I am pleased to announce the completion of my latest intelligent textbook: "Unicorns and Other Mythical Beasts: An Essential Guide to Creatures That Definitely Exist and the AI Technologies That Will Improve Them."
This is a rigorous, evidence-adjacent exploration of unicorn studies, AI hype culture, education's resistance to change, and technologies that have been "five years away" for decades. It uses mythical beasts as allegories — unicorns for overhyped startups, dragons for job-displacing technologies, ostriches for institutions in denial — to examine questions the tech industry prefers not to answer.
Your learning journey will be accompanied by our pedagogical mascot "Sparkle the Unicorn". Sparkle is a bit snarky but will introduce each chapter, share observations that the data makes unavoidable, give tips that are always distracting and occasionally useful, offer the occasional word of measured encouragement, and celebrate your achievements if you ever reach the end of the chapter.
It is also, technically, an AI-generated textbook satirizing AI-generated content. The author is aware of the irony. The irony is the point.
By the numbers:
- 1 fully interconnected learning graph connecting all 140 concepts and their dependencies in a DAG
- 19 chapters covering unicorn history, AI hype cycles, blockchain thermodynamics, ethical Bitcoin, the metaverse, and a bestiary of vaporware
- 19 graphic novel stories featuring mythical creatures in painfully recognizable workplace scenarios with title pages, narrative and some even have the panels generated
- 32 interactive MicroSims built with p5.js and other javascript libraries you can customize
- 190 quiz questions for self-assessment
- 145 glossary terms with precise definitions of completely ridiculous things
- 85 FAQs even though there are rarely questions about unicorns
- 148,000 words (~615 equivalent pages)
Built using MkDocs Material, what were once my state-of-the-art Claude AI Skills, and the intelligent textbook framework — with learning graphs, Bloom's Taxonomy objectives, annotated references, and all the pedagogical infrastructure of a serious textbook applied to a fundamentally unserious subject.
The course carries 3 credit hours and meets the General Education requirement for Magical Thinking. This textbook is ideal for anyone with too much time on their hands.
- Explore the full textbook: https://dmccreary.github.io/unicorns/
Enjoy!