“Don’t Wait For The Singularity.”
That was Tracy R. Atkins’ message when I sat down with him 14 years ago, and it lands harder now than it did then.
While almost every story about #ArtificialIntelligence was busy imagining the apocalypse, Tracy wrote a novel that flatly refused to. Aeternum Ray is unapologetically utopian: a series of letters from a 240-year-old father to his newborn son, looking back across centuries of love, loss, and a world watched over by an AI named Ray.
In our conversation, we get into what the #Singularity actually means to him, why he chose to write utopia when dystopia sells, whether humanity’s future is digital or whether biology still matters, and the uncomfortable question of whether we even survive the road to get there.
Fourteen years on, the technology has caught up to much of what we talked about. The harder question is whether our reasons for building it have, and that is the part I keep coming back to.
So is openly imagining a good future naive, or is it the most radical thing a #futurist can do? Watch the interview and decide for yourself.
Tracy R. Atkins talks about his novel Aeternum Ray, the technological singularity and utopia. Check out his interview for Singularity 1 on 1.