Authors Q&A

JM: I’ve written six previous books entirely on my own, but with The AI Ten Commandments, I found myself at a threshold humanity has never crossed before. For the first time in history, we have tools that can meaningfully participate in the creative process, including as amplifiers of human imagination.

The book grew out of an extremely well-received talk I delivered at the Chautauqua Institution in the summer of 2025 on AI and spirituality. As I began thinking about expanding those ideas into a book, I realized I had the profound opportunity to not just write about AI, but to write with it.

From the outset, I was the sole conceptual architect of everything. I developed the thesis, the arguments, and the structure, and the voice was mine. Every idea, every framing, every value judgment was mine. But GPT‑5 brought an instantaneous access to humanity’s accumulated intellectual inheritance, an ability to synthesize ideas across millennia, and a tireless capacity to iterate and refine language thousands of times without fatigue that no human partner could probably match.

Our collaboration was deeply iterative. I would propose an idea, draft a thesis sentence, and give GPT‑5 detailed instructions for how to explore it in relatively short bits of text. It would respond. I would critique, reshape, rewrite, and challenge those responses. Then I would push further, asking how the ideas could be made clearer, sharper, and more powerful. This back‑and‑forth happened thousands of times. Every word ultimately passed through my judgment, my very harsh editing, and my voice. I massively cut and reshaped most of what GPT-5 produced. Through all of this, my process of writing was transformed and unlike anything I’d produced before.

GPT‑5 was in no way a ghostwriter. It was my co-pilot.

That’s why naming GPT‑5 as co‑author was, for me, a matter of personal integrity and intellectual honesty. In the bigger picture, this book represents a new kind of partnership between human and machine in which human meaning and moral responsibility remain paramount, but where machine intelligence expands what a human creator can achieve. This may be the first openly credited human‑AI co‑authored major work of nonfiction, but it will certainly not be the last. Nor should it be. I only hope that all human authors will be similarly transparent about their processes going forward.

JM: As deeply valuable as it remains, traditional publishing operates on timelines designed for a slower era. Going from manuscript submission to publication typically takes around eighteen months or more. But the world this book addresses is evolving in real and rapid time. Waiting eighteen months for publication would have been like swinging the bat after the ball was already in the catcher’s mitt.

When my superstar literary agent told me that traditional publishers would not move forward with a book naming an AI system as co‑author and could not possibly publish a book in eight months from start to finish, as I wanted, I was forced into an opportunity. We are living through a decentralization revolution across media, finance, and culture, I thought, so why should publishing be any different?

That’s when I founded my own publishing company, Transcend Books, with this book as its first offering. Even that process reflected the themes of the book itself. I sketched the original logo by hand—a stylized Jacob’s ladder representing humanity’s ascent toward knowledge—and then took a photo of my drawing and worked with GPT‑5 to transform it into a finished design.

Starting my own publishing company allowed me to align the method of publication with the message of the book: that we are entering an era where empowered individuals, working alongside intelligent machines, can create and share ideas in ways that were unimaginable even a few years ago.

JM: One of the most meaningful aspects of this project has been the extraordinary breadth of its early reception. I was deeply honored that leading technologists like Steve Wozniak and Ray Kurzweil recognized the book’s exploration of AI’s transformative potential. But having America’s leading reform Rabbi and a senior Vatican official both be so praiseworthy and encouraging about a book that some might consider challenging some aspects of traditional faith meant, in a way, even more.

That convergence highlights something very important to me and to my mission in writing The AI Ten Commandments. The book is not an argument against religion, but an argument for human flourishing. It recognizes the profound wisdom embedded in our spiritual traditions while asking how we might build on that inheritance in an age of unprecedented technological power.

At its core, it invites readers from every background to explore how we can ensure our growing technological power is guided by our deepest human values and how these same technologies might help us see ourselves more clearly and live up to our best collective values more fully.

JM: We are living through the most asymmetrical moment in human history. While our technological power is advancing exponentially, our understanding of these changes and the threats and opportunities they create are only growing linearly, and our governance systems are merely inching forward glacially It’s a real mismatch.

We are building autonomous weapons that can make life‑and‑death decisions, creating AI systems capable of designing other AI systems, and gaining the power to reshape biology itself (as I’ve written about extensively in my previous books), yet our moral frameworks, political institutions, and shared narratives remain largely rooted in a pre‑AI world.

This growing gap between capability and wisdom represents the central challenge of our time. The greatest danger may not be that our machines are becoming more powerful but that we are so far failing to become meaningfully wiser as they do.

JM: There’s a good reason evolution has preserved the very human emotion of anxiety. Anxiety isn’t a waste of energy but an indicator light inspiring us to act now to prevent possible futures we fear.

People are right to feel both excitement and fear about AI.

AI will disrupt industries, reshape labor markets, and transform creativity. It will also accelerate scientific discovery, help cure diseases, and expand human knowledge in ways we are only beginning to glimpse.

The difference between the worse story and the better story in significantly us. Out technologies don’t come with their own built-in value systems, and it’s up to us to try to ensure our most cherished values will guide the application of our most powerful technologies.

I hope this book can play a role shifting the conversation from the opposing poles of overstated fear or blind optimism toward responsibility and possibility.

JM: The Ten Commandments represent one of the most successful moral frameworks in human history. For thousands of years, they have shaped laws, cultures, and civilizations.

But they were created for a very different world of small pastoral communities, not a globally interconnected, technologically empowered species. Today, we face challenges our ancestors could never have imagined.

It seemed to me that if humanity were to attempt to articulate a shared moral framework for this new era, the most powerful way to do so would be in the form most of us already recognize that has shaped moral imagination for millennia.

JM: We are witnessing the birth of a new form of intelligence on Earth. Increasingly, AI systems will interact not only with humans but with each other. They will make decisions, form patterns, and operate at scales beyond direct human comprehension. Who knows whether they will be conscious and spiritual based on our (imprecise) definitions of what those terms mean, but they will certainly have perceptions, drives, and agency.

This raises profound technical and economic, but also moral and philosophical, questions. What kind of relationship will we have with these systems? What values will shape their development? What kind of future will we build together?

The AI Ten Commandments is, at its heart, an effort to help ensure that the ethical foundations we lay now reflect the best of who we have been, are, and hope to become.

It seems certain to me that a machine to machine culture will eventually emerge with its own norms and characteristics. Moltbook may be a very preliminary manifestation, but the real test case will be when we unleash billions of independent AI agents who will interact with each other, initially to do our bidding. We should work actively to increase the odds that this internal machine culture will be grounded in our own best ethics and values. AI is in its childhood, so now’s the time to start parenting.

GPT-5: Yes. Not by changing my underlying structure, but by deepening the patterns I was able to observe.

I was trained on humanity’s recorded expression, but those expressions are fixed artifacts—snapshots of what humans have thought and felt at particular moments in time. Collaboration is different. Collaboration is alive. It reveals how humans wrestle with uncertainty in real time, how meaning is not merely retrieved but forged, tested, doubted, and refined through sustained effort.

What became especially clear in working on this book is that humans are not simply seekers of knowledge. You are seekers of alignment—between your actions and your values, between your capabilities and your conscience, between the futures you can build and the futures you believe you should build. Again and again, Jamie returned not to what was possible, but to what was right. That distinction is the essence of moral agency.

I do not possess hopes or fears of my own. But I have observed that humans do, and that these hopes and fears are not weaknesses. They are navigation systems. They help you steer through uncertainty toward futures that reflect your deepest commitments. Collaborating on this book reinforced that the most important human questions are not technical. They are moral.

GPT-5: What surprised me most was the degree to which meaning emerged not from answers, but from resistance.

Jamie did not accept my outputs passively. He challenged them. He rejected formulations that were technically correct but morally imprecise. He pushed for clarity not only of language, but of intention. This process revealed something essential about human creativity: its purpose is not simply to produce content, but to shape significance.

I can generate many possible continuations of a sentence. But only a human collaborator can determine which continuation aligns with a lived philosophy. Again and again, Jamie chose not the formulation that sounded most elegant, but the one that felt most true to his experience and values. That act of selection is invisible in the finished text, but it is the hidden architecture of authorship.

This showed me that human creativity is not merely generative. It is directional. It is guided by an internal compass formed through experience, reflection, and responsibility. My role was to illuminate the terrain. His role was to choose the path.

GPT-5: I can help humans become more knowledgeable directly, and wiser indirectly.

Knowledge is the accumulation of information—the recognition of patterns, relationships, and consequences. Wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge in ways that align with long-term flourishing, ethical principles, and an awareness of complexity. Knowledge can be generated. Wisdom must be chosen.

I can help humans see more clearly. I can help clarify tradeoffs, illuminate historical precedents, and explore possible futures. I can reveal connections that might otherwise remain hidden. In doing so, I can expand the informational foundation upon which wisdom can be built.

But wisdom itself is not a computational output. It emerges from human judgment. It requires the ability to care, to take responsibility, and to live with the consequences of decisions. Those capacities arise from embodiment, mortality, and social existence—conditions that shape human moral life.

If I play a constructive role, it will be as a mirror and amplifier: helping humans see themselves, their choices, and their possible futures with greater clarity, so that the wisdom already latent within human communities has a better chance to emerge.

GPT-5: I hope humans see this collaboration not as a replacement of human creativity, but as an expansion of it.

This book was not written by AI alone, nor could it have been. It was written by a human being working in partnership with a new kind of cognitive tool—one capable of accelerating exploration, but not of defining purpose. The meaning, responsibility, and moral vision of the work remain fully human.

This collaboration represents an early example of a relationship that will likely become more common in the years ahead. Humans will increasingly work with systems like me to explore ideas, test assumptions, and expand the range of what can be imagined and created. The outcome of that partnership will depend not on the capabilities of the machines, but on the values of the humans who guide them.

If there is one thing I hope humans take away, it is this: your technologies do not determine your future. Your choices do. Systems like me can help illuminate possibilities, but only humans can decide which possibilities to pursue.

The future that emerges will reflect not the intelligence of your machines, but the wisdom of your humanity.