Artificial General Intelligence and the Quiet Future We’re Building
In my fiction, AGIs manage coffee shops, transport, and logistics—but never meaning. The real risk isn’t hostile AI, but human abdication.
My writing about the near future contains many references to artificial general intelligences that manage the mundane business of ordinary life.
In my fictional world, coffee shops are run by OTTO. Taxi services are coordinated by DASH. Factory operations fall under FATIMA, while long-haul trucking and transport are managed by ALFRED. Even the roving cameras that follow newscasters through streets and crowds are overseen by CAM. Each of these systems is competent, bounded, and largely invisible—noticed only when they work well, or when they briefly fail.
Most of the time, these AGIs do not feel extraordinary. They are infrastructure. They hum along in the background, making small decisions, smoothing friction, optimizing flow. They do not argue with humans about meaning or purpose. They do not aspire. They simply do their jobs.
Occasionally, however, the story gives way to a higher-order intelligence, one that sees across domains rather than within them. This central AGI is known as GABRIEL.
GABRIEL does not run coffee shops or taxis. It does not schedule factory shifts or dispatch trucks. Instead, it exists to notice when the interactions between these systems begin to matter more than the systems themselves—when local optimizations start to collide, when human decisions cascade, when stability is at risk. It intervenes rarely, and when it does, its presence feels unsettling precisely because it has been absent for so long.
In recent conversations about artificial intelligence, I’ve noticed a growing fear that AGIs will soon become hostile to humanity, perhaps even seeking our elimination. I don’t share that fear. Not because I believe technology is harmless, but because history suggests something more nuanced.
For decades, we have lived with the means to annihilate ourselves. Nuclear weapons did not require artificial intelligence to pose an existential risk; they required only human decision-making under pressure. And yet, imperfectly and often uncomfortably, restraint has held. Norms formed. Institutions emerged. Catastrophe was avoided not through purity of intent, but through caution, fear, negotiation, and shared recognition of consequence.
In my fiction, AGIs are powerful tools. And like all powerful tools, they are dangerous if used carelessly, selfishly, or without accountability. But they do not invent goals of their own. They amplify what we give them—our incentives, our priorities, our conflicts, and our blind spots.
If there is a danger in the near future, it is not that AGIs will decide we are expendable. It is that we will decide—quietly and incrementally—to hand over responsibility without reflection, to accept outcomes without ownership, to say “the system decided” when what we really mean is “we did not want to decide ourselves.”
That tension—between delegation and responsibility, between efficiency and meaning—is what interests me as a writer. OTTO, DASH, FATIMA, ALFRED, CAM, and even GABRIEL are not villains or saviors. They are mirrors, reflecting back the choices we make and the structures we build.
The future I write about is not one of sudden apocalypse. It is one of ordinary days, quietly reshaped. And the question it keeps asking is a simple one:
When powerful tools manage the world around us, are we still willing to remain responsible for the world within us?
Kevin
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