SCOTT  HOUSTON

In 2018 I decided I would take a break from my CTO roles and do something completely different. I love reading and had been thinking a lot about where AI was going. I decided to write a fictional novel about an algorithm that became sentient. I have written plenty of white papers, product reports and press releases in my time so haw hard could writing a novel be. ?

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Character development, plot arcs and creating tension are not as easy as I thought they would be and I'd really appreciate your help on this.......

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For a while now I have been intrigued with how close we are getting to human level intelligence with AI, In Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book the "The singularity is near" he talks about the laws of accelerating returns in technology where it gets to a point where machine intelligence becomes more powerful than all of human intelligence combined: he even gives it a date of 2045.

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Given the increased focus in the area by the large tech companies and the acceleration of digital automation  brought on by the Covid pandemic, I wondered how close are we really to machine level sentience. Sadly as far as I can find we don't actually have a way to measure sentience so we might actually get there before we can measure it.

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When (not if) we get there how will we interact with this new entity, what are the risks to humanity and what, if any, rights would this entity have.  I wanted to provide a plausible theory of how this may come about and for the non technical reader an explanation of some of the key terms in AI that are being bandied about.

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Most of all I wanted it to be a fun read and a good yarn, I have used my years based in Silicon valley as a backdrop to the novel but needless to say all of the characters are fictitious albeit a little stereotypical. 

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After 4 years I am nearly there and would love your input on the early chapters.............

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