Steven Johnson is a very meta author. He writes frequently about science and technology, and likes to immerse himself in the things he’s covering, even using them to change the way he writes books. A couple of years ago, a few months before ChatGPT launched and the AI boom took over the tech world, Johnson got a magazine assignment that sent him really, really deep down the AI rabbit hole. And he never came back up.
Now, in addition to writing books, Johnson is also working at Google. He’s part of the team building a product called NotebookLM — “Notebook,” as the team calls it. It’s a note-taking and research tool: you upload documents and import web links, and Notebook’s Gemini-powered AI helps you organize things, extract information,…