1.8 million years ago, fire shrank the human gut and freed the brain. The energy saved
went to cognition. Now the systems we built to think on our behalf are doing what
cooking did to digestion — making the organ that benefited unnecessary. Three families
across a century. A factory floor in Shenzhen, a lake shore in Chad, a kitchen in
Oakland. The tools arrive. The tools are good. The skills they replace begin to thin.
Presented as a documentary archive compiled in 2142 by an institute that preserves its
records by hand, in ink, on paper — and written entirely by AI, about AI, for the
humans already living in the early chapters of the story.
