Confessions of a Sci-Fi Scribe: Oops, I Didn't Mean to Inspire a Dystopia
I'm sorry someone read my book and decided to make it real. I'm sorry that, instead of heeding the cautionary tale woven into my words, the takeaway was a blueprint for control and manipulation. I mean, it was just fiction. Speculative fiction… science fiction… nothing that could ever happen in the real world, right?
Who would have guessed that authors like Asimov and Banks are to blame for the actions of Musk and Thiel? We wouldn't be enduring Zuckerberg's metaverse if Neal Stephenson had just left his pen safely on his desk. "Pens don't change the future," you say. "People change the future." Are you sure?
The Guardian asks us, "Will sci-fi end up destroying the world?" as it lays blame on "skewed interpretations of classic works." It seems we've been banning the wrong books all along. It wasn't the books about our past we needed to fear, but those about our future.
Now, I must live with the guilt that our entire society may one day be controlled by a single corporation's AI, and we won't even know it—because I wrote about it in Rephlexions: Echoes of Existence. When religious fundamentalism shifts to a new deity, A.I., and the Church of AI descends upon us like a preacher at a MAGA rally—or when we abdicate our environmental responsibilities to AI, as in The Life of Phi—that burden, too, will be mine to bear.
We thought we were warning the world while offering hope. These were meant to be cautionary tales, concepts to improve lives and our world—not handbooks for autocratic overlords guiding us toward our demise. The words were meant to entertain, and they did. But few saw the warnings woven into the narrative—the flashing red lights of danger, the subtle screams of "don't let it get like that" scattered throughout speculative and science fiction novels.
How do we know?
Look at where we are now…
We had decades of warnings about AI from authors, yet AI has smacked us in the head like a fastball off a bat, rocketing into the stands while we were focused on our beer and hot dog, clearly unprepared for the impact.
So, if you write about our future, as I do, put your pen down now and slowly back away. It's too late for us, but perhaps we can save the future from ourselves…
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