Books
“What is the price of our society’s obsession with artificial intelligence?
Michael Steep’s First Light of Day paints a picture of the not-too-distant future, illuminating the dangers of a world of our own creation, but not of our own design. In so doing, Steep’s lucid and heartful narrative makes an impassioned case for each of us to remember our humanity, especially in the digital age.”
General Stanley McChrystal,
Partner, McChrystal Group
Publications & Events
About First Light of Day: A Cautionary Tale of Our Future Written by One of Today's Leading Experts on Technology Innovation
London, 2045: Technology has changed everything from travel and work to government and even personal relationships. Society is segregated between knowledge workers who enjoy all the benefits of life in the new digital cities and the majority of the population, so-called Zeroids, who have been rendered economically superfluous.
Mikhail Ivanovich Vasiliev is a model “high value citizen,” a top AI engineering architect for Lloyd’s Taiping Group, the world’s premier financial services company. He leads a perfectly ordered life, with his routine optimized by his team of AI agents, but as he nears the creation of the world’s first sentient being, forces converge seeking to prevent or exploit the advent of this new technology. Mikhail and his cohorts and enemies alike struggle with the invention’s potential intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual impacts and the possibility of losing control of their lives to their own creations.
This gripping narrative is followed by an overview of the real-life technologies that play crucial roles in the story and that are shaping our world today. As one of today's leading experts on technology innovation, Michael Steep is uniquely qualified to describe the impact of unchecked technology development currently underway.
Praise for
First Light of Day
With First Light of Day, Mike Steep
has accomplished something
extraordinary. Not only has he
written an incredible description—
chilling as it is—of the world ruled by machine intelligence that is just around the corner, but he has done so by inventing a new kind of book for this new era. It is a hybrid of a novel and a nonfiction book, each part furthering the vision of the other. It is as revolutionary as the future it explains.
- Michael S. Malone, author, columnist, editor, and television producer