The sources

Introduction. The Rising Tide

7 sources behind this chapter. Each one carries a note on what it is doing in the argument.

The chapter itself, for readers of the book

  1. Crashing Waves vs Rising Tides: Preliminary Findings on AI Automation from Thousands of Worker Evaluations of Labor Market Tasks

    Mertens, Kuzee, Harris, Lyu, Li, Rosenfeld, Anto, Fleming, Thompson MIT FutureTech, April 2026

    The study behind the book’s rising-tide metaphor. Across thousands of real workplace tasks, AI capability spread steadily rather than arriving as one clean wave that could be watched from shore.

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    Mertens, Kuzee, Harris, Lyu, Li, Rosenfeld, Anto, Fleming, Thompson. 'Crashing Waves vs Rising Tides: Preliminary Findings on AI Automation from Thousands of Worker Evaluations of Labor Market Tasks.' MIT FutureTech, April 2026. arxiv.org/html/2604.01363v1

  2. When AI Builds Itself

    Favaro, Marina, and Jack Clark Anthropic Institute, 4 June 2026

    The Introduction uses this for the moment AI starts building more of itself; Chapter 26 returns to the same figures to show the pace of capability growth inside the company building Claude.

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    Favaro, Marina, and Jack Clark. 'When AI Builds Itself.' Anthropic Institute, 4 June 2026. www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement. (80 percent of Anthropic's merged code written by Claude; engineers shipping roughly 8x more code per quarter, comparing 2021 to 2025.

  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, via IEEE Spectrum, September 2025

    Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory IEEE Spectrum, September 2025

    Used to keep the book’s water argument in proportion. US data centres consumed an estimated 17.5 billion gallons directly in 2023—vast in ordinary terms, but about 0.3 per cent of the country’s public water supply.

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    Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, via IEEE Spectrum, September 2025. (US data centre direct water consumption estimated at 17.5 billion gallons in 2023, approximately 0.3 percent of total US public water supply. Water Footprint Network, Mekonnen and Hoekstra, for embodied water comparisons. Environmental disclosure.)

  4. Agriculture Dominates Freshwater Use in the U.S

    Gollehon, Noel USDA Economic Research Service, Amber Waves, 1 November 2006

    The comparison point for the data-centre water figure: agriculture accounts for more than four-fifths of consumptive water use in the United States.

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    Gollehon, Noel. ‘Agriculture Dominates Freshwater Use in the U.S.’ USDA Economic Research Service, Amber Waves, 1 November 2006.

All the sources, chapter by chapter