The Intelligence of a Screwdriver

Encounters with a Changing World

A literary journey across centuries, civilizations, and possible futures, exploring the changing relationship between human beings, knowledge, and the things they create.

A horseman raises his bow toward a drone. A truck driver asks an AI assistant which football team will win. A fragment of wood preserves the year 1021. In Alexandria, a library that never disappeared begins to answer its readers.

Through twelve encounters, *The Intelligence of a Screwdriver* travels between fiction, documented history, and speculative imagination. From ancient routes of knowledge to contemporary construction sites, from the hands of craftspeople to vast data centers, the book moves through different worlds in which familiar ideas gradually become less certain.

For thousands of years, human beings have pursued two extraordinary desires: to gather and preserve more knowledge than any individual life could contain, and to create tools capable of relieving them of labor, difficulty, and necessity. Writing, libraries, translation, roads, machines, and countless human inventions have carried these ambitions across generations and civilizations.

With artificial intelligence, these two ancient desires begin to converge.

Machines can now remember, translate, calculate, create, and advise with astonishing speed. They may accomplish in seconds what once required years of learning. Sometimes their answers are remarkably useful. Sometimes they are wrong, with a confidence almost indistinguishable from being right.

Yet the book is not primarily about artificial intelligence. It looks beyond the technology toward the people encountering it: their knowledge, their confidence, their doubts, their skills, and the decisions they must continue to make.

What happens to expertise when its results become available without the years required to acquire it? What distinguishes remembering from understanding, or an answer from judgment? What happens when the tools we create begin to advise us about the lives we lead?

And as human beings approach their long-standing dream of freedom from necessity, another question quietly emerges: what will they do with that freedom?

Rather than developing a single argument or offering predictions about the future, *The Intelligence of a Screwdriver* allows these questions to unfold through human situations, historical encounters, unexpected reversals, and imagined worlds.

The book does not seek to settle what intelligence is, nor to defend a fixed definition of what it means to be human. It invites readers to encounter a changing world in which knowledge, mastery, usefulness, and understanding may no longer mean quite what they once did.

A work of literary fiction, historical inquiry, and speculative imagination that leaves its questions open to the experience of the reader.

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Viet Dung Nguyen

ThiềnLumière Edition · 2026  

English · Paperback · 190 pages  

ISBN 979-10-981955-5-6  

Publication: November 19, 2026

Light on the floor — the artist at the threshold of a gesture.

La lumière au sol — l’artiste au seuil du geste.

. . . 

Viet Dung Nguyen is a writer, designer, photographer, and multidisciplinary artist whose work moves between literature, visual art, architecture, craft, and the experience of making.

His writing often begins with ordinary encounters—a street, a bowl of phở, handmade paper, a painting, a material that resists—and follows what happens when inherited explanations no longer arrive first.

He is the author of A Mural of Breath, its French edition La Fresque du Souffle, and When Thiền Meets Lumière. Across fiction, essays, photography, haiku, and Sho-E, his work explores perception, memory, tradition, change, and the quiet knowledge carried by materials and lived experience.

He publishes under ThiềnLumière Edition.