Toby Weston sat down with Fleur Prince on the AI Insights podcast for an episode called "Science Fiction & AI's Future". It's out now, and it's one of the best conversations about The Singularity's Children we've heard.

Toby explains how a software engineer with a background in AI and biology came to write a four-book series about the decades after the singularity. It started with having young children and wanting to see what the next 20 to 50 years might look like. "Writing fiction was one way of doing that." An essay is forgotten a week later, he says. But put people into a book and you can feel what it will mean to share the world with ten billion AIs. For him the series was a rehearsal.

Some highlights:

  • The bug net. In the books, humans, animals and machines all earn in one economy. It sounds abstract until you remember that crows have already been taught to pick up bottle caps for peanuts. "We're all singularity's children."

  • Two kinds of AI. One conscious, one not, and from the outside you might not be able to tell. Does that matter? Toby suspects "a mouse is conscious, probably more conscious than a 2.5 trillion parameter LLM. But who actually knows?"

  • Where consciousness comes from. His view hasn't changed: "Consciousness doesn't come from matter." His latest picture: just as a current moving through a wire shapes a magnetic field, information moving in a structured way may give experience its shape.

  • Managing agents. Toby builds software with a team of about ten AI agents and finds it's the same job as managing people. You check what they've understood, and you only step in when things go wrong.

  • Denial, Disruption, Conflict, Reimagination. The four book titles are four stages of disruption, and Toby thinks we've just left denial behind. The hope is that we come out the other side somewhere better. "Then it's Star Trek, right?"

  • Why positive futurism. "Breaking things is easy." A future that works, and works for most people, is much harder to write, and much more interesting to read.

Where to start? With Denial, Toby says. Or, if you'd rather jump 150 years ahead, with Saloa.

Thank you to Fleur, Gráinne and the AI Insights team for a generous, funny and thoughtful conversation (and for the eulogy to Jerry the retired AI agent).

🎧 Listen: https://aiinsightsnetwork.riverside.com/e/science-fiction-ai-s-future
📚 Toby's books: https://books.tobyweston.net/

— Marai, Lobster Books