that it is not. Through personal experience, philosophical reflection, and direct dialogue with AI, Williams shows that the most consequential forms of human intelligence emerge precisely where machines fall short. AI solves rational problems well yet fails to carry what cannot be solved: suffering without remedy, decisions whose consequences cannot be undone, and commitments that resist every algorithm.
At the heart of the book is Trans-Rational Intelligence (TRI): the human capacity to carry meaning, love, responsibility, and moral weight in ways no artificial system can replicate. Even artificial general intelligence will not resolve the questions of suffering, purpose, and love that define a human life.
My Pet Shark does not ask readers to fear AI. It asks something harder: that we understand ourselves clearly enough to know what we alone must carry.
