Alongside writing, Thomas Weaver is a tech entrepreneur. His last startup was acquired by Just Eat Takeaway. Despite swearing to family and friends (none of whom believed him) that he would never run another startup again, he recently started a new project in stealth backed by Silicon Valley's largest tech accelerator. The concept is focused on bringing some of the ideas explored in his debut novel, Artificial Wisdom, to life, specifically around communicating in augmented reality.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

I've heard it said that a first book is born out of worry. That was certainly the case for me. After Trump became US President in 2016, and the Brexit referendum tipped towards Leave, I started to worry about the impact of online manipulation and disinformation on humanity’s future. If it was so easy for (as seems likely) foreign powers to influence large groups of people in relatively unsophisticated ways, using social media bots, what would happen to us when technology, particularly AI, became more advanced?

After exiting my startup in 2019, I also found myself with more time to worry about other things, in particular the climate, and what life my children would have to face in their own adult years. It terrified me that climate-denial, particularly in the US, was growing at precisely the time when the world needed to come together and put all our resources in one pot to try and find a way out of the crisis, before it was too late. This growth in denial was driven by political and media manipulation of – again – large amounts of people.

Finally, I started to realise that for some countries above a certain latitude, climate change was going to unlock resources even while other countries burned. If every nation-state had different incentives, how could you even begin to solve something as truly global and interconnected as the climate? This led to the idea that, if things get too bad, we’ll need someone to make the hard decisions that individual nations won’t make, to solve things at a species level, not a national level. I was listening to my favourite podcast, Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. He has a multi-part series called Death Throes of the Republic, on the fall of the Roman Republic, and it occurred to me that the Romans had a process for this kind of thing, when faced with existential threats. They selected a dictator. When the dictator accomplished their mission (e.g. “evict the Carthaginians from Italian soil”) they would hand back power – at least until Caesar came along and kept it all for himself.

All these things came together for me, and I needed to write about it to make sense of it for myself, to explore what could happen if we did and didn’t act, to understand the perils and the potential. If you could manipulate people to think or vote one way, could the same tactics be used to manipulate them to think or vote in ways that might help solve the crisis? Ethically, that’s clearly wrong. But if humanity is pushed to the brink of extinction, would it make different choices? And, more importantly, could Artificial Intelligence be a tool that helps solve this crisis? If it did, what would the cost of such salvation be? I didn’t know. I wrote Artificial Wisdom to simulate one possible future. I’m not going to claim AI or even the climate will develop along the lines I outline here. It’s fiction, after all. I’m just hoping to make people think and debate, and give people a page-turning ride along the way.