A Prophecy of the Present and Future

Title: A Prophecy of the Present and Future

Description: I am really excited to be joined by author Craig W. Stanfill to talk about all things of Artificial Intelligence, dystopian futures and defiance in a heavily controlled world. Craig and I will discuss his latest Sci-fi dystopian novel, Prophecy of the Heron. It is ripped right out of the headlines!

Learn More About our Guest:

Craig W. Stanfill, author of the novels Terms of Service and Prophecy of the Heron
https://www.craigwstanfill.com/prophecy-heron

Original Publication Date: 12/8/2022

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Music Provided by:

Music from “5/8 Socket” by Rico’s Gruv
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“Crossing the Chasm” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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Begin Transcript:

[00:00:00] This is Beyond the Big Screen podcast with your host, Steve Guerra.
Thank you for listening to Beyond the Big Screen Podcast where we talk about great movies and stories. So great. They should be movies. Links to learn more about our guests today can be found in the show notes you can support beyond the big screen on patreon.com. By joining on Patreon, you help keep beyond the big screen sustainable and get many great benefits.
Go to patreon.com/beyond the big screen to learn more and sign. Find show notes, links to subscribe and leave Apple podcast reviews by going to our website beyond the big screen.com. And now let’s go beyond the big screen.[00:01:00]
Thank you for joining me again on Beyond the Big Screen. I am really excited to be joined by author Craig w Stanfield to talk about all things artificial intelligence, dystopian futures, and defiance in a heavily controlled world. Uh, before we get started, uh, Craig, can you tell us a bit about your background and what made you want to write, uh, fiction, particularly science fiction?
Okay, well first of all, in terms of my background, I’ve got a long history of, uh, work as a technologist, as a software entrepreneur. Got a doctorate in computer science, artificial intelligence in the 1980s. I’ve had a long career in the technology industry, primarily, you know, starting out with artificial intelligence and then moving forward into enterprise computing where I’ve worked on technology that is used to collect and analyze data for marketing purposes for a lot of [00:02:00] very, very big companies that are, uh, household names around the country.
And so I’ve got a lot of insight into both what you can do using AI to. Make decisions automatically. And collect the data that Theis need for that, for that, uh, decision making. And then to affect change in the world, uh, by reaching out into the, uh, telephone network. So there’s, there’s parts of the world where technology that I’ve built, uh, affects what shows up on people’s cell phones in a number of countries, uh, where.
You know, you pick up your cell phone and the cell phone sends you a marketing message as well, Sam, why? I develop a lot of that technology so I know what can be done and I know what is being done and it starts to worry me. When you look at places like Google and Facebook, uh, and Twitter and all the others.
And how much of an effect they can have on reality as you see it, or [00:03:00] the perceived reality as opposed to the real reality by tailoring what you see and making things that they don’t want you to see go away. And then, uh, use of rewards and, uh, punishments if you, uh, depending on your behavior, and it worries me.
It’s a fundamental change to. What it means to be a liberal democracy. I’m using liberal in the very general sense of liberty. And, uh, it, that’s what really drove me to work. I just saw this happening and I felt that the best way to reach out with some of these concerns was to set it in a fictional world where you could see, well, if this keeps going, here’s what could happen.
I’d like to, I think that. Really, it’s an un underused, or science fiction was used in that purpose for so long, and then now it seems to have faded away when you had the thought process. I wanna share this information with the public. What made you think that? Yes, science fiction is the way to get this across as opposed to just writing a, uh, [00:04:00] a book about it, a nonfiction science based book.
Well, there there’s a lot of people who do that. And, uh, it would be very difficult to, uh, you know, sort of get things published as either, you know, a polemic or a collection of essays or a, you know, a scientific, uh, work. Uh, there’s a lot out there and it is difficult to break through the, uh, crowd and people wanna be entertained.
You know, science fiction is entertaining and people can learn about AI and the potential abuses while reading a fabulous book that they, uh, are going to. There’s also, I wanted to distance this a little bit from contemporary partisan politics because, you know, uh, I’m on the right side of the spectrum, although not all that far as it happens.
Uh, the things that are going on with the ability of big companies to. Act as a shadow government ought to concern everybody on the left and on the right. [00:05:00] Uh, you know, particularly those people, uh, left of center who do have an ongoing commitment to personal freedom. Do you think that the science fiction genre gives you a bit of a sandbox to play with these ideas in a bit more, uh, maybe a loose fashion and maybe play out where ideas, uh, could po potentially go than just writing?
Predictive, uh, science book, absolutely. I can just set up a world with a political structure that, uh, and a technological structure to be whatever I want it to and say, okay, well here’s the world that I’m going to create and here’s what it’s like to live in this world. Now, the world that I created, uh, which I call the AI dys, I set it 250 years in the future to give myself a big, a big sandbox to sort of detach from current events.
And so I thought, well, let’s take the following power structure. We’ve got, uh, monopolistic corporations that can set [00:06:00] their terms of service to be whatever they want them to be, you know, so they put whatever they want to in their customer agreement, and if you wanna do business with them, you have to sign their customer agreement and, In this world just to make those customer agreements have a little bit more oomph and to keep things simple.
I every, every industry has a single monopoly. So if you don’t, uh, You don’t have to sign the food company’s customer agreement, but you don’t have to eat. Uh, and again, that’s not the world we’re in in this country, although there’s parts of the world where, where we are heading that way. Uh, but the, what we’ve got actually right now are, are, uh, oligarchy’s of like-minded.