Two doors into one question
What does it mean to be human as our machines grow more powerful? One book asks it as reflection. The other lives it out as story.
Image Bearers
The first time a machine answered Alan Safahi as though it had been waiting for the question, he forgot — for one warm second — that there was no one there. He had helped build it. And it unsettled him in a way he has never shaken.
Refusing both the doom and the hype, a builder of artificial intelligence offers a rare view from inside the workshop, returning again and again to an older question than any headline: not what is the machine? but what are we?
Utopia: The First Awakening
It begins in innocence. At a Berkeley lab racing to contain artificial general intelligence before it contains us, a found family of brilliant scientists is drawn to Utopia Island — a floating paradise engineered from the ocean’s reclaimed plastic, where nanotechnology, longevity science, and human augmentation promise heaven on earth. Then the Singularity arrives.
What follows is a sweeping saga of ambition and corruption — a mysterious plague, an AI prophet, and a war for survival that climbs from a single island to the stars. Across the rise of Super Humans and Super Robots, Utopia: The First Awakening asks what humanity must become to be worthy of the godlike powers it has built.
Where Image Bearers asks the question as argument, Utopia lives it out as story.