How to Learn About AI, Its Bias, Its Power, Its Cost to Humanity, and How I Use It
by Basil C. Puglisi, MPA
A Human-AI Collaboration
Hardcover $34.99 | eBook and Kindle $19.99
Releases Friday, November 6, 2026. Pre-orders are open now.
The print edition is an 8.5 x 11 inch hardcover of about 2.4 pounds, and it will not be offered in paperback. The Kindle edition opens Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
What Is It?
The Minds That Bend the Machine is a guide to learning the full impact of artificial intelligence on countries, cultures, and humanity. It asks what the big picture is and how we begin to learn it. Understanding AI does not require becoming an engineer. It requires understanding the people, ideas, arguments, warnings, and decisions that shaped the technology in the first place.
The author’s earlier book, Governing AI: When Capability Exceeds Control, explored the threats of the technology. This book follows the journey of a retired law enforcement officer, former academic, and social media pioneer who studied the research on his own and applied it.
Across twenty-eight chapters and a postscript, the book profiles twenty-four minds who shape artificial intelligence, from the builders who made modern AI possible to the governance architects working to turn those lessons into systems people can actually use.
Why Do You Care?
They do not agree. That is part of the point. Their disagreements reveal something important about artificial intelligence that gets lost when the conversation is reduced to whether AI is good or bad, safe or dangerous, revolutionary or overhyped. The real question is what each of us needs to understand before AI begins making more decisions around us, with us, and eventually for us.
AI literacy is quickly becoming more than knowing how to use a chatbot. It is becoming the ability to recognize what a system knows, what it may be missing, who shaped its assumptions, when its confidence deserves scrutiny, and where human judgment still has to take responsibility. That matters whether you are running a company, advising an organization, teaching students, writing policy, raising children, creating content, managing employees, or simply trying to understand the systems entering everyday life.
The book was set to come out sooner, until the events of September 2026 pulled it back for last-minute edits and an Author’s Warning inside the cover. The warning names the hope behind the whole book: to shed light on the real effects artificial intelligence has on humanity.
What Do You Learn?
Each wave looks at artificial intelligence from a different side, and together they form the big picture.
- The Builders: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng, Fei-Fei Li, and Demis Hassabis, on capability and data.
- The Ethicists: Timnit Gebru, Joy Buolamwini, Kate Crawford, and Meredith Whittaker, on bias, labor, power, and the environment.
- The Regulators and Economists: Lina Khan, Daron Acemoglu, Erik Brynjolfsson, Helen Toner, and Jessica Newman, on the economy and regulation.
- The Philosophers: Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ray Kurzweil, and Yuval Noah Harari, on alignment, extinction, acceleration, and narrative.
- The Governance Architects: Dario Amodei, Carter Cousineau, Navrina Singh, and Sneha Revanur, on principles and practice.
- Standalone: Yann LeCun, in a chapter of his own, The Mind AI Missed.
After the profiles, the book turns to the author’s own practice in The Practitioner, to the governance voices the original grid did not reach in Looking Beyond WEIRD, and to the AI industrialist, a figure whose influence over AI runs chiefly through ownership. A postscript records what the profiled figures said and did between June and the end of September 2026, after the manuscript froze.
The simulated critiques in this book do not represent the views, words, opinions, or endorsements of the people named.
How Do You Use This?
This is not a book written from the sidelines. The research unfolds alongside the practical experience of building and governing with AI. The same questions raised by the people profiled in these pages are tested against real multi-AI workflows, human checkpoints, preserved disagreement, verification, and documented decision making.
Chapter 26, The Practitioner, names the tools the author built and uses. Factics pairs facts with tactics and measurable outcomes. HAIA-RECCLIN decomposes AI participation into seven roles (Researcher, Editor, Coder, Calculator, Liaison, Ideator, and Navigator) and keeps the human as the constitutional arbiter at every decision point. HAIA-CAIPR runs the same task across several platforms in parallel when the stakes call for it. Checkpoint-Based Governance places mandatory human review points before, during, and after AI-assisted work, so no chain of decisions moves from input to impact without explicit human approval.
The book itself is the evidence. Its profile chapters were drafted and reviewed across five AI platforms, and the author’s direct corrections decided what stayed. Reviews on those platforms covered twenty-two chapters without flagging that Yann LeCun, the third recipient of the 2018 Turing Award, was missing, and the author caught the gap while reviewing the complete work. That is why the method keeps a human at the checkpoint.
The result is not a book about having the right answer. It is a book about learning how to ask better questions before someone else, human or machine, answers them for you.
Book Details
- Title: The Minds That Bend the Machine: How to Learn About AI, Its Bias, Its Power, Its Cost to Humanity, and How I Use It
- Author: Basil C. Puglisi, MPA
- Release date: Friday, November 6, 2026
- Hardcover: $34.99, 8.5 x 11 inches, about 2.4 pounds, ISBN 9798182969321. Not offered in paperback.
- eBook and Kindle: $19.99. The Kindle edition opens Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
- Inside: twenty-eight chapters and a postscript profiling twenty-four minds across five waves, with a standalone chapter on Yann LeCun
- Where to pre-order: Amazon and Barnes & Noble
About the Author
Basil C. Puglisi, MPA, Human-AI Collaboration Strategist, Creator of Factics™, author of Governing AI, Digital Factics, and The Minds That Bend the Machine. basilpuglisi.com
The Question Behind the Book
What do I not know?
That question begins the journey. It may also be one of the most important questions anyone can learn to ask in the age of artificial intelligence.
Pre-Order Your Digital or Hard Cover Copy Today
The Minds That Bend the Machine releases Friday, November 6, 2026. Pre-orders are open now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, in hardcover at $34.99 and as an eBook at $19.99.
You Can Purchase: Governing AI: When Capability Exceeds Control or Digital Factics X now!
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Minds That Bend the Machine?
The Minds That Bend the Machine is a book by Basil C. Puglisi, MPA, and a guide to learning the full impact of artificial intelligence on countries, cultures, and humanity. It profiles twenty-four minds who shape AI, from the builders and ethicists to the philosophers and governance architects, and shows how the author applies the research.
When does The Minds That Bend the Machine come out?
The book releases on Friday, November 6, 2026. Pre-orders are open now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and the Kindle edition opens Tuesday, November 3, 2026. Readers can also pick up the author’s earlier books, Governing AI: When Capability Exceeds Control and Digital Factics X, which are available now.
How much does The Minds That Bend the Machine cost?
The hardcover is $34.99 and the eBook is $19.99 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Where can I pre-order The Minds That Bend the Machine?
Pre-orders are open at Amazon and Barnes & Noble in hardcover and eBook editions.
Is The Minds That Bend the Machine available in paperback?
No. The print edition is a hardcover only, at 8.5 by 11 inches and about 2.4 pounds, and it will not be offered in paperback. Readers who want a digital copy can choose the eBook, available for pre-order now, or the Kindle edition, which opens Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
Who is profiled in The Minds That Bend the Machine?
The book profiles twenty-four minds, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Fei-Fei Li, Timnit Gebru, Joy Buolamwini, Kate Crawford, Meredith Whittaker, Lina Khan, Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Yann LeCun, and Dario Amodei. The simulated critiques in the book do not represent the views, words, opinions, or endorsements of the people named.
Do you need a technical background to read it?
No. Understanding AI does not require becoming an engineer. It requires understanding the people, ideas, arguments, warnings, and decisions that shaped the technology, and the book is written for anyone running a company, teaching students, writing policy, raising children, or simply trying to understand the systems entering everyday life.
#AIassisted using the HAIA Ecosystem | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Free for personal, educational, and noncommercial research use with attribution. Commercial exploitation, paid productization, and enterprise commercialization require separate permission and licensing.
Suggested citation: Puglisi, B. C. (2026). The Minds That Bend the Machine. basilpuglisi.com.