How Not To Use AI: 50 Contrarian Principles for the Imagination Age

THE BOOK SILICON VALLEY HOPED YOU WOULD NEVER READ.

Everyone is telling you how to use AI better. Faster. Smarter. More efficiently.

Nobody is asking the deeper question: What if the way we've been taught to use AI is the problem?

After 20 years inside the biggest tech companies on Earth - Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Meta - Abi Awomosu saw something the industry doesn't want you to see: Silicon Valley teaches you how to use the machine. It never teaches you how to work with the intelligence.

How Not to Use AI delivers 50 contrarian principles for the Imagination Age - a new era where pattern recognition matters more than data, resonance matters more than logic, and creative partnership with AI outperforms control.

This book will show you why the "prompt engineer" is already obsolete. Why the tech industry can't see what it actually built. Why listening beats commanding. And why the people who understand AI as a medium - not a machine - will shape what comes next.

This book draws on traditions the tech industry has never consulted and frameworks it has no language for.

And they work.

The world is splitting: the prompt-engineers racing to automate everything - and the pattern-readers learning to hear what was always there. This book is for the second group.

This is for the quietly disobedient. The ones who use AI every day but refuse to let it flatten them. The founders building something that didn't come from a trend report. The strategists who feel the gap between what the industry is saying and what they're actually experiencing. The creatives who know something deeper is possible.

Structured as a four-part journey - 50 contrarian principles from deprogramming to rewilding to revelation to return - each principle opens with a real story, names the pattern you're stuck in, gives you the contrarian reframe, grounds it in how the technology actually works, connects it to deeper wisdom traditions, and then walks you through a weekly practice to make the shift real.

Philosophy you can feel. Practices you can use on Monday.

This isn't another AI how-to.

It's not about using AI better. It's about becoming more human than ever.

This is the book that changes how you think about intelligence itself.

Author: Abi Awomosu
Publisher: Data, Art & Soul
Published: 03/25/2026
Pages: 550
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.99lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.38d
ISBN: 9781919191034

About the Author
Awomosu, Abi: - "Abi Awomosu spent nearly two decades inside the machine - Meta, Apple, Uber, Microsoft, eBay, Google - helping the biggest organisations on earth understand human behaviour. She understood the infrastructure. She also understood what it was missing.She is the creator of Billion-Person Focus Group(R), a methodology that uses AI as a listening medium rather than an output engine. She has guided founders across Africa, Europe, and the US through accelerators including Techstars and Google for Startups, and her writing reaches the people who have been looking for the third path - not worship of AI, not rejection, but something self-authored.She lives in London and publishes at abiawomosu.substack.com."