One Plus One Equals Three: A review of Dr. Paolo Granata’s Generative Knowledge

Unlike many reviewers, I often read the front matter and after-matter (index, glossary, and bibliography) of a new book before reading further. In the very first essay within his front matter, a prologue entitled “The Divine Move”,  we discover that Paolo Granata’s Generative Knowledge:Think, Learn, Create With AI (Wiley Blackwell, 2025, 276 pp.) is not another critique of the perils of AI, nor an installment in the “man vs. machine” debate.

Instead Granata emphasizes what I call “man plus machine” by which we discover that “one plus one equals three” (my language)…. that is, human intelligence (#1) interacting with machine or AI (#2) can create a larger envelope of thought, learning, and creativity (#3) than either one alone and of their imagined logical sum. One (humans) plus one (AI) also equals three types of potential improvement in 1) thinking, 2) learning, and 3) creation. 

Granata first illustrates his point by chronicling famous chess matches in which chess masters faced super-computers. Ultimately, rather than simply moaning their losses to technology, some defeated chess players grew to learn from and thus, in at least one famous case, defeat the “artificial” chess programs which once learned from them. Thus, pinnacle chess strategy evolves from the interaction of humans and AI, not simply from one or the other.

This is a refreshing insight to an ethicist like me who reads primarily of the dangers of boundless AI. In the flagship Journal of Media Ethics (October- December 2025) beside me on my desk, and many kindred journals, there is all but an obsession with the ethical problems and concerns AI already creates and, more importantly, seems destined to manufacture in the next decade. But this is not Granata’s focus. He frequently points to the part of his glass which is half full, and later to the entire glass.

When jumping to the very end of the book, by noting his sources, one learns what kind of scholar Granata has become. He is not “making stuff up”, but rather there is a wide, holistic wingspan in his combined index and references such that Einstein is next to (Elizabeth) Eisenstein, Chomsky is next to (Minyang) Chow, Bacon precedes (Jason) Baehr, while Foucault, Erasmus, and Korzybski are all bedfellows with Dewey, Turkle. and the Wright Brothers! 

In this list of references, beneath Piaget lie Polanyi, Popper, and Postman, the latter of which gives evidence that Granata has not abandoned his media ecology/Toronto School orientation. Indeed, primary media ecology scholars such as McLuhan, Havelock, Ong, Strate, Logan, de Kerckhove, Mir, and others punctuate both Dr. Granata’s listing and thinking… just like Postman.

So before tackling Granata’s infrastructure, we know from his front and aft that, although this is a fresh approach, it is also one based upon a mix of traditional, multidisciplinary, and “outside the box” thinkers. Educational, computational, philosophical, media, scientific and systems theory all co-mingle in the house that Paolo built. 

Unlike other reviewers, I not only read the alpha and omega of a book first, but also any existing reviews written by experts in the author’s field and the leading insight carvers within other fields. Why try to introduce a text myself if it has already been represented by someone who can summarize it much better than I can? 

In this case, top media ecologist and physicist, Dr. Robert Logan, has already reviewed and oriented us to the book’s primary structure in this way: 

  Granata, then organizes the heart of his book in three logical parts,..

Part I Thinking: How might persistent engagement with AI systems,  generative or otherwise, reorganize our epistemic virtues and intellectual habits?

Part II Learning: What changes in metacognitive strategies do learners adopt when incorporating AI into their learning processes? 

Part III Creating. In what ways might co-creation with AI systems reshape   conventional creative processes across different domains.¹

Logan’s excellent X-ray of the tome’s skeletal structure reveals that it is, like De Bono’s “po”, interested in the possible, positive, potential of AI to help humans think, learn, and create rather than ever-present fears about AI which has “gone over to the dark side.” ² Every reader, rather than dreading an inevitable doomed future can ask, “How may AI, enhance, rather than replace or distort, my thinking, learning, and creating?”

Of course, it becomes habitual to insist that AI will be inaccurate, will begin to supplant thinking, will obsolesce much of the work force, and will –like the Sorcerer’s apprentice –populate its own runaway community of darkness which humans can neither regulate nor monitor. In a worst case, AI seems destined to create an Artificial Super-Intelligence which, as in science fiction, will eventually dominate and control the planet. 

What an unethical giant AI is painted to be in such scenarios! And yet Granata’s vision places ethics in a new light. Why cannot AI help us create new ethical thinking and guidelines? While reading Granata, I found myself thinking: “Why can’t Siri and Alexa ethically advise us by saying ‘are you sure you wish to plagiarize that passage?’ or ‘signing that document would present a conflict of interest?'”

In other words, if rogue AI has the potential to be extremely unethical, why can’t virtuous AI be designed to not only help us think, learn, and create, but also be more ethical? On page 148, Granata writes: “One advantage of having AI assist in production is that humans can devote time to the reflective, investigative tasks that machines do not truly master, such as probing ethical ramifications. …” ³

Returning to the second essay in Generative Knowledge, we discover the importance and meaning of the book’s title. Granata is concerned with how knowledge is generated and with how more high quality knowledge may be created by epistemic curiosity, the use of tools like AI, and by building upon previous knowledge and the thinking of prior generations (pun intended). One definition of “generative knowledge” that he provides on page 7 is “that distinctive form of knowledge that creates new knowledge” ⁴

Imagine all of the new truthful knowledge that is available for thinking if one consults all of the verified, fact-checked sources of AI knowledge in the world. If we look for a moment at one of Granata’s sources, Arthur Koestler’s Act of Creation and his concept of “bi-sociation”, imagine how many pro-social ideas may be cross-fertilized or newly associated by virtue of human-AI and AI-AI communication.⁵

As an example, consider a tale which has been told, that is possibly apocryphal, of Gutenberg discovering printing by chance. Allegedly, a child’s block with letters engraved on its sides fell to the floor into some spilled flour or meal. When Gutenberg picked up the block, he noticed an imprint in the powdery substance on the floor and discovered that engraved letters could leave lasting impressions. This was a new “bi-sociation” or combination of previously disassociated objects for Gutenberg. And yet, if true, this one incident of “new knowledge” by observation changed the nature of knowledge, thinking, and the literate world. Granata emphasizes that such generative knowledge can only multiply (e.g. tri- sociations, quad-sociations, mega-sociations, etc.) in a world of newly created  available thoughts – thoughts often maligned as propaganda, synthetic cognition, and noise. And so the word “epistemology”, the study of knowledge and thinking, is enlarged to include far more possibilities – not only all recorded human thought past, present and potentially in the future – but also, all the combinations (cf. bi-sociations) and inventions in consciousness that new thinking machines and their artefacts and interactions with human beings can create.

Instead of fearing AI spawning more e-Goebbels, why not envision the possibility of more (both human and electronic) Gutenbergs? Indeed, a third “G” – Granata– acknowledges that he too has used AI when creating two of the book’s valuable tools – tables and a glossary. And beyond a better understanding and utilization of AI, the University of Toronto professor goes further by praising it while providing a detailed rationale. In chapter 9, the author has identified twelve “dignities” that AI provides — not traits or paths – but laudatory “dignities”. These are predictive modelling, inference-making, knowledge extraction, simulation, heuristics, serendipity, agentic capabilities, autonomy/autopoiesis, scalability, agentic cooperation, human-AI cooperation, and Interdisciplinary mediation.⁶

But this all -but-romanticizing the gifts of AI past, present, and yet to come has not blinded the author to the epistemic responsibility that Lorraine Code called for as early as 1987.⁷ In his epilogue, Granata advocates for what might be called a community of ethical and epistemic stewards. He asks for colleagues to responsibly provide guard rails lest generative knowledge become degenerative and lest noir science fiction becomes science fact. Thus, to some degree his bias is balance — on the one hand he calls for full speed ahead with new creative thinking – but on the other hand, we must slow down to reflect when we see red and flashing yellow lights. Would not such a balanced approach permit us – in the spirit of Dickens – the ability to use AI to create the best of times and the alertness to read all early warning signs to avoid the worst of times?

For those who have not met Granata, he is a walking fountain of inspiration. Although one of the leading authorities on the Toronto School of Communication (McLuhan, Innis, etc.) who is teaching at the University of Toronto, he is not a native Canadian. His country of origin, Italy, like his book, gives evidence of a spirit of Renaissance… and Paolo is far more than a media ecology scholar. He is a Renaissance man.

Indeed Dr. Granata not only creates books, websites, conferences, labs, and lectures, he is the only person I’ve encountered who has developed a McLuhan board game. This volume is the first I have encountered which legitimizes the perspective that we may foster a digital renaissance via AI. Every page of Generative Knowledge is an invitation to engage with Granata’s own generative knowledge to enlarge one’s own. Whether you wish to increase your AI skills or sharpen your AI arguments, you may use this book to think in new ways – which is, after all, this volume’s raison d’etre.

In the heart of Thoreau’s Walden three words — “simplify, simplify, simplify”, summarize his meaning. This tome helps to simplify the enormously complex topic of Artificial Intelligence in three ways. With similar simplicity, three words summarize this review — read this book.

1. Logan, Robert, private communication revealing his preprint to be published in 2026 in NExJ: New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication.
2. de Bono, Edward. 1971. The Use of Lateral Thinking, Avon Books..
3. Granata, Paolo, 2026. Generative Knowledge, Granata, p. 148.
4. Ibid, p. 4. 
5. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation, MacMillan, 1964.
6. Granata, Paolo. 2026. Generative Knowledge, pp. 211-223, see especially the table on page 212.
7. See Lorraine Code’s Epistemic Responsibility, Brown University Press, 1987.

REFERENCES

Code, Lorraine. 1987. Epistemic Responsibility. Brown University  Press,  Providence, R.I. 

De Bono, Edward. 1950. The Use of Lateral Thinking. Avon Books, New York, N.Y. 

Granata, Paolo. 2026. Generative Knowledge. Wiley, Hoboken, N. J.

Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Act of Creation. MacMillan, New York, N.Y. 

Logan, Robert. 2026, review of Generative Knowledge by Paolo Granata, Preprint, to be published in 2026 in NExJ New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication