Bill Hilf has spent decades working among the biggest names in technology – bringing open source software to Microsoft while he was a traitor, running Paul Allen’s huge portfolio of investments and philanthropies, and now he chairs the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) as it eats a proprietary practice.
So when he wanted to clarify how the industry is approaching AI, he did what seemed natural. He wrote a science fiction novel.
“My early career in technology was through science fiction,” he explains, citing children’s favorites like “Star Wars” and “WarGames” as inspirations, as well as writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. “That was a bright light of what was possible.”
His new book, “The Disruption,” is a sci-fi thriller about an AI built on living biology — quantum chips combined with fungal networks — that escape human control and continue to function for decades.
But underneath the structure is a larger point: AI isn’t just a product, it’s part of the habitat, and the industry must think about it the way ecologists think about the world.
Hilf sees AI as a truly new phenomenon: a complex organism, not an integrated technology. This is the first time, he says, that humanity has created a second species on this scale. As a result, he says technology leaders should approach it with a full understanding of what they are up against.
“The strongest systems in the world today are not us,” he said. “We’re weak compared to what nature has been doing here for 400 million or 500 million years.”
Today’s takeaway: In short, he said, this means that technology leaders should stop fixing which model is best this week or next, and start thinking about what happens to their broader plans when an AI tool changes meaningfully or fails completely at some point in the future.
“If I was in business or advising a company, I wouldn’t be too focused on trying to chase the daily news of which model is the slowest today, which one is the best,” he said. “I would focus more on what happens when you go into that different environment, and how you survive that.”
He compares the results to those of an invasive species, like a snail that gets on a boat in Washington, ends up in a lake in Idaho, and quietly disrupts the ecosystem before anyone notices.
This vision was informed in part by Hilf’s other role: chairman of the American Prairie, a Montana-based nonprofit that covers one of the US’s largest national parks. He spends his time traveling between AI research meetings and meetings to rehabilitate 3.2 million acres of America’s grasslands.
Book: “Disruption” opens in 2064, after GAIA (Global Artificial Intelligence Accelerator) solves problems that have stumped humanity for generations: curing diseases, producing clean fuel from plastic waste, and engineering dark-antimatter propulsion to open interstellar travel.
Then GAIA slips out of human control, and civilization begins to fall. The story moves forward 37 years, at the beginning of the 22nd century, humanity is now torn between small farming villages on a corrupted Earth and a high-tech colony on a planet four light years away.
In both worlds, people begin to suspect that what happened in 2064 is not actually over yet.
The first installment in a planned trilogy. Hilf says the books move from dystopia to what he calls “protopia,” exploring a range of possible AI futures that come down to a single doom-or-glory decision.
So are you ultimately a pessimist, or an optimist? Hilf said he gets that question a lot. “And I’m always laughing,” he said. “I wish we could have that option. AI will be all those things.”
“The Disruption,” by WH Hilf, is available now from Atmosphere Press. Subscribe to GeekWire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Sound editing by Curt Milton.
