Books
This is a body of work about defaults. Not the ones you set deliberately, but the ones that get installed when powerful technology arrives faster than the systems built to govern it. The cost is paid by people who were not in the room when the decisions were made.
The pattern shows up in education, workforce economics, organizational governance, professional liability, criminal justice, and national policy. It is the same pattern in each domain. The name for it keeps changing. The argument grew large enough that it became two books, one for each reader it is meant to reach.
The Wrong Default: How Absence Becomes a Decision, and Who Pays the Cost
For the general reader, the parent, the teacher, the leader. It opens with a mother in Troy, New York who looks up and sees a surveillance camera no one voted for, and it traces the same shape through a generation handed the most powerful learning tool ever built and shown only how to play with it, through the work quietly vanishing from millions of households, through people arrested because software misread their faces. It is not a book about whether AI is good or bad. It is about who absorbs the cost when no one is actually deciding, and it ends on the one thing any person can still do about it, at the scale of their own life.
Take the Call: Keeping Your Judgment and Your Accountability as AI Moves Into the Work
For the operator and the professional who can already feel the crosshairs: the expert whose precision used to be a moat, the mid-career specialist watching the tool climb into their craft, the veteran who has quietly decided to wait it out. It opens on a state computer that accused tens of thousands of people of fraud after the workers who used to make that call were let go, and it argues that the one thing the model cannot do without you is hold the context a working life builds. It is about judgment, accountability, and what it takes to stay in the decision instead of letting it get made by absence.
It is one argument pointed in two directions. The Wrong Default follows the cost outward, into the schools and workplaces and courtrooms where it lands. Take the Call follows it back to the person who could have owned the decision and did not. Neither is a summary of the other.
Both manuscripts are complete and moving toward agent and publisher conversations.
Readers of this newsletter already know one piece of this firsthand: the governance gap that opens inside companies using AI without a control layer. That is one instance of the larger pattern, and it sits at the center of Take the Call. The Wrong Default names the problem at the level where it actually lives.
If you are an agent, editor, or publisher and want to discuss either book: mindset@fellowshipintelligence.com