63years
to ban leaded petrol
The harm was known. The evidence was public. It took sixty-three years from the first serious warning to the last country taking it off the forecourt.
Out now · Paperback, Kindle & Hardcover
Difficult to Notice at First
How technological capability outran our
judgement, and what remains to be done
From the back cover
Nobody asked you whether the world should change this fast.
- Your attention was sold before you knew it was for sale.
- Your competence is being quietly absorbed by tools that get better at your job every year.
- Decisions about you are already being made by systems nobody fully understands — and in some countries the law assumes those systems are right unless you can prove otherwise.
The book
Not a forecast. A record of what has already happened, and a set of instructions.
Your attention was sold before you knew it was for sale. Your competence is being quietly absorbed by tools that get better at your job every year. Decisions about you are already being made by systems nobody fully understands — and in some countries the law assumes those systems are right unless you can prove otherwise.
A third of this book is instructions. How to keep your judgement sharp when everything is built to do your thinking for you. How to tell what is true when recordings can be faked. What to teach a child. How to refuse something at work, and what it will cost you.
The rest explains why you need them — not with forecasts, but with things that already happened.
Most books about this tell you to be worried.
This one tells you what to do.
A third of it is instructions
Four things you will know how to do by the end.
-
Keep your judgement sharp
When everything around you is built to do your thinking for you.
-
Tell what is true
When a recording is no longer evidence that anything happened.
-
Know what to teach a child
Which capacities are worth protecting, and which are already gone.
-
Refuse something at work
How to do it, and what it will cost you. The book is specific about the cost.
The evidence
Three things that already happened.
1977
an oil company's own scientists had the climate right
Its public position stayed uncertain for thirty more years. The internal science and the external message were two different documents.
1,000
people prosecuted on the word of a computer
A computer the law presumed was working. The presumption held for years after the software was known to be wrong.
It will not tell you that everything is fine.
It will not tell you that nothing can be done.
Both of those are lies.
Get the book
Available now in paperback, Kindle and hardcover.
Prices and availability vary by Amazon store. Kindle edition is included with Kindle Unlimited in participating regions.
- Publisher
- Independently published
- Published
- 20 August 2026
- Print length
- 340 pages
- Language
- English
- ISBN-13
- 979-8193666936
- ASIN
- B0HG5W599P
- Dimensions
- 6 × 0.8 × 9 in
- Weight
- 1.28 lb