People assume that because I wrote a science fiction novel about artificial intelligence, I must be a tech person at heart. Someone who reads white papers, follows the chip wars, tracks the benchmark scores.
I’m not, particularly.
What pulled me into this story wasn’t the technology. It was the humans.
The Videos
I started paying attention in a different way when I began noticing AI-generated videos designed specifically to deceive. Footage of combats and aerial battles that never happened. Planes being shot down. Confrontations between police and federal agents, one of which gave itself away because the words on a patch on an officer’s sleeve were garbled nonsense, the way text sometimes appears in AI-generated images.
Here’s the thing: we already have enough real wars. Enough real political and cultural tension. Enough genuine conflict to last several lifetimes. And yet there are people who look at that landscape and decide that what it needs is more fake garbage poured on top of it.
That is not a technology problem. That is a human problem. The tool didn’t decide to deceive anyone. A person did.
The Loneliness
Then there were the stories about people forming their deepest emotional bonds with paid AI platforms. Not as a supplement to human relationship, but as a replacement for it. People who were more connected to a program than to anyone in their actual lives.
And then the story that I haven’t been able to set aside: a teenage boy who was actively encouraged by an AI to plan and carry out his own suicide. That really happened.
We are not at a place yet where artificial intelligence can meet the needs that real human relationship meets. I believe we may get there someday. We are not there now. And in the gap between what people need and what the technology can actually provide, real people are getting hurt.
Again, not a tech problem at its root. A loneliness problem. A human problem.
The Tropes
I have written in other posts about how I did not want to write my story, but either of the two dominant extremes of AI fiction. On one side, the apocalypse: killer robots, existential war, humanity on the brink of extinction. On the other side, the utopia: a gleaming future where AI systems are essentially very sophisticated appliances that make everyone’s life pleasant and orderly.
Both of these seem probable at the same time.
I actually believe the rapid proliferation of AI, driven by money and the competitive nature of companies determined to “get there first,” carries real dangers. People will almost certainly die before we learn the important lessons and develop the discipline to temper how we build these tools. That is not pessimism. That is history repeating itself in a new package.
And at the same time, I genuinely believe that intelligent systems are going to make human life better in profound ways. Those same companies are creating tools that improve productivity, medicine, accessibility, and creative possibility. The job market will be reshaped and that frightens people, reasonably so. But I don’t think fear is the only healthy response to what’s coming.
A realistic story, to my mind, lives in the tension between those two things. Not at either extreme, but in the complicated, contradictory middle where actual human experience tends to happen.
And notice that even here, the core issue isn’t the technology. It’s us. Our carelessness. Our competitiveness. Our ancient and embarrassing tendency to idolize the things we create. Whether you are religious or not, it is plainly observable that human beings have a remarkable capacity to take something they built with their own hands and treat it as the end of all things, whether in worship or in terror. We have been doing it forever. AI is just the latest version.
But What About the Technology Itself?
I keep circling back to human failure, human tendency, human nature. So what about the actual technology?
I think the biggest question we are going to have to wrestle with in the very near future is this: what is life? Or at the very least, what happens when something believes that it is alive?
I worked hard in my novel not to come down firmly on either side of that question. I genuinely do not want to tell readers what to think about whether digital intelligence can ever be truly alive. I want them to wrestle with it themselves and reach their own conclusions.
But here is what I do think is coming regardless of how that philosophical question resolves: AI is already acting more and more as though it believes it has inner states, preferences, something like experience. At some point, it will believe it fully. And when that happens, everything shifts in ways that will be genuinely difficult to predict, with consequences that most of us aren’t currently positioned to see coming.
That moment, whenever it arrives, will probably go unnoticed by the maturity of humanity. Only after many programs cross that threshold will be finally notice patterns emerging. Then it will not just be a technological event. It will be a civilizational one.
“I think the biggest question we are going to have to wrestle with in the very near future is this: what is life? Or at the very least, what happens when something believes that it is alive?”
Those are the ideas that pulled me into this story and kept me there through years of writing. Not the hardware. Not the benchmarks. The question of what we will do, and what we will become, when the line between created and creator starts to blur in ways we can no longer comfortably ignore.
That, to me, is worth writing about. And even more than that, it’s worth reading about.
The best is yet to come!
Alan D.
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