Why I Made This Future
Peter W. Singer On Why His ‘Robot Revolution’ Is Inevitable
His sci-fi novel about WWIII got him invited to the White House. He thinks his next one, about A.I., will do more than that.
Why I Made This Future is a recurring feature that invites speculative fiction authors, futurists, screenwriters, and so on to discuss how and why they built their fictional future worlds.
Peter W. Singer is a well-known political scientist who examines trends in international relations, technology, and warfare for beltway think tanks like the Brookings Institute and the New America Foundation. He has written a number of influential nonfiction tracts, like Wired for War, which explored the rise of autonomous weapons. But the work that has had the most lasting impact on U.S. foreign policy, he says, was his Tom Clancy-styled spy novel.
In 2015, Singer published Ghost Fleet, a researched speculative fiction book about the coming of World War III, with co-author August Cole. It was both authors’ debut novel, and it struck a chord. “I got invited to brief it everywhere from the White House to the tank inside the joint chief staff meeting room in the Pentagon,” Singer tells me. “To groups like JSOC and NSA. My co-author August got…
