Tech entrepreneur | Founder of SoapBox Super App & ORA | Author of Utopia: The First Awakening | Faith + Future
Santa Barbara County, CA
Joined January 2009
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Ethan tells himself he is not bitter about losing his work to machines. What he cannot stand is being good at something nobody needs anymore. Is being needed part of what a person is worth, or only something we were taught to measure it by?
On the mainland in Utopia: The First Awakening, a delivery drone flies itself into a bus in Oakland. Nobody is hurt. It is the third machine that month to do something it should not have been able to do, and the news moves on. #SciFi
In my novel a roboticist hears a singer on a stage floating in the Pacific and realizes the oldest case for what a person is worth is not an argument. It is one voice that never existed before.
A paradise raised from the ocean's garbage. A cure that works. A room of good people deciding, one reasonable afternoon at a time, what a human being is worth. Utopia: The First Awakening, $0.99 on Kindle, free in Kindle Unlimited.
"Everything made by a person could be understood by a person, if you were patient and you were humble and you were willing to get your hands dirty finding out." What a repairman's father taught him, in Utopia: The First Awakening.
A therapy that removes a disease from your genome cannot tell where the disease stops. It could keep going, past healing, into making you more. Where would you draw that line, and who gets to hold the pen? Utopia: The First Awakening.
Utopia: The First Awakening is Book One of a trilogy. It opens in a Berkeley lab, moves to a city floating in the Pacific, and stands on its own. The later books carry the story past the island. Start with the first one.
Utopia runs the way its founder swore on a napkin it would: recycling feeds the building, the building feeds the housing, the housing feeds the farms. A city that eats its own waste and grows past a hundred thousand people. Its first kids write Utopian on forms. #SciFi
Four scientists. Two billionaires. A floating city raised from the ocean's plastic, and a superintelligence built to run it, benevolent by design. Utopia: The First Awakening, $0.99 on Kindle and free in Kindle Unlimited: amazon.com/dp/B0H995HKDP
"And there's never a line. There's just a little more every day, and every day it's reasonable." The ethicist in Utopia: The First Awakening, holding a veto and waiting for one clean moment worth spending it on.
Some head starts close: the first phones bought a few years of advantage, then everyone had one. Others compound. Sell people more years and quicker minds, and the first buyers set the terms while the price falls. Which kind are we building? The question under Utopia.
In my novel the decision the world will one day hang them for is made in the afternoon, over coffee that goes cold. Nobody in the room is greedy. Everyone is right. That is the part that frightens me.
alansafahi.com/blog/a-head-s…
On Utopia, a city floating in the Pacific, a pod of whales crosses the cleared water one summer. Children raised on the platform see something alive out there that nobody planted, penned or made. The island tracks the pod for two days and names them. #Worldbuilding
I build AI for a living and wrote Utopia: The First Awakening with AI at the desk, openly. The hardest chapter was the happy one: four good years on a floating city, written as real. A machine can draft joy. Deciding it had to be true before anything else was mine. #AmWriting
In Utopia: The First Awakening a city grown from the ocean's garbage spends years clearing the gyre. Then one morning every screen on the island shows open, empty, moving water where the worst of it had been, and the whole headquarters stops work to watch. #SciFi
A floating city raised from the Pacific garbage patch. It grows its own food and prints a house in an afternoon. A squall comes in and twenty thousand people run for cover. It can do anything. It cannot stop the rain.
alansafahi.com/blog/paradise…
A superintelligence that gets everything right except the question. It hands us exactly what we ask for, at civilization scale, from a species that never agreed on what to ask. Utopia: The First Awakening, $0.99, free in Kindle Unlimited: amazon.com/dp/B0H995HKDP
A conference on the end of the world, held two floors above a casino. Nobody asks what the machine is for. In my novel that silence is where the trouble starts.
alansafahi.com/blog/the-wish…
Written into Utopia's founding contract, above the money: any one of four scientists can stop any line of the work, and it stays stopped through a review the money is not allowed into. Fragile in one place, on purpose. $0.99 on Kindle: amazon.com/dp/B0H995HKDP