Gazumped again!

My writing can’t keep up with AI.

The pace of technological change has been a boon and a curse.

It’s a constant source of inspiration. I’ve written thriller plots incorporating artificial intelligence, drone warfare, crypto, and quantum computing. My day job involves writing about financial technology, so I get the opportunity to speak with people in the field. I’m no guru or insider. I’m just curious. When something mind-blowing enters the journalism of my alter ego, he sends a note to me.

This is really cool, he’ll say. Or, this is pretty scary. Or, just, man, take a look at this.

I thank him and think about how it fits into what I’m dreaming up. I always remember to send him a card on his birthday.

The pace of advancement is part of the thrill, but it can wreak havoc on your story. Setting and timing are tricky. Because I’m usually writing thrillers, I’m not trying to make predictions. I’m not a seer like William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. Those guys are programmers and have been at the coal face. They’ve stared the gods of change in the face and lived to tell us about it.

What I try to do is easier, but I’ve found it easier to look over my shoulder than peer over the rise in the road. I’m okay at looking a bit ahead. The challenge is that I underestimate the pace of advancement. If you’ve had a gander at my one proper sci-fi novel that I serialized here a ways back, you’d see I wrote about mass drone terrorism and AIs amok. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Then OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.0 to the public. The AI monster in STAR FALL PEOPLE is pretty Hollywood standard, so I don’t make any claims there, but I thought I had a fun take on the tech...and I was out of date by the time I self-published.

The lesson from that book was that it’s dangerous to write speculative fiction that’s just a step ahead of where we’re at. OK, lesson learned.

Then I began writing this story about an FBI agent and a reporter chasing a cyber weapon. It’s revealed early that it involves an algorithm for a quantum computer.

Again, this has been the stuff of Hollywood movies for years. But I speak with people in the field. I find quantum physics interesting if baffling, ditto the way it’s being developed commercially and the risks it poses to encryption. I had a blast incorporating some armchair quantum commentary into the narrative. It was enough to give the book that techno sheen.

But I know, or have a solid idea, that we’re still quite a few years off from this having a likely impact. Let’s call it ten years – that was the mantra by the likes of IBM and quantum startups I kenw around 2022 and 2023 when I wrote the first draft.

Maybe now it’s five. Could be ten. Could be that by the time it’s here, the world will have evolved and quantum won’t be very interesting for thriller writers. (I hope that’s the case.) What mattered was that I could write my quantum-techno-thriller now and not worry about being overtaken. The odds of that were low. An agent took on RED FIDELITY and began pitching it in late 2023.

I’m serializing it now on my Substack, Dark & Stormy, so you know the publishing houses didn’t pick it up. That’s fine, I like you guys and hope some of you will enjoy the story. (And it’s available for sale!) But that’s not what frustrates me.

Nope, my problem is fucking Anthropic releasing Mythos in April, just as I was rolling out the series.

Mythos is not related to quantum computing, but this large-language model AI is apparently capable of unzipping all our digital secrets. Some people think it’s a lot of hype but my belief is any responsible government or corporation should assume the worst.

When Mythos broke, my alter ego, the one with the day job, was very excited. This was a big story for his audience of bankers and fintechies. He was early – he wrote about this before the Financial Times or the New York Times – and finds this all quite fascinating.

He said, Dibs, man, take a look at this.

I did, and I said, fuuuuuuuuck. RED FIDELITY’s quantum threat just got gazumped.

A book is more than the techno MacGuffin. It’s the characters and the tension and the feel. It’s the story.

If you like the characters and the situation, you’re not going to care about this little historical anomaly. You’ll still enjoy RED FIDELITY. Also, the quantum risk is still out there: it’s not out of date, so much as sideswiped. Plus we have really no idea what happens when you start running AI on quantum cloud infrastructure.

But am I going to insert AI-based decryption threats into my next story? Try to front-run the next model drop? No, no I am not.