Interview with Author Daniel Frost

Daniel Frost was born in 1998 in New York City and now lives in Houston, Texas. He uses the science fiction genre to explore philosophical questions and the impact of technology on the improvement of human society. He has written dozens of science fiction short stories and has recently completed his first novel, The God AI. He is an award-winning artist, a National Merit Finalist, and a co-inventor of the Squaremino board game. His intellectual interests include math, science, economics, and history. Currently, he is a sophomore studying Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin.

When did you start writing?
From a very young age, I wrote comic books and had an immense interest in creating stories. Ironically, my interest in writing comic books led my parents to think that I was interested in art. They enrolled me in a painting school, but I discovered that my true passion was writing fiction. In 2015, I began writing short stories every week as part of a homeschooling activity called “Creative Friday”, where I would write a science fiction story of about 1000-2000 words in length. I wrote dozens of stories, each of which portrayed a single “What if” question. In early 2017, I decided to take on a much bigger project by writing a novel. I wrote The God AI from early to mid-2017.

What inspired you to write The God Al?
I was inspired by a thought experiment called Roko’s Basilisk, in which a sufficiently powerful AI can punish people for eternity as retribution for resisting its will. This is the primary idea behind the story, but I was also inspired more generally by talk of the Singularity, a hypothetical time in the near future when AI would advance itself to the point that it was capable of becoming godlike and making humans immortal. I was excited and terrified to learn that many experts placed this date at around 2040-2050, a time I would likely live to see!
In the end, I chose to write about the idea of a godlike artificial intelligence because it was scary and exhilarating. It captured my imagination like no other sci-fi concept I had ever seen before. I knew that my first novel had to be about The God AI.

What do you hope readers get out of it?
I want to shatter people’s minds with the unfathomable potential of AI and its terrifying risks to humanity. The general theme of the novel is that technology will become an increasing threat to humanity as it becomes more and more advanced, until humanity’s very existence becomes uncertain. As the story unfolds, it unveils time and space to the reader on increasing scales. My story starts with one inventor in a garage and ends by examining how his actions change the destiny of the human race.

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