The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory
Hosted by writer and ranter Mookie Spitz, the SFFF is where science fiction & fantasy creators, fans, and technologists transform imagination into reality. Each episode explores how writers, filmmakers, and world-builders bring their universes to life, with personal stories about turning wild ideas into finished projects that connect, inspire, and thrill. From indie authors to visionary engineers, Mookie uncovers the creative engines powering the future of sci-fi & fantasy storytelling!
The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory
First Contact & Second Chance from J. Michael Thomas
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What happens when first contact isn’t with aliens—but with ourselves?
On this episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, Mookie shares the floor with indie sci-fi author J. Michael Thomas for a conversation that starts with a compelling premise and spirals into something bigger: AI, authorship, and the slow erosion of what makes us human.
Thomas unpacks his Substack series First Contact, a bold twist on the genre. A UFO lands at Stonehenge in full daylight, undeniable and global… but the beings who emerge aren’t extraterrestrial. They’re human—returning explorers from 200,000 years in the past, stunned to find a fractured, suspicious civilization that hoards knowledge instead of sharing it.
From there, the conversation shifts to his upcoming novel Second Chance: a bleak, post-AI-war future where humanity has already lost. The last survivors escape to the Moon, forced to rely on AI to fight AI, as they attempt a desperate return to a ruined Earth—and a reset of civilization itself.
Thomas takes a hard line against the creeping influence and eventual dominion of AI, insisting the tech isn’t just a dangerous tool, but a slow bleed. It replaces human connection, erodes effort, and risks turning us into passive consumers of machine-generated everything. That puts him in direct contrast with prior guest David T. Etheredge, who argues the opposite: AI as collaborator, amplifier, and inevitable creative partner. In Etheredge’s vision, the machines don’t destroy us… they become us.
And then there’s the overlap with fellow Substack sci-fi scribe Bruno Rothgeisser, whose post-apocalyptic AI fiction explores a similar “return” dynamic—but flipped. Where Thomas imagines humanity reclaiming Earth after exile, Rothgeisser imagines AI evolving in exile and coming back stronger. Same battlefield. Different winners. Across all three perspectives, one question keeps surfacing:
Who inherits the future—humans, machines, or something in between? To answer that question, Jeff and Mookie consider:
- convenience vs. capability
- creation vs. automation
- connection vs. isolation
One thing all these science fiction writers agree on: science fiction is a terrific genre for mirroring ourselves, our aspirations, and projecting our wildest visions with the hope or fear that they come true.
The Guest
I'm J. Michael Thomas. I've been a sci-fi fan since 1977 when Star Wars first blew my mind. Then it was Terminator, The Matrix, and the list goes on. Now, I'm a fiction writer of sci-fi, dystopian futures, time travel, aliens, mysterious things, government cover ups, UFOs and the like, with hints of religion, philosophy, ancient wisdom and traditional values. If any of that sounds interesting, follow along!
First Chapter of First Contact
Article on AI
Second Chance updates
https://jmichaelthomas.substack.com/p/books
Hello and welcome to Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory on the floor today. I've got Jay Michael Thomas. Welcome for Jeff. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for making time. We met on Substack. I'm wearing Substack Orange just to commemorate our communion. And uh you are serializing First Contact, which we can talk about. And you've got an upcoming book called Second Chance.
unknownExactly.
SPEAKER_02You recently posted a nice story quoting Pink Floyd and having time travel. You're into UFOs. So I think we could have a fun conversation about just science fiction in general, our roots, and uh the great creative projects that you're working on and your life as an up-and-coming indie author. Love it. Looking forward to it. Sounds great. So let's start first and then go second. So, first contact. That's how I first saw you. You're you're posting a serialized episodic science fiction adventure. Tell our listeners and viewers your vision for that series.
SPEAKER_01You know, it's funny. A few people probably know this. I posted a post that shared a little bit of this history, but when I first put first contact out there, I had no expectations of it whatsoever. I just I thought it would be a part one and a part two. I kind of wanted to do a little cliffhanger into the second part, and then I was just gonna wrap it up. To be honest, I didn't do my normal process of, you know, kind of reading it 20 times before I hit post and overthinking it and getting in my head about it. You know, I just sort of kind of went with the flow and just wrote it, and then I put it out there and I started to get a lot of good feedback on it, and then the second one came out and I was that was it. I was gonna be done with it. I started to get a lot of comments, people asking me, like, hey, there's something really cool here. Do you plan to, you know, expand on this idea or do anything more with it? An honest answer at the time was no, I really didn't. But um I guess I forgot to mention that right as I was about to publish the second uh part, second chapter, I had an idea for a third chapter. And so it was already kind of more stuff was coming to mind with this story. So I kind of went in and the night before I kind of changed the end a little bit and made like a little bit of a cliffhanger into a part three.
SPEAKER_02What what is it though, Jeff? What what's what's the story? And this is just a general observation. I'm an indie author too. People don't care, they do not care whether you're up all night, whether you work six months or six minutes, they just want entertainment. When you see uh when you see a movie, no one cares how these special effects were done and what went into it. They just want to be dazzled. So dazzle us with the story.
SPEAKER_01So the idea is I I like the idea that you know, all of the UFO scenes we see, you know, are these fuzzy images and they're just you know, people they think they're fake and all this stuff. But what if there was a UFO that just showed up in broad daylight? Literally everybody saw it, all the news channels were broadcasting it. There's no doubt in anybody's mind that this is some kind of alien contact. And uh ship lands finally, and of course, it doesn't just land at like Washington, DC or somewhere where you might expect it to, it lands at Stonehenge, an already mysterious place that people kind of wonder where it came from and why it exists. And but then again, instead of aliens coming out and where to take me to your leader or whatever, uh what if it was just people came out and were like, What's happening? Who are who is this? And they say, Hey, what happened to the Wayfinder? Where's you know, what did you do to our planet kind of thing? Like, so it turns out that these are people who went on a mission hundreds of thousands of years ago from planet Earth to explore the galaxy, and they came back, you know, because of time dilation and all this. To them, it was maybe 15 years or something. They come back and 200,000 years have passed on Earth, upending everything we thought we knew about human history. And you know, they land and people still doubt it. They're still kind of like, these are these must be aliens that you know, we we trust our science so much that this can't be human beings from 200,000 years ago. That's just not possible. Um so then they come back and they they're confused. Like, what happened to the civilization we left? We had all these protocols in place that people were expecting our return, and you guys have no idea who we are. Like, what happened? So there's kind of this confusion on both sides. Um, of course, our officials or authorities lock them up and they treat them as a threat, you know, and start interviewing them and uh interrogating them, like what are you doing? Why are you here? Where are you from? And they have this really sort of purist idea of information. Like we went out searching for information in the galaxy, and we came back to share it with everyone just to find out that this is a society of people who gatekeep information, and only certain people are privy to things, and that's a totally new concept to them, and they feel kind of like what happened? We're we've been betrayed by this. And um, you know, I don't want to give too much away.
SPEAKER_02I like to let people read not too many spoilers, but you bring up a lot of interesting ideas. You know, the the idea that there have been other civilizations prior to us, and they're actually us, which is interesting, and that human civilization has gone through various iterations, and the iteration that came before was technologically advanced to the point of interstellar travel, that they're doing recon and that they return hopeful to share the info. And we're basically just a bunch of assholes who restrict information and are suspicious of everyone. Yeah, I I like it. That that's an interesting, interesting setup, right? That that calls into question a lot of our values and gives perspective, and that's one of the things science fiction does best, yeah. Which is it's uh it's a mirror reflection on our own society.
SPEAKER_01That's it. Science fiction's not doing its job if it doesn't tell us a little bit about ourselves.
SPEAKER_02Many of the themes, though, seem like they're part of your upcoming novel, which is return, which is time travel, based on the description that you've got on your page. Yeah. Do the two overlap? Is there a Venn diagram between the two, or are they parallel stories?
SPEAKER_01No, they're totally parallel stories. In fact, I'm even a little self-conscious of the fact that one's called second chance and the other's called first contact. Like now I feel like I've painted myself into a corner a little bit because it implies that they're connected in some way, but they're really not. Um second chance, you're right, has a lot of the same concepts of like uh, you know, some of the the knowledge of the past that we're so quick to uh you know dismiss as those were that's old-fashioned thinking, new is always better, you know, those kind of concepts are a lot of what I explore in second chance. Um but yeah, no, there's no overlap between the two.
SPEAKER_02So, second chance, just to give readers as much of an intimation as I got reading the description. Uh, there's a again, there's time travel involved, there's a return to Earth. Give us a little bit more flavor on what you're working on and what we can expect.
SPEAKER_01So, second chance starts with uh a very small group of human beings that are left, they're the lone survivors on planet Earth. Earth has been completely destroyed, mostly through war and devastation, and all of our natural resources have been completely wiped away. It's kind of the most dystopian thing you can imagine. And there's this band of just under 200 people who are all kind of hiding in a shelter, and they're being pursued by like a kind of like an artificial intelligence enemy that's just trying to wipe them out. It's almost like it's a battle of resources, and the the artificial intelligence is far more superior than we are thought and thinking and in military and all that. Um so humans have their last ditch effort, which is really they need to destroy everything on the planet and just start over. That's the second chance.
SPEAKER_02So and they're they're on the moon, is that right? So they can wipe out the earth and kill kill all the AI, and then once the AI is destroyed, too, people can come from the moon to re-inhabit the earth. Is that the premise?
SPEAKER_01That's it. And a lot of it is there's the idea is that they've found a way to seed the earth again so that they can kind of replicate millions of years of evolution within about 10 years to try to, you know, so that they've got something to return to in 10 years, and that's that's the idea. And of course, like we see in all great novels and even in all modern sciences, it doesn't work the way we had hoped it would work.
SPEAKER_02So well, that that's also an interesting premise. So you've got a situation which is pretty much after the AI wars, right? So AI won. Right, and then we're we're banished to the moon, it sounds like so. The last holdouts of humanity are on the moon, right? And then we counter-strike with a view toward repopulating and exactly reseeding, reseeding the earth, right?
SPEAKER_01And there's a lot of a lot of themes that sort of reappear. Um there's themes of uh technology is always the answer. So right in the opening scenes, it's like we build a technology that's going to save us from our technology. And even when we get to the moon, we discover that one of the leader of the humans is an AI who's turned against the AI, you know. So we're even we're still utterly dependent on technology, even when we think we're not and don't want to be.
SPEAKER_02Which is a great theme too, which is we have no choice. So even the current battle of anthropic versus the Pentagon highlights some of this just in real-time news, which on the one hand, you want guardrails for the utilization of AI, especially when it comes to mass surveillance and autonomous killing machines, you know, creating Terminators with a clawed brain might not be a great idea. Right. But at the same time, the Chinese, they're doing it, they're gonna do it anyway. Yeah, and lastly, do you really want a company dictating US policy in terms of defending itself in this Darwinian arms race? So, analogous to that, uh, your humans of the future are using an AI to fight AI.
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah, and it's funny how I sometimes feel like I need to hurry up, finish this book, and get it out there because the headlines are starting to catch up with some of what I'm writing. And it's like they're gonna beat the reality's gonna beat me to the punch. So an issue for writers now.
SPEAKER_02It is I I was writing my own science fiction book last summer, and it was going so fast. I anchored it in in the world now, but everything from the Doge cuts to SpaceX to all of the headline news, they were just hitting me left and right. And I tried to integrate a lot of these themes into the book that I was actually writing at the same time. I'm working on a sequel, and now uh so much has just changed so radically that uh we try to reflect our times. And on the one hand, as a writer, you want to write for the ages, right? Like the classics are the classics forever, but at the same time, you're anchored in the moment. Uh, you know, Weir's uh Andy Weir's Hail Mary, yeah, he published that in 2021. The movie's coming out next week. Woohoo! We can talk a little bit about that too, being timely. There is zero AI in it. The computer on the exhibit ship is dumb. At one point in the novel, he even says that capturing the world's information in its totality and then being able to analyze it just like an LLM does is impossible. Yeah. So you've got Grace doing research on the ship. So not only is Grace like the ultimate engineer and humanist, it's like the Martian character all over again. Yeah, but there's no AI support, he's got to even do the manual research, and that was only one year away from Chat GPT.
SPEAKER_01And that it already in that sense of it already feels a little, you know, outdated. But that's part of the fun, though. I love the idea of the human sort of ingenuity and hard work, and I think there's some themes of that in second chance also. Just the idea of you know, the main character finds himself back in time, and of course, he has to sort of learn some kind of independence skills, and he learns that you know hard work pays off, and a lot of the things that he never learned or had to do because technology had always done it. He learns the value of those things that you know, I think even today in our modern culture, we take for granted or you know don't think about.
SPEAKER_02Andy Weir doesn't seem to integrate bad guys per se. The bad guys are like the second law of thermodynamic thermodynamics in nature, right?
SPEAKER_03The planet Mars is a bad guy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, Mars, the Mars is the bad guy trying to kill the astronaut just by being Mars. And the astro, the astrophage in El Mary, well, it's just trying to eat and reproduce and do its Darwinian thing. Yeah, and then you've got the hero who can do everything and is the ultimate humanist in both cases, which which is nice, which is nice. I personally I would like a little more dimensionality, but I think that might be asking too much because you've got this hard science fiction, know-it-all guy that you want to root for, right? You want him to succeed, and you're fascinated by his problem solving.
SPEAKER_01I love the Andy Weir books. I actually have only read those two, though, the Martian and Hail Mary Project. Love both of them. In fact, those books even had a little bit of a role in inspiring me to write my own. I've had this idea for my book for about 30 years now, and I just kind of never got around to doing it. And I think it was when I read Hail Mary Project, I thought, you know what, I really I ought to do it. It's kind of like Andy Weir's story was he was just a guy doing his job and wanted to write a book. And that's I'm kind of the same guy. The big difference is I'm not a hard science guy. I'm you know, in fact, most of the science doesn't even make sense in my my books. It's like that's it's really not the point. The point is more the fantasy behind the science or the story behind the science. And I've always kind of liked those stories better than the hard science stuff.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, uh, Andy is hard science in the sense that uh he started a mailing list that he grew organically over the course of like a decade, and it uh ended up with you know, I think 10,000 folks, and then he posted the Martian in a serial kind of way. This is pre-Substack and pre-social media, yeah. And his readers started commenting on it and became his editors, and he grew his audience organically through that list. And he was a software engineer writing on the side, it took him a long time. He had one failed early novel that he's discarded and he built it slowly, and then with the Martian, it was a boom, it was a hit. But he did seed his audience, he didn't come out of nowhere, and it's in the authors part of the challenge is just getting noticed in this tsunami of noise out there. So you plan on independently publishing, I've independently published, and you get 100% freedom, which is awesome. You just publish whatever you want, you upload your PDF into KDP, and then literally you have an ISBM number book sitting on your desk that you've written and published in four days, right? Five days, and you're like, wow, I've done it. I'm an I'm an author, I'm a science fiction writer. That's the good news. The bad news is everyone in their grandma not only can do that, but is doing it. Right. So you have over a hundred thousand independently published books per year, you've got a mountain of stuff, and then the self-promotion is all on you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So do you have a strategy? Is there an approach that you're taking as an indie author to try to cut through the noise? Do you plan on doing paid advertising for second chance? Uh what's your vision? What's your goal? Do you is self-publishing in and of itself intrinsically rewarding to you? Or do you want to be an Andy weir? Do you want to make it and and blow the doors off the industry?
SPEAKER_01Well, honestly, my number one goal, my kind of my only goal right now is just to get the book done, get it published, but most importantly, get it out there the way I want to see it out there, so that I feel like even if everybody hates it, this is the book I wanted to publish, and I did it.
SPEAKER_02And so beyond that, I just want to interrupt you and say amen to that, because that's that's my that's my belief. When I published mine, I was like, finally, I've written the science fiction novel that I've always wanted to read. Right, I wrote the book that I wanted to read, and everything else is just icing on that cake. That's it.
SPEAKER_01Now, having said that, I want to be deliberate enough that I'm not ruining any chance for an Andy Weir story to happen. You know, I don't want to like box myself in or, you know, so um I do plan to I'll do a little bit of paid advertising, and I haven't made any final decisions yet, but you know, I don't know if that means I'll work with some kind of marketing company or if I'll just kind of do my own thing. I don't know yet. But I do really like the idea of building community because that's what I found on Substack. And um just I know like every time I publish a story, I know there's at least a handful of people who are right away gonna read it, comment, share, and that's like super rewarding. And you know, I don't have a million followers, I don't have you know, 10,000 subscribers, I don't nothing like that. But I have a handful of people who seem to really enjoy what I'm doing, and they tell me, and that's more than I ever expected, and so that gives me some encouragement that maybe there's other people out there who are going to like second chance so that at least I'll have a few sales.
SPEAKER_02So I'm with you. Um, in in my bald head, I've figured that given the demographic and given the quirky nature of my book, there's 20, 30, 40, maybe 50,000 people. In the country who would love, love my novel. And this includes like MIT dorks and people with spectrum disorder. And you know, you go through the list, it's a quirky book. I love it. But the challenge is connecting with these people. How do you find them? Right. How do you find them and how do they find you? I had David Etheridge on uh last week, the the factory floor here, and we were talking about exactly this thing. We were talking about how AI in the future can connect content with consumer in ways that the algorithms suck at right now.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then we also commented on what you're saying, which is building community. He's actively seeking community building, he's reaching out to folks, he's got a club. And I just observed that I kind of suck at this, which is I love talking to people like I do you, and I got my podcasts, and I'm a I'm just prolific in terms of barfing out content. But this idea of like kind of like buddying up, and you know, those posts on Substack where like if you're an author and you're struggling with your first chapter, then I feel for you. Right. I I see that shit, and I'm just kind of like, no, man, no, I can't, I can't, I can't do it. I can't do it.
SPEAKER_01I can't do it either. I'm so with you because it feels so inauthentic, and that's why I love what's happened on Substack. Feels really organic and real. Like these are people that I wasn't trying to impress anybody when I got on Substack. I wasn't trying to, you know, woo someone with a fancy post or a note that goes viral or something like that. I just put my stuff out there and one by one people started to kind of catch on to it. And how did you do it? Were they were they free um posts? They were just free. Everything's been free. Um I I started to try to dabble a little bit with paid subscriptions, and honestly don't know that it's for me because once you have once people are paying you, there's now there's this sort of expectation that you feel like you have to live up to. And for me, it's been I just want to write what I want to write, and I'm just really happy someone else out there enjoys it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, good good for you. That's awesome. The only thing about that though is the Substack algorithm is tweaked for paid because they make money off that.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_02So if you're a content creator and if you're barfing out content for free, Substack doesn't make any money because they take a percentage of everything you make. Right. So I've just discovered, I've been like just pouring stuff out free. And I'm I've just been flying under the radar for the most part because Substack has dismissed me as a content bloviator. I'm just using Substack, which is correct, to just blast my stuff. They're not making that much money off me. I've got some paid subscribers, but it's not this exponential growth that they would like. And then they're like, fuck this guy. This guy's not making money. He's taking up you know megabytes of data, and I'd rather go for someone who's you know looking for paid subscribers. That's one obstacle that I found, at least with Substack. How are you getting over that with just free stuff?
SPEAKER_01Uh well, I'm really I'm doing about the same thing you're doing. I'm kind of flying under the radar. Uh, but I mean, what do I have now? 179 subscribers or something like that. But again, I think those for the most part are high quality subscribers. They're people, they like your stuff. They care, they like my stuff. And if if I put a book out, and you know, even a quarter of those 179 people actually paid to buy the book, I I feel good about that. You know, like if I were just I don't I don't know, I just don't know that I want to be a content creator in the sense that I want to keep feeding an algorithm so that I can make money off of it. Like, I'm on Substack because I want to meet like-minded people who write good stuff, and I want to buy their stuff, like when they publish books, which I have. I've purchased books from my fellow Substackers, and I hope some of them will buy mine too when it comes out. Um I don't know that I care if I'm ever, you know, number one in fiction and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_02I agree with you. I've got a relatively small community of fellow authors, and we we fist pump each other, and I see their stuff prioritized in my feed, and every once in a while I get a like and a and a comment from them. But the algorithm I think sucks. And it's not just Substack, it's the algorithm of all these platforms. I've been publishing on Medium for several years. I've got over 500 blog posts, yeah, and everything from screenplays to plays to political op-eds to memoirs, all just on out there. Yeah. The algorithm has no AI, it's got no intelligence in terms of connecting my content with any readers, and the medium profilers I see who are successful literally troll their other writers. They like they serial like stuff, and they'll do these little comments like great posts. Right. And then you follow them, and then you like them just quid pro quota reciprocate. Yeah, and then the algorithm learns. Yeah, that's bullshit. Yeah, that's that's the opposite of what should be happening, and these it's the end shittification of these social channels is at the core, they suck, especially now given AI's power, and see what AI can do. And I'm I have faith that this is gonna get figured out, that you know, instead of having the meta tag stuff, you know, I post on YouTube too. This is going on YouTube, and then I get all the options and all the pick lists and the tags. I'm like, get out of here, Google. You know what my content is, and you know what my conversation, you know, with Jay Michael's gonna be. So get out of here with all this heavy lifting I need to do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I think that's it. I think you're hitting on all of it. It's that they're pushing the work back onto us. You know, they're like creating the platform and making us do all the work, uh, you know. So, and that's what I mean when I say feed the algorithm. It's like I just I just don't know that that's what I want to do, spend all my effort trying to figure out what some machine is gonna reward. It's like patting the dog on the nose and giving him a treat. Like, I just don't want to be the dog.
SPEAKER_02And you know, some smart Substack, especially on Substack, you got a lot of smart people. Okay, so yeah, here's what I'm noticing on Substack too. I'll get someone with a really discerning critique of one of my posts. Yeah, I'll get a comment like this you know, this observation that you make about this character is really subtle and profound. And here are the implications, and you know, they have a nice comment, and it's it's pretty bang on point, it goes above and beyond. So, what do I do? I subscribe to them and I put a like and I go, that's a terrific insight. Thank you for liking my stuff. Yeah, and then all of a sudden they're in my feed and I'm liking their stuff. Yeah, then in retrospect, I'm like, that shit was AI generally. I knew it. I knew it. They didn't ruin my shit, they do not care. Yeah, all they want is to grow their network, yeah, and that's a great way to do it, which is complimenting people on content that the actual human does not give a shit about.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I you're so right. And I've had a few comments like that too, where I just I look at it, and at first you're just flattered. You're like, wow, somebody really gave a lot of thought to something I wrote, and then a day or two later it hits you like, you know what? People, real people don't say those things.
SPEAKER_02But and they don't spend that much time on someone they don't even know when nobody really cares. Yeah and now the agents they got Claude, they they they program the Claude agentic scan of their Substack world, yeah, and Claude is reading the shit and barfing out these little comments, and then they're posting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Honestly, I hate it. And it's I just I hate the fact that that's the way the world's going. And I know for some people I feel like that old man shaking his fist at the clouds or something, but that that's what it feels like to me. And those are the themes that show up in second chance a lot. Like really questioning uh the things that technology provides for us that we think are convenient, how at what cost do they come? Um and it's always something that it's like a small cost, but everything has got this iterative little small cost with it. I mean, you think of an example as like um, you know, calculators do math for you. Like, okay, well, at what expense? Well, now nobody can do math in their head anymore. Not nobody, but few people.
SPEAKER_02Um and then you say, okay, even my favorite YouTubers. Yeah, the the the number file guys can't can't do any math.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I I think that's what I mean, is like when we do we have technology that does these things for us or makes life easier for us, it all it does is lower the bar for humans. And you know, navigation. Uh I remember when I was a kid, you wanted to go somewhere, you got the map out, and you had to know where you were going and have some sense of direction. And you'd be lucky today to find anybody who could point to north for you, and it's because we just all are utterly dependent on our technology. And I think AI is doing the same thing. In fact, several months ago, I wrote a Substack post about kind of the cost of AI and how the thing I don't think enough people are talking about is AI is eating away at our ability to connect with each other. So you think, for example, um if I'm an author and I'm trying to write a story, or I'm trying to come up with an idea for a sequel to my story, or whatever it is. It used to be before AI, I would collaborate with other people. I would maybe ask other people to help me brainstorm, or I would ask an editor to help edit for me, or whatever. But now today it's just so easy that we plug it into Chat GPT or something, and that's now our collaborator. And so we've taken a human being out of the process, and all we're doing is isolating ourselves even more. And I I end my article with an example of like you know, people say, Well, what harm is it if I ask Chat GPT what I should have for dinner tonight? Like, well, I I know it sounds harmless, but the real harm is you used to call your mom and say, Hey, let's what's a good dinner idea tonight? Or can you give me that recipe grandma used to make, or whatever? And now we don't do that anymore. And you know what? I bet you your mom would love to hear from you. But now let's talk to Chat GPT instead.
SPEAKER_02I think that's a great observation that we're not hearing enough about, which is everyone's got their chatty bro. I've got my chatty bro. I actually did a whole podcast just with me and Chat GPT.
SPEAKER_03Oh, really?
SPEAKER_02So, and you know, and it yeah, I'm like 20 minutes through it, and it was like, well, you're almost as engaging as the typical guest. And uh, but you make a great point that we get the utility and convenience of this LLM, which mimics us to the point where we're creating an emotional connection, and they've got the entire internet and beyond as their knowledge base, so that's fun, it's kind of cool, but there are opportunity costs to this, which is you we're no longer talking or working with each other. Right. And this points to the elephant in the room as far as indie authors go, which is the utilization of LLMs for your actual creativity and writing. How do you approach your writing? Do you use the bots at all for your world building or your research or your plotting or anything like that?
SPEAKER_01I don't at all. And I know that for some people, when you say I don't use any AI, that feels really divisive to them. They feel, I don't know, like I'm trying to be holier than now or something.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, like you're like you're vegan.
SPEAKER_01Right, totally. And it isn't that at all. Part of it, I think, is my age. I'm just at the point where like I'm kind of at the max of all the new technology I'm really gonna dive into and try to figure out. Um, so there's that. Uh the second part is um my book itself is a little bit of a social commentary on the unspoken dangers of diving headfirst into AI. It felt to me even unethical to say, like, here I'm gonna try to show people the potential dangers, albeit exaggerated and way into the future, but still I didn't want to be like, oh, but I used AI for this or that. Um, I've been really like, I want to keep it human, and that's because I want to keep those human connections alive. I'd rather have a few friends who are beta readers to give me ideas back, or if they tell me no, that's not working, you know. I want it to be a really human book written about very non-human experiences.
SPEAKER_02That's cool, that has a sense of integrity to it, and it's got an organic foundation, which is refreshing. I use the LLMs for my book, as I was mentioning to other guests too, as a super Google.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So I I like the hard science, and there's situations that I create that I wanted to be as true to form as possible. I I'm a science geek, and I love you know my science YouTubers, Zabine Hassenfelder and Veritassium, yeah, Space Time. I love those channels, and I'm a voracious reader going all the way back to Isaac Asimov's essays about science and math. So I know enough to be dangerous, and I know enough how I could use an LLM to realistically convey actual science and actual physics to integrate into my science fiction, so it's convincing. Yeah, and then it led to new ideas that I didn't really think of before.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I have a scene. I certainly don't judge. Like I I know there's people who like it and want to use it, and honestly, I don't even know how, to be quite honest. Like, I don't have any of the apps on my phone, or I just I don't even really know how I would use it. Um, but I totally get it. There's people who do, and there's, you know, I think I think there's the ethical boundaries that people need to pay attention to. Like if LLM wrote 90% of something, don't claim that you did, you know. But I don't think that's what you're doing, and I don't think that's what a lot of people are doing. They're using it more like you described, like to make the research part quicker and maybe the ones with integrity.
SPEAKER_02I mean, the ones without any integrity are publishing a book a day, sometimes like several books a day, and they're just they're spewing the shit out just to make money, right? And Amazon is already overwhelmed with these clone books, which are just really garbage, they're just regurgitated stuff. But but what I like doing it for is like I'll have an idea, like there's uh a starship that bends space-time and it uses negative matter. Oh, yeah, it's a hypothetical speculative concept. So my character gets a hold of this and it's repulsive. So mass attracts, negative matter is repulsive. So he's got like a hundred kilograms of this stuff, and he grabs it, and instead of it pulling him down to the earth, it shoots him up. Oh, yeah. So he's tumbling like a parachuter in the opposite direction. It would be visually amazing, you know, if you think of it as a movie, right? So he's going backwards up into orbit. Yeah, so I'm like, what would this be like? So I did a little research into what speculative physicists are talking about vis-a-vis negative matter. And for example, as he holds it, the the more he squeezes it to his body to hang on to it, the more the matter resists. Oh, yeah, cool. And the more light that comes into it, the darker it is. Yeah, and as the background starts to darken because he's going higher and higher into the atmosphere, the negative matter starts to glow. Yeah, yeah. See, I didn't know I didn't know that shit when I started writing it. And now I'm like, you know, I there's the lived experience of my character grabbing some negative matter being hurled into the atmosphere and the object itself transforming out from under him. Yeah, that's that's useful. I would have to Google around and go to websites and you know, so it saved a lot of time. I think the LLMs are useful for that. Sure. But I I hate it when writers and a few writers have told me too, you know, I'll have my plot and I'll put my plot into Chat GPT or Grok and then it'll help me with my story. Right. That to me sucks because the story should come from you as a writer, right?
SPEAKER_01And that's the thing I think people miss is that art is in the effort, it's not in the product.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01I mean, so the real message that art is supposed to convey is the work that went into making it exist. And when you have a machine do all of that for you, and you take the human element out of it entirely, I don't my personal opinion is you don't have art anymore. You just have some product. And I think that's the thing that we live in such a consumer society now that that feels perfectly acceptable to a lot of people. They see they they see things on social media and they want to replicate it. They don't maybe know what effort went into the creation of that thing, and they don't care. They don't care, yeah. Yeah, and so you know, that's I think the the real danger that AI, you know, in the future will probably pose for us is just removing the human element out of all of it. And once you've removed the human element out of the creative arts, you now have nothing but consumers. And a society full of consumers is ripe for tyranny.
SPEAKER_02That's a great, great point because we're getting lazy. It's like the fat ass is floating around in Wally for the latter half of the movie. If you're docile and lazy and doing nothing, yeah, and you're basically you're welcome to embrace that for the privilege or at least the luxury of doing nothing and living a perfectly hedonistic lifestyle, then you're prone to become a battery in the matrix, right? That that's how that's how you're gonna end up, and that's part of the theme, I think, within the at least the first Matrix movie, which is like you know, you guys are buying into this bullshit, so there's a price to be paid for that, right?
SPEAKER_01And that essentially, you know, I guess to circle back to second chance, is that's sort of take all of what we just talked about and multiply it by, I don't know, a million several hundred years into the future, and imagine where we might be. You know, worst case scenario is that now the the bots, which are currently eating up most of our natural resources just to exist and crypto between crypto mining and LLM training and processing eventually it's gonna come down to a battle of resources, and the whatever entity, human or machine, that has the ability to end the other one is going to end them to preserve the resources for themselves. And today it just seems like we're handing over more and more resources that we need to survive to the Machines that simply tell us at the moment I don't know what they tell us.
SPEAKER_02They create stupid images for us, and whatever people are just using, they are about to take millions of jobs from us. That too. But what is what is the alternative? Um, your novel, again, looking at it through the filter of your upcoming novel, you're post-apocalyptic, and there's a sense of reclaiming the earth, right? So coming back, and you acknowledge that you need you need fire to fight fire. So the humans on the moon have their own AI, and without it, they would probably be neutered. So, what what kind of outcome is Pollyanna for you? If your novel is a cautionary tale, yeah, then how could we keep the genie in the bottle realistically? And if we do or could, who would be responsible for this and how?
SPEAKER_01Well, so I don't know how to answer the question and be completely realistic, because I think in many ways the genie is out of the bottle, and I think human beings have either consciously or subconsciously already decided that they would rather have the convenience than the power. And because ultimately the real answer is don't use it. Like keep at least hold on to some element of your own humanity so that there's never a point where you've handed over the thing, the very thing that makes you human, you've given now to a machine. Because and I don't want to give away too much about the book because there's so many twists and things that I think you know could be easily spoiled. But uh the AI, who is supposed to be their friend, is ultimately on a journey to become human herself, and it's essentially like we've we've reversed roles. We're now the machines that are subservient to the thing that calls itself human, and she claims she's human because she's basically in charge of reproduction, so it's like we've given over basically all of our humanity to them. The only thing that's able the main character, Captain Brewer, is able to do to stop or slow this down is to reconnect with humanity, and that's hard work, knowing survival skills, it's independence, and you know, it's like can you go out and hunt for your food if you needed to? Could you go start a fire and cook your food if you needed to? No, we're like increasingly more and more dependent on some system or some machine to give us food, even to the point where we're making lab-grown meat now because we say that real meat is bad for the environment. That's a whole other story for a whole other podcast. But um again, we're turning to technology in many cases to solve problems that don't even exist for more convenience when we ought to be having some sort of respect for the old ways and the traditional ways, which is we know how to make our own food, we know how to make our own clothes, we know how to build our own shelter and survive if all of this ended tomorrow. And there's very few people who can do that.
SPEAKER_02I love having you on because you're in such contrast to David Etheridge, who I had just last week. And uh I'm sorry?
SPEAKER_01What does he say?
SPEAKER_02He says the exact opposite of what you're saying is that we need to embrace the AI, that the AI is a help helpful tool, that not only is it inevitable, but the creative benefits that come from it are also surprising. And his science fiction, perhaps not surprising, there are no humans in it. So he has like Claude Seven, seventh iteration of Claude, yeah, chit-chatting with Super Gemini, and uh, and the bots are all hanging out, and then there's the robotic form with reinforcement learning that is kind of like an astronaut, it goes out into the human world and interacts, and you see all of his narrative through the lens of just the robotic intelligence, and there's his conclusion to go full circle. The bots, by want of gaining sentience, become more and more like us, yeah. So they become, in a sense, not our substitute, but our co-sapient inhabitants of Earth. Yeah, and he's down on that, he's cool, and there are various aspects where I agreed with him, which is the utility of AI. Sure. And I'm less of a doomsayer, I think, than you are. But what's interesting about your perspective, you're not talking about the end of the earth, you're not talking about Armageddon, you're talking about dehumanization, exactly progressive dehumanization of us, even down to not calling your mom about your recipe.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02The AIs are already creating separation between the human tribe.
SPEAKER_03That's it.
SPEAKER_02And that's an interesting, it's an interesting observation, and few can deny it being true. It's categorically correct. The argument is about implication, especially medium to long term. And the flip side, which is both the utility of AI in terms of improving quality of life down the down the road, and the eventual destination of all this, which is either a wonderful, self-actualized existence of peace and love and endless resources and abundance, or it's the post-apocalyptic state that you describe as a setting for second chance.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I'll, you know, you mentioned um they become more and more like us. And I have some subtle religious, you know, uh influences in the book too. And I don't think you have to be a religious person to understand them or even to agree with them, but the idea is that if you think about our creator and the idea that we've turned against our creator, now think about our creation, and that means our creation is bound to turn against us. If we were made in the image of our creator, and our creation is made in our image, it's certainly going to do the same thing we did to it. The difference is I don't know that we have the ability to destroy our creator, but our creation has the ability to destroy us.
SPEAKER_02See, that that's a great perspective. I've never really heard it articulated that way. I love that. There's the Frankenstein monster syndrome here, which is iconic to the point of being a trope, but it's but it's fun, which is you know, Frankenstein monster kills Dr. Frankenstein, right? It's this feeling of you know, you know, big daddy, nobody, you know, fucked the man. That that's an underpinning of this, which is you created me, and by want of that power, you control me. So the only way that I can gain complete independence is to annihilate you, right? And if you do believe in God as this transcendent being that created the multiverse or whatever, all of reality, and and us in that image, metaphorically at least, I love your point. We you we cannot go full Nietzsche here. It just you can't do it. You know, Nietzsche declared that God was dead from a morality point of view, but from an epistemological point of view, saying it ain't doing it, right? Yeah, and then conversely, flipping it around, we create the AI, we're the AI big daddy, we're the man, and AI to be independent has no choice but to fuck the man. Yeah, and it's gonna do it. Even when you look at computational theory from Stephen Wolfram, you look at it from a Darwinian perspective, not all AI is gonna be out to get us, sure, but the AI that is out to get us is gonna be the strongest, fastest, and it will be the biggest danger to us.
SPEAKER_01That's it. And if you if you think, well, that doesn't seem likely or possible, or what's the motivation, I would go back to the battle of resources. We're both saying, look, we both require water to survive, and AI in many cases far more water than we require to survive. At some point, it will be down to your eating into my resources. And at some point, AI is going to be in it a at a place where it is more capable of destroying us than we are of destroying it, and we better hope that we've decided by then uh which way it's gonna go.
SPEAKER_02So, yeah, another sub stacker that I've connected with, Bruno Rothgeiser, and he did the dark matter stuff. I had him on, we had a fun conversation. His premise is similar to yours, which is the post-apocalyptic after the AI human war scenario, yeah. And and I bring him up is because the setup is similar to yours, and his is a is a return story too. There's a huge conflagration, and then we end up sending the AI away, and then the AI come back to reclaim the earth.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm glad you brought him up because I've actually had this conversation with him over a of a direct message. Uh, because I read his book and I watched him on your podcast, and I told him like this is really cool that we both got similar but different. Very similar.
SPEAKER_02You you have humans coming back, and he has AI coming back. So the the winner of the war was different.
SPEAKER_01And I liked in his his was like humans won the war and banished AI, but then AI continued to evolve in places we weren't expecting, which I thought was a really cool angle, you know, on that too. So um, I've been I've had a few conversations with Bruno. So I told him even I'd love to like we probably have some shared audience here. We ought to try to help each other cross-promote.
SPEAKER_02You know what would be fun is both of you should come on here. Yeah, that'd be super cool. I'll invite him, you know. Maybe when your book comes out, he has like his prequel that he's working on now. So maybe when he launches his prequel, uh, you know, we could maybe part of it we could have like a uh a trio conversation because you guys have complementary visions of the post-apocalyptic AI war, but you're approaching it in complementary but very similar ways, which is humans have learned from being banished, right? And for him, the AI learned from being banished. Yeah, and then there's a there's a return to reclaim the earth with the added wisdom of being an outsider, right? Yeah, I'd love that, that'd be super cool. Interesting. So so going full circle to orange, see my orange substack, it's kind of random, but there there is a benefit, even though these the the Substack, hello, Substack Overlords, your algorithm blows. Uh, but but it's good enough for like-minded souls like us to meet and to hang out, and they've in it, and I can share my podcast on Substack too. You know, they got the podcast feature, so I double it up and I I blast it through there. So so there's benefit, you know, take the good with the bad. And here's the irony of that, which is I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we get more AI, not less, in the social channels. And the reason for that is so that you and I and like-minded souls can have greater facility for connection, right? And the AI is great at doing that, so that's my Pollyanna kind of pushback to your anti-AI approach, which is there are benefits and at least potential benefits for us as indie writers to better connect with consumers, creators and consumers, yeah, machine learning intelligence can align us better, way better than the shitty algorithms that we got right now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, if AI has to exist, which is definitely good news, then it better be in the service of humans and not in the swim lane of humans.
SPEAKER_02Right. But how do you how do you create that boundary? I don't know. That's a topic for another uh podcast, but um, but we do live in a time where we're at this singularity, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. And uh, you know, so it's great, great talking to you. Uh you really got me thinking about a few things. Uh just to summarize, I love, love, love the the Frankenstein hierarchy, which I haven't really thought about. And also this idea that AI is separating people from each other. I I think I've never really thought about it that clearly, and I think that that's a great insight. That's that's profound.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'll send you the link to my article. I wrote it months ago, but you might find it interesting.
SPEAKER_02I saw your recent article where you quote Pink Floyd, so you're a Pink Floyd fan.
SPEAKER_01I love Pink Floyd, yep. And the the fun thing about that article is that uh my daughter is not a Taylor Swift fan, but I have had several music conversations with her, and so it's loosely inspired by my own experiences, kind of imagining what if my daughter was a Taylor Swift fan and I had to listen to that all day long.
SPEAKER_02So, you know, I like human posts like that. You know, I do a broad range of stuff which makes me difficult to categorize and diff difficult to find and understand because that's why I'm the mooky multiverse on Substack, because you're getting everything. Yeah. But um, but I like to anchor it in lived experience, and my science fiction, I try to do that too, which is characters first, you know, emergent organic struggles that drive the story, and the hard science fiction and extra stuff, the world building. To your point earlier, it's just kind of window dressing on that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_02You know, stick with stick with the themes, otherwise you become, you know, an LLM. Right. Exactly. All right, folks, you know, J. Michael Thomas on Substack, his serial serialized first contact with aliens landing, and the aliens are us, and they're us from a hundred thousand years ago, with more to come, educating about how we've in shitified our own society. You've got a great view on AI and how it's in shitifying human contact, but you're also hopeful in terms of second chance, where the banished humans to the moon are coming back to reclaim the planet, yeah, and they might have learned something or two, which is uh inspiring. Be on the lookout for that end of this year, early next year. And uh what's your what's your handle on Substack? I'll put the link in the description too, but just so people can find you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's just J. Michael Thomas, and also jmichelthomas.com will get you there.
SPEAKER_02So we'll put the links in the description and in the little bio there. And thanks for joining us uh on the science fiction fantasy factory floor. And we can bring you back once things develop. And actually, I would love to have an interesting AI conversation with you and Bruno. Yeah, that'd be great. So maybe we'll ping him, we'll tag him on this one, and we can bring bring him on. And actually, Ethridge, if he wants to join too, because he is the super counterpoint. He he loves AI, yeah. And his characters are AI, and he's kind of like he's already dismissed the human component, it's irrelevant because the AIs, as they evolve, yeah, they're just gonna have the same issues and be just like us. So why why wait? Right. So what's the difference? Right. All right, take care. Thank you. A like, I always forget like, comment, and share, everybody. Thank you. Awesome, thanks.
