An old Soviet science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky about contact with the incomprehensible, and what it has to say about the AI race we are running today.

McLuhan in 1964 said machines extend humans and remake the humans who use them, set against Samuel Butler's 1863 letter arguing the machines would outlive their makers.

Debord's 1967 argument that modern life is lived through mass-produced images, read in 2026 when the apparatus runs autonomously and the user is the one making the images.