Claire Nicholls

So it wasn't that I'd seen it.

I just sort of get, I was, you know, it was coming, you know, the AI field has been, you know, has been studied for a long time.

And I mean, I read books about AI research.

before this new kind of wave of actual AI, the only thing that's different is kind of the collapse of the time horizons.

Like I was writing about something in which people still thought it was 50 years away, five years ago.

And so I thought I was writing a book in this era, which I kind of...

sort of called pre-futurism, which is, I always, I felt that we were living, we were always living on the precipice of the future where everything seemed about to change.

Oh, like, you know, self-driving cars are going to flood the world.

There's going to be, you know, AI, all these kind of things, but it never...

actually eventuates.

But I was wrong.

It's coming really fast now.

And I feel like we're in an era not unlike, you know, I think we're going to traverse what was kind of 1870 to 1945, but we're going to do it in about 10 years, you know, where the cities all became electrified.

I think, yeah, and I think that...

AI is interesting because fiction has shown two versions of the future in the past.

You've got George Orwell's 1984, which was kind of this idea of totalitarianism.

And then you have Brave New World, which was an idea of contentment and pleasure and distraction being the thing that controls us.

But there's another kind of human motivation that AI taps into, which is just our love, addiction, and need for convenience.

And so I think that what I can see happening

is that, you know, AI sort of removes a lot of the friction to life and, you know, we're at kind of genuine risk of forgetting how to function without assistance, which is dependency, not oppression.