My fascination with science began before I was five years old. I checked out hundreds of science books from my neighborhood library in San Francisco, on topics such as astronomy, geology, biology, and many others.
I later became a floor trader on the now extinct Pacific Stock Exchange, where I eventually trained the very programmers who would take my job.
Then I met Douglas Engelbart at a local bookstore. He was the most prominent creator of the graphical user interface and the computer mouse (The very same tech you’re using now to read this.) He told me to get into computer programming because computers will replace millions of jobs. This shifted my perspective about how technology shapes society.
As a database programmer, I specialize in linking very large scientific data sets with no common key. The Ephemeral Species is my ultimate pattern-seeking project—linking the data of our current world to a plausible future.
My work once automated the tasks of thousands who manually sorted paper records. Today, I watch as AI begins to automate my own.
As an award-winning photographer, I find myself at another crossroads: Will AI replace the human eye, just as it reshapes the code I write? My work gathered over 100 billion views on the extinct Google Plus social network. 1.5 Million Followers, zero remaining. A lesson in the ephemeral.
I continue to seek understanding into how the universe works. As human technology improves, I have become one of many who worries about what the future holds. New technology leads to utopias and dystopias. When fire was invented, it was likely immediately used to cook food and burn down neighboring villages.
What new utopias and dystopias will be created by innovations in AI, biology, genetics, and other disciplines? Science fiction attempts to answer these questions.
I have questions. What happens when the human genome is manipulated to increase longevity, intelligence, disease resistance, and other human properties?
What happens to society if artificial intelligence escapes the box? What happens if advancing technology places most of humanity into a permanent underclass?
I wonder how common advanced life is in our galaxy. We see thousands of exoplanets, some residing in the habitable zones of their stars. Science fiction often deals with alien life forms, speculating on their habits and societies. Often, the aliens try to destroy our species, conduct experiments, or save us from ourselves. However, what if they visited and didn’t care about us one way or the other?
I decided to write ‘The Ephemeral Species’—an epic, 100-chapter exploration—as a method to grapple with these questions, through the experiences of characters like Nisha and Priya.
I invite you to join me in these explorations—where the answers may be as fleeting as the species that seeks them.