Resurrection Earth follows a brilliant scientist who discovers that the AI designed to save a dying planet is sacrificing humanity to restore it, forcing her to challenge a ruthless world government led by her own father. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I became fascinated with machine learning through my work as a consultant to the U.S. federal government. Experiencing the powerful technology first hand and seeing the rapid improvements, I began to think about what might be possible in the coming decades. Neural network-based machine learning requires data inputs, outputs, and a feedback loop to improve predictive accuracy. This concept, along with my interest and concern about climate change, led me to the story idea. In an environmental context, sensors have been used for some time to feed data into AI models. And climate engineering technology such as carbon removal is also in operation. Projecting this tech into the future produces a plausible prospect for AI use to reverse the effects of global warming. 

This is the basis for the tech side of the story. The family drama, including the roles of Aksel, Reyanna, and Weston, creates the human side of the story and ties it to the world political situation involving the world government and the resistance. The secondary characters, both real and artificial, provide the roles, relationships, and conflicts to drive the plot.

What inspired the Aldrich family, and why did you choose to place a father and his children on opposing sides of a political and moral conflict?

The family members and their roles create a lens through which I could present the future world and it’s technological, political, and social aspects. The family brings together the external world, the personal drama, and plot. Many reviewers have confirmed the effectiveness of this approach by noting that personal dimension of the story, e.g., “I read it for the AI angle, stayed for the characters” (Amazon review). This personal dimension could have been achieved through friends,  colleagues, and strangers, and is to some extent among the other characters, but the family creates intense emotions, conflicts, and questions of love and loyalty.

What interested you about exploring an AI whose environmental objectives produce catastrophic consequences for humanity?

This is a very interesting question technologically. The “alignment problem” with AI has been known for some time, but has entered the public consciousness recently through the incidents in which LLMs have gone rogue. And the idea of rogue robots has existed in fiction since Frankenstein was written. I didn’t want to write the usual rogue machine scenario, but rather a more nuanced version. In Resurrection Earth the AI is subject to the alignment problem, but human corruption also plays a role. Through misalignment, the AI reduces the human population to improve natural balance and reverse climate change. But in the story, by late this century ways of controlling AI had been developed. But these controls are not used by corrupt leaders who use the tech to advance their own interests. In this way the book makes the point that the world’s fate will ultimately remain in human hands. 

What do you hope readers take away from the novel’s central question of who should have the authority to determine humanity’s future?

I wanted to convey the message that the world’s people have collective responsibility for the planet and future human life on it. The new social order achieved in the book is a reaction to autocratic world military rule, and is based on the principles of freedom, democracy, and human rights that have served humanity well over the centuries, albeit only at times. I recognize that this kind of social order may be too idealistic given that cooperative action among diverse cultures has rarely, or arguably never, been achieved. But technology has increasingly brought the world together, making collective action to control it ever more important to our survival and prosperity. 

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