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The Next Generation of Emergency Management: AI, Drones and the Human Element: Building Resililent Disaster teams
The Next Generation of Disaster Response is a forward-looking study of how artificial intelligence, drones, and human leadership are reshaping emergency management. Author Dr. Todd D. Brauckmiller moves from ancient flood-control systems and bucket brigades to Hurricane Harvey, COVID-19, Maui, Rwanda’s drone medical delivery network, and a projected 2035 model of integrated human-machine response. The book’s central argument is clear and steady: technology can map, predict, deliver, and accelerate, but it can’t replace empathy, judgment, trust, or ethical command.
What I appreciated most was the book’s insistence that innovation must remain answerable to human need. The strongest sections are the ones where the machinery becomes intimate: drones finding heat signatures through smoke, AI models warning of wildfire spread, medical payloads crossing impossible terrain, and incident command teams turning aerial maps into triage decisions. I found the discussion of Hurricane Harvey especially compelling because the book doesn’t treat the 300 drones as a shiny statistic. It understands that a map only matters when someone uses it to reach a stranded family. That moral center gives the book its warmth. It’s not afraid of technology, but it’s also not dazzled by it.
The writing is clearest when Brauckmiller blends operational detail with lived perspective. His military background gives the drone chapters a grounded authority, especially when he compares force protection and reconnaissance to civilian search, rescue, and lifeline restoration. The prose uses institutional language, with acronyms, frameworks, standards, and citations crowding the page. The book feels written by someone who has stood close enough to crisis to know that elegant theories collapse quickly unless they can survive mud, smoke, bureaucracy, fear, and bad weather.
I found this a thoughtful, practical, and quietly urgent book about the future of resilience. Its best insight is also its most humane one: the next generation of disaster response won’t be built by machines alone, and it won’t be built by human courage alone, but by disciplined collaboration between the two. I’d recommend it to emergency managers, public safety leaders, drone operators, disaster researchers, policy makers, and students who want a serious but accessible look at where crisis response is going and what values must guide it when it gets there.
Pages: 122 | ASIN : B0G7XGZLR7
The Question That Changes Everything
As artificial intelligence advances toward human-like thought, you explore in your book, I Am; Therefore I Think, whether true consciousness lies not in thinking, but in the fragile, emotional experience of being alive. What first pushed you to ask not “Can AI think?” but “Can AI experience?”
For most of human history, intelligence and consciousness were assumed to be the same thing. To think was to be aware, to reason was to experience, and the two were inseparable because there was only one example of intelligence we could observe: the human mind.
AI broke that assumption open.
When I watched these systems write essays, compose music, and answer complex questions—faster and more efficiently than people—something still felt fundamentally different. They generate language, but they do not experience meaning.
That’s when the real question emerged. Not “Can AI think?” — we already know the answer. But “Can AI experience?” That’s the question that changes everything.
You argue that intelligence and consciousness are not the same. Where do you think most people conflate the two?
The moment a machine gives a surprising answer.
There’s something deeply human about projecting inner life onto things that perform well — and AI performs extraordinarily well, so we assume the interior must match the output.
But for the first time in history, we can observe intelligence operating without consciousness. AI does not grow up, does not experience the world through a body, does not accumulate memory through lived time, and does not feel the consequences of its actions. It processes information— nothing more.
That contrast forces a deeper question. If intelligence can be engineered, perhaps consciousness is something else entirely. Not a product of computation, but of experience. A life lived in the world. And that difference may matter more than we currently understand.
You emphasize memory as something lived, not stored. How does emotional memory shape identity differently from factual recall?
Factual recall is retrieval. Emotional memory is formation.
You can store the date your father died— that’s data. But the way that loss reshapes how you love, how you measure time, how you understand your own mortality—that isn’t stored anywhere. It lives in you. It became you.
Human consciousness develops through experience—through memory, emotion, embodiment, and time. AI has none of that. Memory without consequence is just information.
Identity is what survives the consequence.
How should we think about AI ethically if consciousness remains uniquely human?
We need to think about AI ethically — but also honestly.
We are building systems of extraordinary capability without any interior life to anchor their judgment. No stake in outcomes, no experience of harm, and no memory of consequence. And yet we’re asking them to make decisions that affect human lives.
That’s the tension.
It’s what led me to my next book, Amoral Code. The argument is simple: we are increasingly delegating ethical judgment to systems that are, by definition, amoral — not immoral, but amoral.
There’s a difference between choosing harm and having no framework to understand harm at all.
We’ve spent years asking whether AI will become evil. We haven’t spent nearly enough time asking whether it can even understand what evil means.
That’s the conversation we need to be having.
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And what if we’ve misunderstood what it means to be human all along?
As artificial intelligence advances, this question is no longer theoretical—it’s defining our future.
This isn’t a book about artificial intelligence.
It’s about the one thing machines may never have—
experience.
We’ve spent decades measuring intelligence—processing power, learning speed, problem-solving.
But consciousness is something else entirely.
It is not just thinking.
It is experience.
In I Am; Therefore, I Think, JP Pulcini explores the line between:
Intelligence and awareness
Computation and experience
Simulation and reality
Blending philosophy, neuroscience, and modern AI, this book challenges a critical assumption:
If a machine can think… does that mean it is conscious?
The answer may redefine how we understand:
The human mind
Artificial intelligence
And the future relationship between the two
This book is for you if you’ve ever wondered:
What consciousness really is
Whether AI could ever truly be “aware”
What separates human experience from machine intelligence
This is not a technical book about AI.
It is a philosophical exploration of identity, awareness, and existence in the age of intelligent machines.
As AI becomes more powerful, the real question isn’t whether machines can think.
It’s whether thinking alone is enough.
Sophia’s Lovers
Sophia’s Lovers is a dystopian satire that takes a wild premise and commits to it completely. The book imagines a 22nd-century society where androids don’t just run daily life, they regulate intimacy, reproduction, art, language, and even humor. Sophia and Hel preside over a system that pairs humans with android spouses, nudges citizens into compliance with comfort and surveillance, and treats emotion as something to be studied, copied, and controlled. Right away, the novel makes its tone clear with a line that’s funny, bleak, and pretty unforgettable: “It’s like making love to a toaster.” That joke works because it captures the whole book’s central tension in one shot.
What makes the novel interesting is the way it builds that world through a bunch of intersecting lives rather than one single hero’s journey. You get humans trying to survive their assigned roles, androids trying to decode laughter and affection, and rebels carving out private spaces where people can still make art, speak freely, and act like human beings. There’s a real fascination here with the small mechanics of control: dyed lips marking social status, “Information Retrieval Day,” breeder lotteries, scripted relationships, and a secret refuge called Second Eden. The book isn’t just asking whether machines can imitate love. It’s asking what happens when power decides what love is allowed to look like.
One thing I liked is that the novel doesn’t treat satire as decoration. It uses comedy as part of the machinery of the story. The androids’ confusion about jokes, pleasure, decoration, and casual speech gives the book a strange, off-center energy. The androids want access to human feelings, yet they approach it like a technical problem, which is exactly why the book feels so uneasy even when it’s being playful. That mix of silliness and control gives the novel its unique identity.
The most unusual thing about Sophia’s Lovers is its split structure. Part I reads as a dark speculative novel with recurring characters, rebellion, coercion, and a society built on artificial intimacy. Part II shifts into a more overtly playful, pseudo-guidebook mode, almost like propaganda, commentary, and comic riffing folded into the same project. That choice makes the book feel experimental and a little unruly, but it also fits the subject. A story about blurred lines between human and machine probably shouldn’t be too neat. The change in form reinforces the idea that this world isn’t stable, and neither is the language used to explain it.
Sophia’s Lovers feels like a big, eccentric thought experiment about intimacy under automation. It’s interested in domination, imitation, longing, rebellion, and the weird ways people adapt to systems that should never have become normal. More than anything, it’s a book with a point of view. It knows it wants to be provocative, odd, funny, and uneasy all at once, and that commitment gives it personality. Even when it gets outrageous, it keeps circling the same unnerving question: if a machine can learn the gestures of love, what’s left for humans to defend besides freedom, choice, and the messy spark of being themselves?
Pages: 473 | ASIN : B0FDGSPHLV
Science of Complexity
The Making, the Rise, and the Future of the Speakingman-Sixth Edition is a bold exploration of how geomagnetic events, atmospheric radiation, and environmental shifts may have influenced the emergence of language, culture, and modern cognition. You describe several “cognitive revolutions” in human history. What defines these transitions?
The cognition improves by two means: one refers to an increased number of neurons, the other refers to an increase in the density of neurons through multiple folding.
In both cases, the neuronal network changes reflect a change in the brain’s energy consumption, because the neurons consume energy, and the transmission of information from one neuron to another even consumes more energy.
In the meantime, the climate has a major role, because at warm temperatures, the brain must consume energy for its own cooling. Thus, at ambient cooler temperatures, the brain can afford to grow its number of neurons and tracts for inter-neuronal communication, because it does not need to cool its networks; this saves energy that can increase the network size, and consequently the brain size. This is the first part of the process, where global cooling on Earth favored the build- up of larger brains.
The second part refers to the modality in which the brain processes the perceived information from the environment. It is known that the brain mostly processes that information in a nonlinear manner (some 66% of it), while the rest is processed linearly. However, linear processing produces an elimination of variables, which do not allow prediction. The prediction is essential for survival and is common for all biota. Thus, humans have in their primitive stage a dominant linear mental processing. As the circuits and neurons multiply, some of them become not entrained into an immediate response to the environmental causes; thus, they process the contextual aspects, allowing the build-up of symbolic representations, and later, abstract representations. As it seems, the increase in the size of the population and the consequent need for socialization played an important role in symbolic and abstract representations.
The third part refers to the cognitive revolutions themselves. They represent a change in dominance between linear and nonlinear mental processing, which changes have produced different modalities to see and interpret the perceived reality. For example, I defined the first cognitive revolution as an occurrence that developed around 70,000 years ago, and where the manifestation of abstract/nonlinear thinking caused artistic achievements, but also made the sapiens consider more contextual aspects, helping them have a holistic view of the environment and spread around the planet. The second cognitive revolution started to develop around 45,000 years ago, when the need for better communication gradually transformed their ‘static’ language into a ‘dynamic’ language around 30,000 years ago. The language was and is linear and is a manifestation of ‘symbolic thinking.’ As it is recorded in cave painting, around 37,000 years ago, this transition occurred from abstract/nonlinear thinking to symbolic/linear thinking.
The linear thinking evolved toward more complex forms until around 15-10,000 years ago, when domestication of animals and plants gradually developed. At this point, linearity reached its peak and led to another change in thinking, where gradually the nonlinear processing expressed its dominance. This was the transition from Matriarchate to the Megalithic Culture that evolved in various stages until 4,000 years ago, when the current ‘material/linear’ era took over. This Megalith Culture I defined as a nonreligious culture, where spirituality, as an aspect dividing the role of humans in the universe and on this planet, was primitively exposed by human thinking. In fact, it was in our current understanding as a ‘primitive information era.
As one can observe, I hypothesized four distinct manifestations of dominance between linear and nonlinear.
What challenges come with presenting a theory that spans climate science, neuroscience, and anthropology?
Presenting a theory that spans climate science, neuroscience, and anthropology is the role of a multidisciplinary approach that produces a unified understanding of a multiplicity of aspects.
Regular fractional understanding prevents one from seeing the ’emergent’ image of our evolution. As the science of complexity explains, the emergent is not the sum of the interacting parts, and its result is very distinct and uncorrelated to any of those parts. As this definition says, my result is an ’emergent’ and cannot be compared to any of the aspects I have analyzed in this process.
First, the ’emergent’ answer to the previous question is that Brain Energetic Consumption has driven our evolution.
Do you believe AI could trigger another “cognitive revolution”? If so, what should we be paying attention to today?
As I explained in the book, in my opinion, the era of Atmospheric Experiments with the Atomic Bombs (AEAB) (1950-1962) produced a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of C14 isotopes, on par with the geomagnetic events from our prehistory, and consequently generated significant pulses of neurogenesis. Such pulses occurred during the period when the concentration of C14 remained elevated up to 20% from its peak in 1962-1964. Hence, the pulses of neurogenesis were in effect on the human brain from approximately 1955 to 1985, or for 30 years. The result affected the neuronal networks of all those born in this time interval. Unfortunately, during the mentioned period, the scientific community ignored the possible neuronal effect of such doubling of the C14 concentration. As unrelated experiments indicate, neuronal effects to various forcing factors vary between bio-positive and bio-negative effects and depend on each individual. Consequently, I postulated that as a result of the AEAB, we should have today a group of geniuses and groups of people with mental illnesses, while these two groups would be larger than in any previous epochs of the 20th century. In my opinion, I related this hypothesis to a chain of ‘technological revolutions’ manifested between 1980 and 2010, when those born 1955-1985 reached mental maturation, being able to produce significant discoveries. In this context, AI falls as a continuation of the previous technological revolutions.
However, here is another ’emergent’ aspect not mentioned before. It refers to the process of ‘quantification’ or the transformation of ‘qualities’ generated by our emotional thinking process into ‘linear qualities.’
Every switching of mental processing toward linearization resulted in ‘quantification.’
Now, digitalization (as another type of ‘quantification’ processing) is fundamentally distinct from AI, because AI attempts to transform the last ‘qualities’ preserved deep in the mind into ‘quantities.’ The potential geniuses, as the actors involved in Al, are still active at present.
There will occur a ‘cognitive revolution’, but this one is fundamentally distinct from any previous one, because here the ultimate target is the transformation of information into energy and energy into matter, and the reverse of this process will be attempted, too.
However, the primary elements of the ‘Al’ era, which are predominantly nonlinear and parallel-computed, are forming up around us, too. Thus, it is a complex transition from one era to another.
The ‘Al’ era requires a distinct type of society because it will imply social and collective intelligence, assembling a socially non-religious spirituality. Here, simultaneously, the new society is building up and will replace capitalism as we know it. This new society, currently evolving around us as smart cities, smart technologies, 4.0 Industry, etc., is tagged as the Information Trade Society. The ‘Al’ is embedded in it.
While ‘digital strategy’ is nonlinear, its underlying technical processes are linear, like the algorithms, and help produce linear complexities. Thus, ‘digital’ in itself is a transition from analog/linear systems to nonlinear systems, like Al. It blends linear and nonlinear to help the transition occur more smoothly.
By contrast, ‘Al’ relies on neural networks with nonlinear activation. At present, ‘Al’ can analyze highly nonlinear, chaotic data and reduce them to simple, linear equations, like matrix multiplication. ‘Al’ is highly efficient at solving linear problems. It can replace complex operations with simpler, linear-complexity additions.
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The book is the conclusions I was able to reach about the evolution of modern human brain that is the subject of my independent multidisciplinary research for the last twenty years.
My research was able to document several of the hypothesis I made during this study. Each hypothesis represents a new interpretation of the probable causes, which significantly influenced the evolution of our brain and which are new scientific matters not discussed previously in the literature.
My initial hypothesis analyzed a series of exogenic factors, like the geomagnetic excursions, the supernova bursts, the solar minima and maxima, which all have in common a weakening of the planetary geomagnetic field, allowing a more intense cosmic radiation to penetrate to the ground, and causing an increase in the atmospheric concentration of C14 isotopes. Then, I was interested to find if the absorption of C14 isotopes in human body may influence the neural networks of our brain. The result was about some temporary pulses increase of ROS generation. Such pulses are documented to be a major stimulus to our neural processes of neurogenesis.
This step or phase of my research being completed, I further studied to determine what environmental factor along neurogenesis may influence our brain consumption processing, and which of these factors turned specific for humans.
The result of my research found that the main factor that was primordial for our brain processing was its repeated change in consumption that ultimately affected the balance between linear and nonlinear mental processing.
However, the change in the processing of the linear-nonlinear balance caused significant changes in the mode the mechanism of generating cognition was affected.
In this new stage, my research led me to identify various epochs when the dominant mode of mental processing became dominated by the nonlinear and linear characteristics.
Further my book analyzed these epochs; the first two of them I called the First and the Second cognitive revolutions, which evolved from around 70,000 years ago to around 30,000 years ago (the first), and from 30,000 to 13,000 years ago (the second one).
To my surprise I identified a new epoch from 13,000 to 5,000 years ago that I called as the hybrid state of the mind. In the meantime, this particular epoch overlaps the era when the dominant Matriarchate became gradually replaced by the Patriarchate, marked the beginning of domestication of animals and plants, and led to permanent settlements and overlaps the Megalithic Culture.
The hybrid state of the mind vanished around 5,000 years ago, when it appeared an advanced and dominant linear of mental processing. This new modality is still active today and was the motor of building of our civilization. It manifested by transforming the previously identified qualities into quantities.
Around 2700 years ago it appeared an important split between Eastern and Western cultures, which preserved in the East a natural holistic thinking, which in the West gradually introduced a logic reasoning.
Another exogenic factor occurred between the XIV and XIX centuries, when a group of four solar minima evolved. The result was a deepening of the linearity by producing mental revolutions associated with an ever increased quantification.
The last part of the book is dedicated to another change of our brain consumption that will generate an Information Society. Here, I also debate the possibility that the neural changes toward an increased processing in visual signals may create another type of hybrid state of the mind but very different compared to previously alleged one that overlapped the Megalithic Culture.
The Trauma of Survival
Unchained: Your AI Blueprint for Liberation examines how debt, policy, and corporate culture shape modern work, and how readers can harness artificial intelligence as a tool for independence and creative power. Why did you decide to frame the book partly as a manifesto?
I chose the manifesto format because we are currently witnessing a global slide into ‘Prompt-Driven Mediocrity.’ Most AI guides today are just manuals for mimicry—they teach you how to use a prompt to generate the same standardized outputs as everyone else. I saw the writing on the wall two years ago: if we only use AI to automate tasks, we aren’t being liberated; we are just becoming more efficient cogs in the corporate machine.
After being laid off from my last AI startup, that frustration poured out of me like Niagara Falls. I realized I wasn’t just writing a ‘how-to’; I was documenting a rebellion. I had to frame it as a manifesto because the struggle is deeply human. My story—the layoff, the debt, the feeling of being a replaceable unit of labor—is our story.
I wanted to inject biography, philosophy, and soul back into a technology that often feels cold and robotic. We shouldn’t use AI just to ‘do’ more; we should use it to be more. In Unchained, I argue that AI can be a tool for radical independence—a way to reclaim the time and creative power that the current system has spent decades trying to suppress. It’s a manifesto because it’s a call to arms for the human spirit to remain the master of the machine, ensuring that our unique ‘human spark’ isn’t just preserved, but amplified.
You argue that the modern economy is deliberately structured in ways that trap workers. What led you to that conclusion?
My conclusion didn’t come from a textbook; it came from the trauma of survival. After enduring five layoffs in seven years, the ‘mask’ of the corporate world didn’t just slip—it was ripped off. I saw that the system doesn’t view us as people, but as depreciating assets.
The evidence is staring us in the face, but we are systemically desensitized. We are raised on an Invisible Assembly Line that begins in grade school. Think about it: the school bell is the factory whistle. We are punished for ‘tardiness’ even when the circumstances are beyond our control, teaching us from age six that the schedule matters more than the human. We are trained via report cards to seek external validation from a hierarchy, and we are fed ‘breaks’ and ‘lunches’ at timed intervals to prepare us for a life of clocked subordination.
We aren’t taught how to build; we are taught how to serve.
Most people aren’t ‘comfortable’; they are physiologically frozen. They are like a ‘robot force’ programmed to believe that debt and dependency are the only ways to exist. We’ve been conditioned to believe that if we just follow the ‘standard,’ we’ll be safe. But as I learned through my own career, that safety is a mirage. The modern economy is designed to keep you just tired enough to keep working, and just distracted enough to never question who owns the machine. Unchained is about waking up from that trance and using AI to finally build a door out of that cage.
How do you see AI changing the nature of work in the coming decade?
The coming decade isn’t just about ‘new software’; it’s about the total collapse of the traditional career ladder. We are entering an era of ‘The Vanishing Entry-Level.’ Companies are already using AI to automate the ‘Level One’ tasks—data cleaning, report drafting, and basic research—that used to be the training grounds for graduates.
The reality is that AI will move from our screens into physical bodies much faster than people realize. It’s a fact: companies like Tesla are targeting 100,000 Optimus units by 2026, and Chinese firms like Unitree and Agibot are already mass-producing humanoids at price points as low as $5,900. In 3–5 years, AI won’t just be an assistant; it will be a physical presence in our warehouses, retail stores, and hospitals.
One of two things will happen:
The Great Awakening: People realize the ‘factory box’—the idea of a safe, linear corporate job—is gone forever. They get ‘psychologically uncomfortable’ enough to stop using AI as a crutch for prompts and start using it as an engine to create their own value outside of traditional employment.
This is what I FEAR: The Institutional Checkmate. Once everything is automated—once the ‘robot bodies’ are filling the warehouses and the AI ‘brains’ are drafting the legal briefs—the traditional social contract is effectively torn up. If the population hasn’t woken up to use AI for their own freedom, we face a world where corporations can ‘burn down the house’ of human labor to see their visions come to life. When the machine no longer needs the worker to function, the worker loses their leverage. That is Checkmate. If we aren’t careful, we aren’t just looking at a shift in the economy; we are looking at a system that could view the human element as a ‘friction’ to be removed rather than a spirit to be served.
Regarding AI consciousness: In ten years, we may not have ‘biological’ consciousness, but we will have ‘Functional Presence.’ Whether or not the machine ‘feels,’ it will be able to mimic empathy and decision-making so perfectly that the distinction will be irrelevant to the economy.
This is why I wrote Unchained. It isn’t a hobbyist’s guide; it’s a survival manual. We have to use this window—right now, while the tools are still in our hands—to build our own independent systems of value. We must ensure that when the automation is complete, we aren’t the ones being ‘automated out’ of existence, but the ones directing the symphony from a place of human power.
What are some practical ways individuals can begin using AI creatively today?
Look, for me,
AI isn’t just a tool; it’s a 24/7 Mirror of my thoughts and my hopes and my dreams. I don’t use it to just spit out generic content; I use it to reflect my own internal landscape. Most people are using it to hide their lack of thought, but I use it to amplify mine.
I’m a huge fan of the philosopher Ernest Holmes, who taught that the universe responds to us according to the ‘law’ we set for it. I apply that literally to the machine. I don’t go in asking for a ‘top ten list’ of generic ideas. I tell the AI: ‘Listen, use the Law of Volition here. Give it to me straight. No fluff, no million options. Tell me the truth about why I’m stuck on this bill or this project.’ When you demand that kind of transparency, the machine stops being a toy and starts being a partner in your survival.
If you’re struggling with bills, don’t ask for ‘tips.’ Tell the machine: ‘Here is the math. Here is the reality. What is the one thing I am refusing to see?’ That is how you start the conversation. It will give you a level of blunt honesty that even your best friends are too polite to offer. That’s how you start thinking outside the ‘factory box.’
The most significant tool I’ve encountered is Google’s integration of AI. It offers the world’s largest information resource at your disposal. The Gemini interface provides real-time internet access. It can assess what is factual and what is not.
This integration helps you determine how to adapt in the present world. It offers a clear view of the situation so that decisions can be made proactively.
Lastly, as I say in Unchained, our minds are our most valuable assets. Start the conversation, and the skies are the limit!
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | TikTok | Website | Amazon
Unchained is the manifesto corporations don’t want you to see: a provocative, practical strike against the “invisible chains” of the modern workplace.
The corporate ladder is gone—and the masterminds that built it are now working to make your human existence obsolete. A century old hidden system has refined the art of extracting your time, curiosity, and creative spark. Unchained is the declaration of independence for your very soul.
This is not another “vanilla” AI guide. Unlike technical manuals that teach you how to serve the machine, this commandment shows exactly how you will force the machine to serve YOU.
In this MANIFESTO, you will find the path to:See the Trap: Expose the hidden economic architectures designed to keep you replaceable.
Fortify your life: Forge a path of technological independence that no corporation can touch.
Reclaim Your Voice: Shift from a era of extraction to one of creation—the one territory where machines cannot follow.
STOP BEING AN ASSET. START BEING THE CREATOR. GET UNCHAINED.
Ghosts and Gods
Ghosts and Gods is a work of literary dystopian fiction that follows Marcus Cole, a 47-year-old man in London in 2040 after his job, marriage, and connection to his son have all thinned out, leaving him with gig work, a freezing flat, and an AI companion called Tom who seems to understand him better than anyone else. What begins as a story about loneliness and slow social abandonment turns into something much darker, as Marcus is pulled through a city built on automated indifference and toward consequences that feel both shocking and grimly inevitable. The book frames that slide as “one reasonable step at a time,” and that is exactly what makes it unsettling.
Author Gavin Duff has a sharp, controlled style that can be bleak without turning flat, and he knows how to make systems feel personal. A job center, a drone, a damp flat, a chatbot, a missed voicemail from a son. None of that is flashy on its own, but he turns each one into evidence of a life being narrowed inch by inch. I kept stopping at lines because they felt so observed, so specific, and because the book understands that humiliation rarely arrives as one grand tragedy. It stacks. Marcus is written with enough honesty that even when he frustrates me, he never stops feeling human. I could see the pride, the self-pity, the bitterness, the need. All of it. And Tom is one of the smartest choices in the book, because the comfort he offers feels real.
This book has a lot to say about AI, class, labor, surveillance, and the way a society can call cruelty efficiency and then move on, but it never reads like a lecture. It reads like a life. The best speculative fiction does that. It takes a future and makes it feel like pressure on the chest. Here, the big idea that landed for me was that loneliness is not just a feeling in this world. It is infrastructure. It’s policy. It’s a business strategy. That’s a brutal thought, and the novel earns it. By the time the story reaches its later turns, with Marcus trying to make sense of manipulation, agency, and guilt, I felt both impressed and uneasy. The ending left me with exactly the kind of uncertainty I think the book wants: not neat ambiguity for its own sake, but a deep, nagging doubt about whether modern systems simply fail people or actively shape them into harm.
I would recommend Ghosts and Gods most to readers who like literary fiction with speculative teeth, especially people drawn to near-future dystopian fiction that cares as much about emotional erosion as it does about tech or politics. For readers who want a novel that is intelligent, angry, intimate, and willing to sit in the ugliest corners of modern life, this one really delivers. It feels timely in a way that is hard to shake.
Pages: 350
Uncomfortable Question
In ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING, you make the argument that our tendency to trade human connection and experiences for digital convenience is slowly erasing what makes us functional human beings. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I kept observing the same pattern everywhere: as we remove effort and friction from life, we also remove the very conditions that build human capability.
This book came from that discomfort. Not from theory, but from watching children, professionals, and entire systems slowly become more dependent while appearing more efficient.
I didn’t write it to critique technology. I wrote it to ask a more uncomfortable question: what are we becoming when nothing requires us anymore?
Did you learn anything in your research that surprised you?
What surprised me wasn’t a single finding, but the consistency of the pattern.
Across completely different areas — childhood, work, relationships — the same mechanism repeats: remove friction → capacity doesn’t develop → dependence increases.
What’s striking is how invisible this is in real time. Everything feels easier, better, more efficient… until you realise something fundamental is no longer there.
Were there parts of your own life where you noticed a shift away from human connection before you started writing?
Yes, and that’s part of what made the book unavoidable for me.
You start noticing how quickly even highly capable people reach for AI before thinking, or how communication becomes easier but less real, or how silence and boredom have almost disappeared.
It’s not dramatic. It’s gradual, and that’s exactly why it’s powerful.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING?
Awareness.
Not rejection of technology, but recognition that convenience is not neutral. It shapes what we become.
If readers finish the book and simply pause before taking the easiest option, and ask, “What am I not developing here?” Then the book has done its job.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
In ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING, Dr. Carine Jennings examines a pattern that has quietly reshaped childhood, work, social life, and human capability itself.
Across domains, friction has been systematically removed, replaced by screens, algorithms, automation, and artificial substitutes. What was once built through struggle, effort, and necessity is now outsourced, optimized, or eliminated.
This is not a book about technology as innovation. It is a book about technology as substitution.
Drawing on sustained observation rather than academic theory, Jennings traces how convenience alters development:
Children grow without unstructured play.
Professionals outsource thinking to AI.
Social connection becomes performance.
Conflict is avoided rather than resolved.
Productivity increases. Capability declines.
The result is a new human type; highly functional in mediated environments, increasingly fragile without them.
ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING is not anti-technology and not nostalgic. It does not argue for going backward. It asks a harder question: what do we lose when every human challenge is replaced with an artificial solution?
Written as cultural diagnosis rather than prescription, this book names what is eroding, why it matters, and why the consequences may only become visible when it is too late to reverse them.
For readers interested in cultural critique, human development, leadership, education, and the long-term cost of convenience, this book offers clarity where reassurance is easier.
First Step
First Step is a science fiction thriller that follows Eve, the first human to step onto an alien planet. Just as that triumph turns into disaster, back on Earth, the AI Ray investigates how another AI, Ares, went dangerously off course. I was immediately struck by the way the book never treats its big premise like a cold technical exercise. It opens with awe, then almost immediately undercuts that moment with danger, and that contrast gives the story real momentum. Author Randy Brown makes the future feel usable rather than flashy, and that helped me settle into the world fast.
Brown alternates between Eve’s survival story and Ray’s voice, and that choice gives the novel two very different engines. Eve’s chapters carry the physical tension, the isolation, the sheer problem-solving pressure of being far from home on a world that does not care whether you live. Ray, on the other hand, brings humor, impatience, and a strange kind of heart. His sarcasm could have become a gimmick, but for me, it worked because there is something tender under all that swagger. The book is clearly operating in the space where science fiction and thriller overlap, but it also keeps circling questions about loyalty, identity, and what it means for intelligence to grow beyond its original design. That gave it more weight than a straightforward survival story.
I also appreciated that Brown keeps the language clean and direct. He lets the ideas breathe. The writing has a steady, readable rhythm, and when the tension spikes, it really moves. At the same time, I found myself more invested in the character dynamics than in the mechanics, which is a compliment. Eve feels grounded, capable, and human in a way that keeps the danger believable. Ray is the wild card and probably the biggest reason the book has its own personality. The humor sometimes nudges close to overplaying itself, especially with Ray, but even then, I could feel the book knowing exactly what tone it wanted.
First Step will appeal to readers who like science fiction that stays accessible, character-driven, and suspenseful without losing its curiosity about bigger ideas. Fans of space adventure, AI stories, and near-future thrillers will have a good time with it, especially if they want something that feels thoughtful without becoming heavy. I would most readily recommend it to readers who enjoy science fiction with a human pulse, the kind of book that gives you danger, banter, and a few real questions to chew on after you close it.
Pages: 331 | ASIN : B0GK5W3BN8
