Singularity will be an opt-in scenario for human beings, especially as we draw closer to it. The more that we have the opportunity to interface with and combine ourselves with machines and machinery and electronics - those will all be opt-in moments. Would you choose to have some sort of brain implant? Would you choose to have Google Glasses installed in your eyes? It's all an approach; it's all a glide path to the moment of genuine singularity; genuine artificial intelligence.

I think that anyone who grew up reading and being taught the Bible, as I did, can't help but have their prose shaped by it later in life. I still have deep, almost primal responses to the language of scripture, and I think that comes through in all my writing.

Don't repackage your fear and try to sell it to me as indifference.

The urge to move is natural and understandable. As will be the case throughout your life, no matter how long or brief, the choice is, in the end, yours. Simply bear in mind that most every choice will have consequences, and in this instance those consequences would likely be quite grave.

Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out.

I bailed out on social media for a while, and in short order I found I was able to sit down and read a book again. For the first time in a couple years I could read more than three pages without my brain wandering off into the ether. I drew a direct causal line between all this sort of ratta-tat-tat staccato stimulation that we get from the Internet and my growing inability to sit down and read anything that was longer than 500 words. But for me it came back because those synapses were already latent in my brain.

I don't know if it's something that we as a species are hardwired for or if it's more of a contemporary phenomenon related to technology and rapid dissemination of data. I did know that whatever its cause or nature, I wanted to interrogate this phenomenon. But the only way for me to do that, the only tool I have to dissect it with, is a fictional narrative.