Science fiction: petri dish for the future. - 28 June 2026

I’m fifty pages into Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. One of my biggest takeaways from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk was how powerfully Douglas Adams’ science fiction novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, shaped Musk's early life. As a teenager, Musk carried that book with him everywhere. So, what does Musk's affectation with Adams' novel have to do with the first fifty pages of Mallaby’s book about Demis Hassabis?

Partway through his doctoral research in neuroscience, Demis Hassabis, like Musk, discovered a work of science fiction that made sense of who he really was. The book Called "Ender's Game," by Orson Scott Card, tells the story of a diminutive boy genius who is taken from his family and sent off to a space station. There, at an intergalactic battle school, Ender is manipulated by adults, bullied by classmates, and put thorough extreme mental testing, all to discover whether he can shoulder responsibility for the survival of the human race. By dint of grit and talent, Ender rises to the challenge. At the climax of the novel, he outwits and army of alien invaders, destroying their armada and saving planet Earth. According to Mallaby, Hassabis sees himself as Ender.

So, are science fiction novels a waste of time? Hardly. Turns out they’ve served as intellectual rocket fuel for at least two of the sharpest minds currently riding at the tip of the spear of human progress.

I’ll readily admit to being a devoted sci-fi fan myself. Yet for some mysterious reason, my bookshelves haven’t yet propelled me to Musk- or Hassabis-level achievements. (The universe clearly misplaced my “chosen one” memo.) Still, I can see how these stories spark discovery and stretch the imagination. I read both Ender’s Game and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the last five years, and they—along with other sci-fi classics—have added rich texture and depth to my admittedly limited grasp of the AI revolution. Now, I’m eager to finish The Infinity Machine.

And now the butterfly enters the chat.

The butterfly effect: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? Or, more provocatively, did a novel written by Orson Scott Card—a hometown boy like me from Provo, Utah—help ignite Hassabis's quest for superintelligence, humanity’s audacious attempt to approximate what we once called God? And here’s where it gets delightfully absurd: I’m five years older than Card. Did my mere co-existence with Card in Provo, Utah somehow ripple into his imagination (the butterfly effect) and, by extension, into the future of AI? Am I, myself, at the root of today's human progress? …Yeah, that’s definitely too far-fetched. Even for sci-fi.