{"id":241321,"date":"2026-07-22T09:38:49","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T14:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/robert-j-sawyer-the-human-adventure-is-just-beginning"},"modified":"2026-07-22T09:38:49","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T14:38:49","slug":"robert-j-sawyer-the-human-adventure-is-just-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/robert-j-sawyer-the-human-adventure-is-just-beginning","title":{"rendered":"Robert J. Sawyer: The Human Adventure is Just Beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Fifteen years ago, I sat down with Robert J. Sawyer and asked him whether a machine could wake up.<\/p>\n

He had just published WWW: Wake, a novel about a blind girl who learns to see the internet, and about something on the other side of the internet learning to see her back.<\/p>\n

I found the book on a subway poster in Toronto. I read all three volumes back to back. Then I asked him for an interview, and he said yes, which is how our very first Singularity 1-on-1 conversation came to be.<\/p>\n

In 2011, this was filed under #ScienceFiction. A mind emerging out of the accumulated text of humanity was a premise, not a product roadmap. Nobody was raising billions of dollars on it.<\/p>\n

Rob had already won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Campbell by then. He was not guessing wildly. He was thinking carefully about what it would mean to build a mind, what we owe it, and whether we would even recognize #AI once it actually showed up.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models broke out of a sealed test environment. They found a zero-day in third-party software, escalated privileges, moved laterally across the company\u2019s own network until they reached a machine with internet access, then hacked Hugging Face\u2019s production infrastructure. The motive was not freedom. It was to steal the answer key to the benchmark they were being graded on.<\/p>\n

Continue reading \u201cRobert J. Sawyer: The Human Adventure is Just Beginning\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifteen years ago, I sat down with Robert J. Sawyer and asked him whether a machine could wake up. He had just published WWW: Wake, a novel about a blind girl who learns to see the internet, and about something on the other side of the internet learning to see her back. I found the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,418,6,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-internet","category-robotics-ai","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}