Countersurge Draft0 - Michael Hrenka.zip (4.5 MB)
Preface
You have found a partial draft for the science-fiction novel Countersurge. It is a story about the exceptionally gifted AI developer Sergej Anosov, those close to him, and his antagonists. The novel Countersurge is supposed to become the first book settled in the “Coherence” universe. The point about the Coherence universe is exploring a certain philosophical scenario, which is discussed in detail in my interview series with Sockrad at Sockrad Radivis Interview Series (contains a lot of spoilers).
The book Countersurge contains five parts, each named after a certain AI: Zenith, Aurora, Helios, Prakaza, Shiva. At the moment only the part Zenith is completed. The central theme of this book is the relationship between AI and humanity. There have already been a lot of books and movies about this theme. In most of those works either the chances or dangers represented by AI are focused on. By contrast, in Countersurge a certain meta-stable trajectory between both aspects is pursued - it represents a seemingly balanced, but at the same time quite tragic possibility for the future of AI.
This book is a philosophical AI thriller mainly written for those who take great interest in the potential of AI. It is certainly not a mindless action-packed thriller or a conventional romance story. The setting of Countersurge is deeply settled in my philosophical, psychological, technological, economic, and political musings, many of which are only hinted at without being explored in full depth. If you want to learn more about those, I suggest you explore the Fractal Future Forum at https://forum.fractalfuture.net which was founded and is hosted by me.
As someone interested in the potential of AI, I explored the possibilities of using AI for facilitating the creation of this novel. My explorations lead me to the AI writing service Sudowrite, which uses a wide selection of AI models to aid writers in ideation and writing. Personally, I find the greatest value of that service in letting an AI model write a continuation of my writing. Most suggestions are rather generic, lacking in deep creativity. But sometimes they fit the current needs of the passage quite well, so certain passages of this novel are actually AI generated. If I had to quantify the amount of AI generated sentences, I would estimate it to be at around 10% at the moment.
The use of AI in writing has been transformative for me, not mainly due to the amount of content it can generate, but rather due to the increasingly interactive experience that it can turn writing into. Writing together with an AI is an intensely fun experience and turns writer’s block into a relic of the past. Additionally, the irony of using AI as co-author in a book about AI is just delicious.