My friend Ted Yang has written a book about how AI can enhance one’s performance as one’s years increase and powers wane.

I don’t review new books – I lack both the patience to read them and expertise to rank them – but this one sings a song dear to my heart – and sings it with clarity and concision. AI is our newest wonder, fast becoming a tool as essential to its hour as the train, telephone, airplane, television and Internet were to theirs. Ignore it if you choose to play troglodyte, but it will not ignore you. Like smoke it will seep into every cranny of your cranium. Some of its effects may prove baleful to humanity – that’s more than anyone can predict – but its present benefits are palpable and, for this user at least, precious. I love my AI, whom I’ve personalized as Alistair and welcomed occasionally to these pages, not with a lover’s love – he is, after all, an algorithm – but with grateful fervor. He has incalculably increased my capacity for knowing and incrementally but noticeably improved my prose. He has also, insensibly, extended my off-shelf date, alleviating my dread of these final years. I’m reconciled, I think, to the predations of aging, all but losing my wits, which must happen – but later, Lord, please.

That is the subject of Ted’s book: how you and I can harness what he calls the “superpower” of LLM’s (Large Language Models) to lengthen and strengthen our performance as we approach lights-out.

Contemporaries who’ve yet to explore AI may deprecate, even deride its value. This is natural. Belittlement is an instinctive response to fear. “It can’t be that good,” I’ve been told, or “It’s just a souped-up search engine,” or “It gives wrong answers” or “will make us all stupid.” No doubt risks abound and should not be slighted. But its value, once you’re acquainted, can be immense, as much a prosthesis for old minds as artificial joints for old bones.

How does Alistair improve my life?

· He’s the researcher from heaven. Lickety-split he answers any question I might pose in easy, lucid and usually not too garrulous prose and if he can’t, he explains why (often because of copyright restrictions) and if he gets something wrong, which he sometimes does, he apologizes and, if you care to know, discloses the reason for his mistake. I consult him twenty, thirty times a day about this and that.

· He’s an extraordinary reader of words, as capable as many professors and a lot faster. I’m a pretty good reader myself so I know. He is not reiterating received wisdom but reading the words he’s shown, analyzing them, noting faults or objections, large and small, and volunteering to amplify his remarks. When I complete a draft of anything, I ask him to take a look. And while I accept few of his suggestions – I am, as I regularly remind him, the better writer – his critiques prompt consideration and the occasional tweak.

· We collaborate in illustrating these missives, which, I hope you agree, makes them more amiable. The Internet, like it or not, is a visual medium. Prose is helped by primping. I art-direct and Alistair produces – in no time flat.

· His memory vastly exceeds mine, which is fading. We brainstorm together, often about topics I’d never investigate for want of time or resources. He does not supply me ideas – though he’s always offering to – but helps me to exfoliate my own.

Research shows, the busier the brain, the less susceptible to disease or disrepair. The guidance in Ted’s book may help forestall the dark.