The Change: A Novel by Joseph Valerri

Growing up I had a singular dream of building software. For the last 30 years that’s what I did. Now I’m a science fiction writer with the release of my first novel The Change. This transition may seem unnatural, but I don’t see it as a transition but an evolution.

I became a technology entrepreneur when software was still something you installed from a floppy disk. Over the decades that followed, I built companies, developed products, raised money, hired teams, won and lost customers, and eventually cofounded a software company that was acquired by a large corporation and a few others that will soon follow suit.

I’ve watched computing travel from punch cards fed into room-sized machines with memory measured in kilobytes to the phone I’m writing this article on; a computer billions of times more capable that fits in my hand.

Today, I’m working inside the next transformation: artificial intelligence. I spend my days thinking about when AI stops being a tool people use and begins acting on their behalf. The questions quickly become larger than software. What happens to work? To truth? Who controls it? What happens when technology evolves beyond the ability to control it?

Those are business questions today and also ideas that drive countless scifi stories.

Eventually, I realized that the ideas I wanted to explore weren’t a product roadmap. Fiction gave me a different laboratory.

SciFi allows me to take something that’s barely possible today and push it forward in time, decades or centuries, and predict the many directions AI may take us and lets me explore the people living inside that future. Technology itself is rarely good or evil. What matters is how it’s applied, who controls it and why, and what people are willing to sacrifice to obtain that power.

I don’t think of myself as having left technology to become a writer. I brought technology with me to explore my vision of futures free from the hard work it takes to make it real.

After decades spent trying to predict the future to build businesses, I’ve changed the question from “What should we build next?” to “What happens if we do?”