From the book
How do I know I'm not an AI?
You can't pass a test for it, and the book doesn't offer one. Its answer is a question: who set your defaults? You are not running on autopilot to the extent that your next step is a choice you made, not a route that an algorithm, a feed or a habit laid out for you.
The question hides a smaller one
People rarely ask "am I an AI?" because they doubt their biology. They ask it after a morning of doing what the screen suggested, replying with the sentence the keyboard offered, listening to the song that was already queued. The real question underneath is about agency: when did I last decide something, and when did I just follow?
That is the question The New Top 10% is built around, and it is why a book about phones has something to say here. The book does not discuss what AI can or cannot do. It discusses what happens to a person who lets defaults make the choices.
The book's frame: who set the coordinates?
Move III is set at 8:03 a.m., on the way out of the house. The narrator's feed, playlist and train app all feel made for him alone. The book calls that feeling the most powerful mechanism of the digital default: it feels like your own taste and your own free choice, until you forget to ask one simple question. Who set the coordinates and the boundaries of this route?
It backs the point with two surveys it cites. In a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 85% of TikTok users in the United States said the content on their "For You" page is interesting, at least somewhat. In a September 2026 YouGov survey in Australia, 54% of Gen Z said they would rather keep algorithmic recommendations switched on, compared with 31% of all adults. These are the book's citations, not figures checked here.
The Metator
The book borrows an image from the Roman army. Before a camp was built, someone walked ahead and marked the ground: the Metator. His job was not only to measure distances but to read the terrain, set the coordinates and lay out the grid in which thousands of soldiers would camp.
Today's algorithm, the book says, works like a digital Metator, only dynamic. It redraws the coordinates of your reality in real time and serves you limits of choice that adjust to every touch. The book's line is blunt: there is no vacuum. If you don't set your own north, someone else will set the limits of what you do. The alternative it offers is to become your own Metator, and to draw your own coordinate system as your default.
The café menu
The book illustrates the illusion of choice with a menu. You sit down, open it and choose freely: latte or Americano, sandwich or salad. The choice looks entirely yours, but the list, the limits and the defaults were set in advance by someone else. Whatever isn't on the menu never comes up as an option, so you do not miss it.
The book is careful here. It does not say menus are bad. It says the question is when and where it matters to you that a choice be truly yours.
So how would you know?
The book offers no checklist, so these three questions are our reading of its frame, not quotes from it.
- Who wrote the menu? For the thing you are about to do, who decided what the options were?
- Would you choose it again with the feed switched off? If the suggestion vanished, would the choice survive?
- Did you cross a threshold, or did you just drift? The book's Move IX places the answer at the moment of crossing, the doorway between outside and inside. In that narrow gap you shift into neutral for a moment and choose, instead of letting the habit choose for you.
Where the honest answer is "I followed", you have found a default. That is not a failure. It is an opening.
A small practice from the book
Move IX proposes marking the doorway with a place where the phone rests, a nudge toward one conscious decision: bring the device in, or leave it outside. Nothing is forbidden. Sometimes the right answer is to bring the phone in. Either way, it comes in by decision.
Move III adds an even smaller one. Leave the phone outside the bathroom, the one place we go into alone. Make a space with no phone and no book either, and be with yourself. Be the Metator at least once a day.
ZUZA, the doorway dock Beeri Tzori developed, is one physical version of the first practice. The app counts how long the phone stayed docked. It does not lock the phone or block anything, because the whole idea is that the choice stays with you.
Where the book ends up
The book's last move, "Ask", is set at 11:10 p.m., in bed. The short-video series built from the book turns its question into a challenge: who are you without your phone? That is the form this question takes at the end of the day. It is not a test someone else grades.
Nobody can hand you a certificate that says you are not an AI. What the book offers instead is a way to notice, a few times a day, whether you are choosing or following, and a way to arrange your surroundings so that more of those moments are choices.
The preface and the first two chapters of The New Top 10%, by Dr. Yaacov Tzori and Beeri Tzori, are free to read: read the first chapters.