I asked Claude to predict the next 20 years. It wrote a 90,000 novel that I reworked (heavily) and have published.

I feel everyday as though I'm living with some low-level anxiety and unease. Watching the way people've stopped being able to connect to each other meaningfully, the attention pandemic caused by social media, horrific news headlines etc.

One day I thought: since Claude holds the entire record of human history — climate patterns, economic booms and busts, how civilisations have collapsed, what actually happened after previous technological disruptions etc — why don't I ask it to trace those patterns forward? Show me what the next twenty years can look like if we don't change course?

What came back was a novel*.* It follows three characters: Sophie in Singapore's climate-controlled towers, Emeka in Lagos, Hassan in rural Pakistan. None of them chose their starting line, but where they were born determines everything about what happens to them as the world reorganises itself.

How we collaborated: Claude brought its predictions, but I had work through chapter by chapter, heavily editing the language and challenging Claude whenever the plot didn't make sense. I brought the moral urgency, the characters' humanity and interiority, the conviction that we need to be preparing now — spiritually and practically — for futures we're not ready for.

Preview:

David Chen stood on his balcony forty-five floors up, the view full of skyscrapers that looked like they had come out of a 3D printer. His daughter, Sophie, was napping inside. His phone buzzed.

A message from work: Algorithm deployment complete. 94% efficiency gain. 2,300 jobs automated.

He stared at it for a moment. There was a time when news like this felt exciting — a win for engineering, a triumph of human ingenuity. But lately the wins all came with a body count. Not that anyone called it that. They were "headcount optimisations," "streamlined operations." The kind of euphemisms that sounded good in shareholder reports.

Still, the bonuses were nice.

[Full chapter here — Substack ; Medium]

Free to read, and I'll be posting a new chapter every few days.

Curious what you think. You've all been working closely with Claude — does this feel like a plausible near-future to you, or are we off somewhere?