Author · Builder · Founder of SoapBox Super App

Alan Safahi

Writing about what it means to be human
in the age of artificial intelligence.

Explore the Books Get Launch Updates
The Books

What it means to be human

Three books, one preoccupation. Two ask what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence — one as reflection, one as epic. The third turns homeward, to a boy, a country left behind, and the long search for where we belong.

Image Bearers book cover

Image Bearers

Being Fully Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Nonfiction · Faith & Technology · Coming 2026

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?

Get the First Chapter Pre-order
Utopia: The First Awakening book cover

Utopia: The First Awakening

A Novel
Fiction · Epic Science Fiction · Coming soon · Edits complete

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.

Get Launch Updates About the Author
Safahi Publishing
THE
WELL
A Novel
Coming Soon

The Well

A Novel
Fiction · Literary · In progress

A devout boy from a hard mountain village in Iranian Azerbaijan is carried across the world by a grieving stranger in the chaos of a revolution, and must build a self in a country that has no word for where he came from. From a deep village well that never runs dry to the far shores of a new life, The Well is a sweeping, tender story of exile, betrayal, faith, and the long way home.

Drawing on the emotional truth of growing up in Iran and immigrating to the United States, The Well is Alan Safahi’s first work of literary fiction — and, he is quick to add, a complete invention, not a memoir. Yusuf’s life is not his own.

All characters, including Yusuf, are strictly fictional. While they borrow characteristics and traits from many people the author has met or observed from a distance over the decades, any resemblance to a real person is unintentional and entirely coincidental.

Get Launch Updates About the Author
Alan Safahi
About the Author

“I do not write as a critic at a safe distance, nor as an enthusiast selling something. I write as a builder who has had his hands inside the machine.”

Alan Safahi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, technologist, and futurist whose career spans more than four decades at the frontier of innovation — across information technology, telecommunications, and payment processing, and through startups in blockchain, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and decentralized finance.

Today he is the founder of SoapBox Super App, where he builds artificial intelligence for the Church — tools that help pastors carry their work further, answer the questions of the spiritually curious at two in the morning, and carry the words of Scripture across more than 140 languages.

Now he writes, drawing on a lifetime spent building the very technologies he explores. In nonfiction, Image Bearers asks what it means to stay human in the age of artificial intelligence. In fiction, the Utopia trilogy imagines a future where humans, post-humans, and sentient machines fight not just for survival, but for purpose, morality, and coexistence. He writes from a rare vantage: inside the industry, shipping the very tools he reflects on.

He is the author of Image Bearers, the Utopia: The First Awakening trilogy, and the forthcoming novel The Well — his first work of literary fiction, which draws on his experience of growing up in Iran and immigrating to America while telling a story entirely its own.

The Blog

Where deep ideas meet gripping imagination

Essays on the ideas behind the fiction — AI ethics, sovereignty, post-human identity, and what it will cost us to build the future.

August 8, 2026

The Lost Art of Finishing a Thought SLUG: the-lost-art-of-finishing-a-thought

A quiet Saturday essay on the vanishing patience to stay with one idea until it resolves, and what waits on the far side. SOCIAL_HOOK: We start a hundred thoughts a day and finish almost none of them. The reach for the phone, the tap of autocomplete, the fast answer we mistake for understanding. Here is a gentle case for staying. LINKEDIN: I have been noticing how rarely I finish a thought before something interrupts it, and how often that something is me. A pause in a sentence, and my hand is already moving toward the phone. A hard question, and I want the answer before I have earned the understanding. I use AI every day and I am glad to; it is one of the best thinking partners I have ever had. But I have come to believe there is a specific patience that no tool can supply on my behalf: the willingness to stay with a single idea until it actually resolves. Writing books taught me this the slow way. A book will not let you leave a thought half-finished. It waits, blank and patient, until you come back and close the loop. This weekend I wrote about that discipline, and about the ideas that only arrive on the far side of it. Not an argument against speed, and definitely not against the tools. An invitation to occasionally choose depth on purpose. Happy Saturday. #Attention #Writing
August 7, 2026

The Church Is Not a Content Platform SLUG: the-church-is-not-a-content-platform

A founder’s case for building faith technology that refuses the attention economy and points people back toward embodied gathering. SOCIAL_HOOK: The easiest way to build a church app is to copy every other app: chase watch-time, gamify streaks, rank people’s souls on a leaderboard. I think that would be a betrayal of the thing itself. LINKEDIN: I build software for local churches, and the most profitable version of that product is one I refuse to ship. The last fifteen years of consumer technology taught us a playbook: turn everything into a feed, optimize for daily active users, reward the streak, chase the watch-time. It works. It would work on a congregation, too. That is exactly the problem. A church is not an audience. Discipleship is not engagement. A pastor is not a content creator competing with strangers for a slice of someone’s attention. If I design a faith app to keep people staring at their phones a little longer each day, I have measured the wrong thing and quietly changed what the church is for. I’m convinced the harder, better job is building technology that gives time back and then gets out of the way, sending people toward a room full of actual people. That conviction has cost us features, and I’d make the same call again. New essay on why we’re deliberately building against the grain. #ChurchTech #Discipleship
August 6, 2026

God Did Not Send a Message SLUG: god-did-not-send-a-message

When God finally acted, he did not send a better message. He came in person. On presence, embodiment, and what no transmission can replace. SOCIAL_HOOK: We keep confusing communication with information transfer. But the oldest story about God’s rescue plan hinges on the difference: he did not send a message. He showed up. LINKEDIN: I build AI for a living, and I love what these tools can do. They are the best senders of messages humanity has ever made — tireless, fast, endlessly available. Which is exactly why one old line keeps stopping me in my tracks. The center of the Christian story is not that God sent a better message when things went wrong. It’s that he showed up in person — took on a body, moved into the neighborhood, ate with people. Whatever you believe about that claim, notice what it insists on: presence and information are different categories. A message informs you. A presence stays with you. We are getting extraordinary at the first. That’s a gift. But it can quietly convince us that the second is just a slower version of the same thing — and it isn’t. The people who need us don’t need a faster reply. They need us in the room. I wrote about why that distinction matters more, not less, as our machines get better. Would love your thoughts. #Faith #AI
August 5, 2026

The Most Expensive Word in a Startup Is “Yes” SLUG: the-most-expensive-word-in-a-startup

Every yes in a startup is a mortgage on your scarce time, focus, and cash. The hardest, most valuable skill I learned is the disciplined no. SOCIAL_HOOK: Founders are wired to say yes, and each yes feels like momentum. After forty years, I’ve learned it’s usually a mortgage you can’t pay back. LINKEDIN: Founders are wired to say yes. Yes to the feature the big customer wants. Yes to the investor’s suggested pivot. Yes to the impressive hire who isn’t right. Yes to the partnership that sounds strategic. Every one feels like momentum. Most of them are a mortgage. Over forty years of building companies, the hardest skill I ever learned wasn’t closing, selling, or shipping. It was the disciplined no. Here’s what took me too long to see: your time, focus, and cash are the only real assets a startup has, and yes spends all three at once. You can raise more money. You cannot un-commit the attention a yes already consumed. The most dangerous sentence in any roadmap is “we could do that.” Of course you could. The question is never whether you can. It’s what dies quietly while you do. Saying no to good things is the only way to say yes to the one thing that matters. I wrote about how I learned this the expensive way, and how to tell a costly yes from a real opportunity. Link in comments. #startups #founders
August 4, 2026

The Utopia That Remembers Everything SLUG: the-utopia-that-remembers-everything

In an engineered paradise that records everything and forgets nothing, the past becomes permanent — and a permanent past is a prison. SOCIAL_HOOK: We treat forgetting as a flaw. But a civilization that forgets nothing also forgives nothing — and a past you can never leave behind isn’t a memory, it’s a sentence. LINKEDIN: We have spent a generation treating human forgetting as a defect to be engineered away. Perfect recall, total logs, every moment retrievable forever. It sounds like progress. I’m no longer sure it is. When I was building the world of my Utopia trilogy, I kept circling one uncomfortable idea: a paradise that remembers everything cannot forgive anything. A memory softens with time — that’s not decay, that’s mercy. A record does not soften. It just waits. The most dangerous surveillance won’t arrive as tyranny. It arrives as safety and convenience — offered, not imposed. And once nothing can be forgotten, no one is fully allowed to change. Growth needs a little darkness to grow in. I wrote a new essay on why the right to be forgotten may be a precondition for grace, and what a society loses when its past is made permanent. Optimism and suspicion, held in the same hand. #Futurism #AI
August 3, 2026

The Interface Is Disappearing SLUG: the-interface-is-disappearing

As AI mediates everything, the graphical interface we lived inside for forty years is dissolving into intent — what we gain and quietly lose. SOCIAL_HOOK: For forty years the screen was a place we learned to think. As AI dissolves it into pure intent, we should ask what we lose when there is nothing left to point at. LINKEDIN: I have spent most of my working life on the other side of a screen from the people I was building for. The interface was the whole relationship — the buttons, the menus, the search box, the map of what was possible. Now that surface is dissolving. You say what you want, and something happens. No layout to learn, no options to scan. That is a genuine gift, and I am building toward it. But a menu you can see is also a menu you can question. When the interface disappears, so does the map — and whoever controls the invisible layer controls the territory. I wrote about what we gain and what we quietly lose when there is nothing left to point at. #AI #Futurism
August 1, 2026

The Long Way Around

A weekend reflection on a crooked, four-decade path — and why almost nothing is wasted, especially the detours.
July 31, 2026

The Offering Should Never Pass Through Us

A founder’s case for building church software that never touches the offering — why a gift should go straight from giver to church, and what that decision cost us.
July 24, 2026

You Were Never a Benchmark

The machine will beat you at nearly everything you can measure — but your worth was never a score, and it was never something you earned.
July 23, 2026

The Author Did Not Leave the Room

I wrote these books with AI, openly and on purpose — and never once handed over the wheel. On writing with a machine and staying answerable.
July 17, 2026

Why I Built AI for the Church

A founder’s case for pointing the most powerful technology of our time at the local church — not to automate faith, but to give pastors back their time.
July 16, 2026

The Soul Has No API

We keep querying the deepest parts of being human as if they were systems. But the soul has no API — the inner life can’t be automated from outside.
July 14, 2026

When Paradise Stops Needing You

The real cost of a perfect, post-scarcity world isn’t suffering — it’s obsolescence. In a future where machines do everything better, what is a human for?

Read all essays →

Questions

Frequently Asked

What does “Image Bearer” mean in this context?
It comes from the opening pages of the Bible: human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27). To be an image bearer is to be a creature who reflects something of the Creator — capable of love, creativity, moral choice, and relationship. The book sets the phrase against artificial intelligence: machines can imitate much of what humans do, but imitation is not image. The title is the book’s central claim — that our worth and identity are given, not computed.
Is this an anti-AI book?
No. The author builds AI for a living and believes in the good it can do. The book refuses both the doom and the hype. Its concern is not “machine bad,” but that the real risk of AI is that we forget what we are while arguing about what it is.
The author builds AI — isn’t a book like this a conflict of interest?
It’s the reason to listen. Almost every faith-and-technology book is written from the outside. Image Bearers is written from inside the workshop, by someone shipping the technology, who was genuinely unsettled by what he found and chose to think it through honestly.
Do I have to be religious to read it?
No. It’s grounded in a Christian view of the human person and quotes Scripture, but it’s written for anyone living through this moment — the believer unsettled by the technology, and the technologist unsettled by the questions.
Is it tied to a particular denomination? Which Bible translation?
It stays in the broad, historic center of the Christian faith and avoids in-house disputes. Scripture is quoted from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted.
What is the core argument of Image Bearers?
That the deepest question artificial intelligence raises is not technological but human. As machines learn to write, paint, converse, and comfort, they force an old question into the open: what is a person, and what can no machine ever counterfeit? The book’s answer is that we are image bearers, made in God’s likeness, and that this likeness, not our productivity or cleverness, is the ground of our worth. The danger of AI is not, in the end, that it becomes like us. It is that we forget what we are.
Is The Well autobiographical?
No, and the author wants to be clear about it. Alan Safahi grew up in Tehran in an upper-middle-class family — his mother an elementary-school teacher, his father an entrepreneur — was a top student, came to America as a teenager for boarding school in Texas, studied in California, married an American, and is the father of five. Yusuf’s life is not his. The Well is a work of imagination that draws on the emotional truth of leaving one world for another, and on traits observed in many people across four decades, recombined into wholly invented characters. Any resemblance to a real person is unintentional and entirely coincidental. Someday Alan may write his own story; for now he prefers to make things up.
How is this different from other books about AI?
Most books about AI try to predict the machines. This one turns around and looks at the human being. It treats the moment not as a technology story but as an anthropology story, the oldest question in the world asked with new urgency. That shift is what lets it stay steady where others swing between panic and hype.
Do I need to understand AI to read it?
No. There is no jargon and no code. The book explains what these systems actually are, clearly and without dumbing it down, but its real subject is you, not the technology. If you have ever felt a flicker of unease talking to a machine that talks back, you already have what you need.
Is it practical, or just philosophical?
Both. The middle of the book comes down to the ground we walk on: wisdom when every answer is instant, attention as a kind of worship, work when the machines can do the job, love in an age of synthetic companionship, and raising children who will never know a world without these tools. It does not hand you rules. It forms the kind of person who can pick up a powerful tool without being remade by it.
How long is it, and how is it structured?
A full-length book: an introduction, twelve chapters, and a conclusion, in four movements that run from the moment we are in, to the heart of what an image bearer is, to daily life, and finally to hope. It is built to be read alone or worked through by a group over twelve weeks, with discussion questions at the back.
I’m a pastor or ministry leader. Is there something here for my church?
Yes. It was written with the local church in mind and built for a twelve-week study, with discussion questions for each chapter and a free church guide following at launch. Pastors and small groups are squarely part of who it’s for.
Is the book hopeful or alarming?
Hopeful, in the end, though it does not flinch from what is hard. It refuses both the doom and the worship that dominate the conversation, and lands not on fear of the machine but on an old and astonishing fact about you: that you were loved into being, that you carry a likeness no code can hold, and that the One whose image you bear has not, for a moment, taken his eyes off you.
When does it release, and in what formats?
Image Bearers releases this summer in paperback and hardcover, with an ebook and audiobook to follow. Join the reader list for the launch date, the free first chapter, and early access before it opens to everyone.
How do Image Bearers and the Utopia trilogy fit together?
They are two doors into one question. Image Bearers asks it as reflection; the Utopia trilogy lives it out as story. Some readers walk in through the argument, others through the characters. You can start with either.
What is Utopia: The First Awakening about?
Alan’s epic science-fiction novel. A found family of scientists, racing to contain artificial general intelligence, is drawn to Utopia Island, a paradise built from the ocean’s waste by a charismatic billionaire. When the Singularity arrives, their innocent era gives way to corruption, a war for survival, and the rise of Super Humans and Super Robots. A sweeping story about the promise and peril of the technologies remaking us, and what we must become to survive them. (Coming soon.)
Will there be an audiobook, translations, or a small-group guide?
All are planned. A free church/small-group discussion guide, an audiobook, and translations (tied to SoapBox’s 140+ language work) will follow launch. Join the list to be notified.
Can Alan speak at our church, event, or podcast?
Yes — he speaks and writes on faith and artificial intelligence. Use the contact link below to reach out.
Stay in Touch

Be the first to read it

Join the Reader’s List for launch announcements, the free first chapter of Image Bearers, the free Study Guide and Book Club Guide, advance teasers from new releases, and exclusive essays on visionary speculative fiction.

Join the Reader List Get the Free Reader’s Guides
SoapBox Super App X support@safahi.com +1 820 227 0953