\cleardoublepage \part{The Test and the Picture} \setbookpart{The Test and the Picture}

Part I: The Test and the Picture

A board is shown a slide with one box on it, labelled "AI". A council debates whether to automate case handling, as if the choice were between a person and a machine. A newspaper reports that the number of AI systems in public administration has doubled, without saying what was counted. In each case an intelligent person is looking at a picture that is too simple for what it describes, and the decision that follows is shaped by the picture rather than by the landscape. This part asks the reader to take a short test before reading further, and then gives them the two things the rest of the book depends on: the vocabulary of the new landscape, defined here in plain words, and a notation that draws it the same way every time.

The test comes first because the point of the book is not that the reader does not know enough, but that the pictures most of us carry are wrong in particular, predictable ways. Each question has a measured answer, drawn from a public dataset that Appendix C describes, and where a survey has asked people the same question, the share of respondents who chose each answer is shown beside it. The reader who scores poorly is in good company. The old pictures, boxes, binaries and the cloud as a place, served well in an earlier landscape and still do elsewhere. The new landscape has features they cannot show: software that acts, with an identity of its own or with a person's, at a level of autonomy that someone chose, reaching people who never see it, under a decision that someone holds or that nobody holds. The notation, Contour, gives each of those features a fixed place in the picture.

Chapters in this part:

  • Chapter 1, Introduction: A Test, a Picture and a Stance, gives the test, introduces Nordvik Region and Hansa Mutual, the two illustrative organisations that appear in every chapter, names the possibilist stance the book takes, and acknowledges Factfulness as its inspiration.
  • Chapter 2, The Old Pictures: Boxes, Binaries and the Cloud, shows the pictures people carry of technology at work, where each came from, what it was good for, and what it hides in the present landscape.
  • Chapter 3, The New Landscape: Who Acts, With Whose Identity, Under Whose Decision, describes what emerges when architecture becomes code and AI tools go to work, and defines the vocabulary the book adopts with attribution: the six usage modes, the five autonomy levels, the policy decision point outside the model, containment, evidence, decision records and mandates.
  • Chapter 4, The Notation: One Picture, Drawn the Same Way Every Time, teaches Contour: the unit and the mark, the seven dimensions, the three frames, the six views, the legend, and how to read a landscape in thirty seconds.

What you will carry out of this part:

  • Your own score on the test, and the questions you will meet again in Part II
  • The vocabulary of the new landscape, defined before it is used
  • The notation, which every later figure of an organisation uses

Part II takes the test questions one instinct at a time.