Writing The Future, And Being More Human In An Age of AI With Jamie Metzl

How can you write science-based fiction without info-dumping your research? How can you use AI tools in a creative way, while still focusing on a human-first approach? Why is adapting to the fast pace of change so difficult and how can we make the most of this time? Jamie Metzl talks about Superconvergence and more.

In the intro, How to avoid author scams [Written Word Media]; Spotify vs Audible audiobook strategy [The New Publishing Standard]; Thoughts on Author Nation and why constraints are important in your author life [Self-Publishing with ALLi];
Alchemical History And Beautiful Architecture: Prague with Lisa M Lilly on my Books and Travel Podcast.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, professional speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of sci-fi thrillers and futurist nonfiction books, including the revised and updated edition of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• How personal history shaped Jamie's fiction writing
• Writing science-based fiction without info-dumping
• The super convergence of three revolutions (genetics, biotech, AI) and why we need to understand them holistically
• Using fiction to explore the human side of genetic engineering, life extension, and robotics
• Collaborating with GPT-5 as a named co-author
• How to be a first-rate human rather than a second-rate machine

You can find Jamie at JamieMetzl.com.

Transcript of interview with Jamie Metzl

Jo: Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, professional speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of sci-fi thrillers and futurist nonfiction books, including the revised and updated edition of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. So welcome, Jamie.

Jamie: Thank you so much, Jo. Very happy to be here with you.

Jo: There is so much we could talk about, but let's start with you telling us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

From History PhD to First Novel

Jamie: Well, I think like a lot of writers, I didn't know I was a writer. I was just a kid who loved writing.

Actually, just last week I was going through a bunch of boxes from my parents' house and I found my autobiography, which I wrote when I was nine years old. So I've been writing my whole life and loving it. It was always something that was very important to me.

When I finished my DPhil, my PhD at Oxford, and my dissertation came out, it just got scooped up by Macmillan in like two minutes. And I thought, “God, that was easy.”

That got me started thinking about writing books. I wanted to write a novel based on the same historical period – my PhD was in Southeast Asian history – and I wanted to write a historical novel set in the same period as my dissertation, because I felt like the dissertation had missed the human element of the story I was telling, which was related to the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath.

So I wrote what became my first novel, and I thought, “Wow, now I'm a writer.” I thought, “All right, I've already published one book. I'm gonna get this other book out into the world.” And then I ran into the brick wall of: it's really hard to be a writer. It's almost easier to write something than to get it published.

I had to learn a ton, and it took nine years from when I started writing that first novel, The Depths of the Sea, to when it finally came out. But it was such a positive experience, especially to have something so personal to me as that story. I'd lived in Cambodia for two years, I’d worked on the Thai-Cambodian border, and I'm the child of a Holocaust survivor. So there was a whole lot that was very emotional for me.

That set a pattern for the rest of my life as a writer, at least where, in my nonfiction books, I'm thinking about whatever the issues are that are most important to me. Whether it was that historical book, which was my first book, or Hacking Darwin on the future of human genetic engineering, which was my last book, or Superconvergence, which, as you mentioned in the intro, is my current book.

But in every one of those stories, the human element is so deep and so profound. You can get at some of that in nonfiction, but I've also loved exploring those issues in deeper ways in my fiction.

So in my more recent novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata, I've looked at the human side of the story of genetic engineering and human life extension. And now my agent has just submitted my new novel, Virtuoso, about the intersection of AI, robotics, and classical music.

With all of this, who knows what's the real difference between fiction and nonfiction? We're all humans trying to figure things out on many different levels.

Shifting from History to Future Tech

Jo: I knew that you were a polymath, someone who's interested in so many things, but the music angle with robotics and AI is fascinating.

I do just want to ask you, because I was also at Oxford – what college were you at?

Jamie: I was in St. Antony's.

Jo: I was at Mansfield, so we were in that slightly smaller, less famous college group, if people don't know.

Jamie: You know, but we're small but proud.

Jo: Exactly. That's fantastic.

You mentioned that you were on the historical side of things at the beginning and now you've moved into technology and also science, because this book Superconvergence has a lot of science. So how did you go from history and the past into science and the future?

Biology and Seeing the Future Coming

Jamie: It's a great question. I'll start at the end and then back up.

A few years ago I was speaking at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is one of the big scientific labs here in the United States. I was a guest of the director and I was speaking to their 300 top scientists.

I said to them, “I'm here to speak with you about the future of biology at the invitation of your director, and I'm really excited. But if you hear something wrong, please raise your hand and let me know, because I'm entirely self-taught. The last biology course I took was in 11th grade of high school in Kansas City.”

Of course I wouldn't say that if I didn't have a lot of confidence in my process. But in many ways I'm self-taught in the sciences. As you know, Jo, and as all of your listeners know, the foundation of everything is curiosity and then a disciplined process for learning.

Even our greatest super-specialists in the world now – whatever their background – the world is changing so fast that if anyone says, “Oh, I have a PhD in physics/chemistry/biology from 30 years ago,” the exact topic they learned 30 years ago is less significant than their process for continuous learning.

More specifically, in the 1990s I was working on the National Security Council for President Clinton, which is the president’s foreign policy staff. My then boss and now close friend, Richard Clarke – who became famous as the guy who had tragically predicted 9/11 – used to say that the key to efficacy in Washington and in life is to try to solve problems that other people can't see.

For me, almost 30 years ago, I felt to my bones that this intersection of what we now call AI and the nascent genetics revolution and the nascent biotechnology revolution was going to have profound implications for humanity. So I just started obsessively educating myself.

When I was ready, I started writing obscure national security articles. Those got a decent amount of attention, so I was invited to testify before the United States Congress. I was speaking out a lot, saying, “Hey, this is a really important story. A lot of people are missing it. Here are the things we should be thinking about for the future.”

I wasn't getting the kind of traction that I wanted. I mentioned before that my first book had been this dry Oxford PhD dissertation, and that had led to my first novel. So I thought, why don't I try the same approach again – writing novels to tell this story about the genetics, biotech, and what later became known popularly as the AI revolution?

That led to my two near-term sci-fi novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. On my book tours for those novels, when I explained the underlying science to people in my way, as someone who taught myself, I could see in their eyes that they were recognizing not just that something big was happening, but that they could understand it and feel like they were part of that story.

That's what led me to write Hacking Darwin, as I mentioned. That book really unlocked a lot of things. I had essentially predicted the CRISPR babies that were born in China before it happened – down to the specific gene I thought would be targeted, which in fact was the case.

After that book was published, Dr. Tedros, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, invited me to join the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, which I did. It was a really great experience and got me thinking a lot about the upside of this revolution and the downside.

The Birth of Superconvergence

Jamie: I get a lot of wonderful invitations to speak, and I have two basic rules for speaking:

1. Never use notes. Never ever.
2. Never stand behind a podium. Never ever.

Because of that, when I speak, my talks tend to migrate. I’d be speaking with people about the genetics revolution as it applied to humans, and I'd say, “Well, this is just a little piece of a much bigger story.”

The bigger story is that after nearly four billion years of life on Earth, our one species has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life. The big question for us, and frankly for the world, is whether we're going to be able to use that almost godlike superpower wisely.

As that idea got bigger and bigger, it became this inevitable force. You write so many books, Jo, that I think it's second nature for you. Every time I finish a book, I think, “Wow, that was really hard. I'm never doing that again.” And then the books creep up on you. They call to you. At some point you say, “All right, now I'm going to do it.”

So that was my current book, Superconvergence. Like everything, every journey you take a step, and that step inspires another step and another. That's why writing and living creatively is such a wonderfully exciting thing – there's always more to learn and always great opportunities to push ourselves in new ways.

Balancing Deep Research with Good Storytelling

Jo: Yeah, absolutely. I love that you've followed your curiosity and then done this disciplined process for learning. I completely understand that.

But one of the big issues with people like us who love the research – and having read your Superconvergence, I know how deeply you go into this and how deeply you care that it's correct – is that with fiction, one of the big problems with too much research is the danger of brain-dumping.

Readers go to fiction for escapism. They want the interesting side of it, but they want a story first.

What are your tips for authors who might feel like, “Where's the line between putting in my research so that it's interesting for readers, but not going too far and turning it into a textbook?” How do you find that balance?

Jamie: It's such a great question.

I live in New York now, but I used to live in Washington when I was working for the U.S. government, and there were a number of people I served with who later wrote novels. Some of those novels felt like policy memos with a few sex scenes – and that's not what to do.

To write something that's informed by science or really by anything, everything needs to be subservient to the story and the characters. The question is: what is the essential piece of information that can convey something that's both important to your story and your character development, and is also an accurate representation of the world as you want it to be?

I certainly write novels that are set in the future – although some of them were a future that's now already happened because I wrote them a long time ago. You can make stuff up, but as an author you have to decide what your connection to existing science and existing technology and the existing world is going to be.

I come at it from two angles. One: I read a huge number of scientific papers and think, “What does this mean for now, and if you extrapolate into the future, where might that go?”

Two: I think about how to condense things. We've all read books where you're humming along because people read fiction for story and emotional connection, and then you hit a bit like: “I sat down in front of the president, and the president said, ‘Tell me what I need to know about the nuclear threat.'” And then it’s like: insert memo. That's a deal-killer.

It's like all things – how do you have a meaningful relationship with another person? It's not by just telling them your story. Even when you're telling them something about you, you need to be imagining yourself sitting in their shoes, hearing you.

These are very different disciplines, fiction and nonfiction. But for the speculative nonfiction I write – “here's where things are now, and here's where the world is heading” – there's a lot of imagination that goes into that too. It feels in many ways like we're living in a sci-fi world because the rate of technological change has been accelerating continuously, certainly for the last 12,000 years since the dawn of agriculture.

It's a balance.

For me, I feel like I'm a better fiction writer because I write nonfiction, and I'm a better nonfiction writer because I write fiction. When I'm writing nonfiction, I don't want it to be boring either – I want people to feel like there's a story and characters and that they can feel themselves inside that story.

Jo: Yeah, definitely. I think having some distance helps as well. If you're really deep into your topics, as you are, you have to leave that manuscript a little bit so you can go back with the eyes of the reader as opposed to your eyes as the expert. Then you can get their experience, which is great.

Looking Beyond Author-Focused AI Fears

Jo: I want to come to your technical knowledge, because AI is a big thing in the author and creative community, like everywhere else.

One of the issues is that creators are focusing on just this tiny part of the impact of AI, and there's a much bigger picture. For example, in 2024, Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind and his collaborative partner John Jumper won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with AlphaFold.

It feels to me like there's this massive world of what's happening with AI in health, climate, and other areas, and yet we are so focused on a lot of the negative stuff.

Maybe you could give us a couple of things about what there is to be excited and optimistic about in terms of AI-powered science?

Jamie: Sure. I'm so excited about all of the new opportunities that AI creates. But I also think there's a reason why evolution has preserved this very human feeling of anxiety: because there are real dangers.

Anybody who's Pollyanna-ish and says, “Oh, the AI story is inevitably positive,” I’d be distrustful. And anyone who says, “We're absolutely doomed, this is the end of humanity,” I'd also be distrustful.

So let me tell you the positives and the negatives, and maybe some thoughts about how we navigate toward the former and away from the latter.

AI as the New Electricity

Jamie: When people think of AI right now, they’re thinking very narrowly about these AI tools and ChatGPT. But we don't think of electricity that way.

Nobody says, “I know electricity – electricity is what happens at the power station.” We've internalised the idea that electricity is woven into not just our communication systems or our houses, but into our clothes, our glasses – it's woven into everything and has super-empowered almost everything in our modern lives.

That's what AI is.

In Superconvergence, the majority of the book is about positive opportunities:

In healthcare, moving from generalised healthcare based on population averages to personalised or precision healthcare based on a molecular understanding of each person's individual biology.

As we build these massive datasets like the UK Biobank, we can take a next jump toward predictive and preventive healthcare, where we're able to address health issues far earlier in the process, when interventions can be far more benign.

I'm really excited about that, not to mention the incredible new kinds of treatments – gene therapies, or pharmaceuticals based on genetics and systems-biology analyses of patients.

Then there's agriculture. Over the last hundred years, because of the technologies of the Green Revolution and synthetic fertilisers, we've had an incredible increase in agricultural productivity. That's what's allowed us to quadruple the global population.

But if we just continue agriculture as it is, as we get towards ten billion wealthier, more empowered people wanting to eat like we eat, we're going to have to wipe out all the wild spaces on Earth to feed them.

These technologies help provide different paths toward increasing agricultural productivity with fewer inputs of land, water, fertiliser, insecticides, and pesticides. That's really positive.

I could go on and on about these positives – and I do – but there are very real negatives.

I was a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing after the first CRISPR babies were very unethically created in China. I'm extremely aware that these same capabilities have potentially incredible upsides and very real downsides. That's the same as every technology in the past, but this is happening so quickly that it's triggering a lot of anxieties.

Governance, Responsibility, and Why Everyone Has a Role

Jamie: The question now is: how do we optimise the benefits and minimise the harms? The short, unsexy word for that is governance.

Governance is not just what governments do; it's what all of us do. That's why I try to write books, both fiction and nonfiction, to bring people into this story.

If people “other” this story – if they say, “There's a technology revolution, it has nothing to do with me, I'm going to keep my head down” – I think that's dangerous.

The way we're going to handle this as responsibly as possible is if everybody says, “I have some role. Maybe it's small, maybe it's big. The first step is I need to educate myself. Then I need to have conversations with people around me. I need to express my desires, wishes, and thoughts – with political leaders, organisations I’m part of, businesses.”

That has to happen at every level.

You're in the UK – you know the anti-slavery movement started with a handful of people in Cambridge and grew into a global movement. I really believe in the power of ideas, but ideas don't spread on their own. These are very human networks, and that's why writing, speaking, communicating – probably for every single person listening to this podcast – is so important.

Jo: Mm, yeah.

Fiction Like AI 2041 and Thinking Through the Issues

Jo: Have you read AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan?

Jamie: No. I heard a bunch of their interviews when the book came out, but I haven't read it.

Jo: I think that's another good one because it's fiction – a whole load of short stories. It came out a few years ago now, but the issues they cover in the stories, about different people in different countries – I remember one about deepfakes – make you think more about the topics and help you figure out where you stand.

I think that's the issue right now: it's so complex, there are so many things. I'm generally positive about AI, but of course I don't want autonomous drone weapons, you know?

The Messy Reality of “Bad” Technologies

Jamie: Can I ask you about that? Because this is why it's so complicated.

Like you, I think nobody wants autonomous killer drones anywhere in the world. But if you right now were the defence minister of Ukraine, and your children are being kidnapped, your country is being destroyed, you're fighting for your survival, you're getting attacked every night – and you're getting attacked by the Russians, who are investing more and more in autonomous killer robots – you kind of have two choices.

You can say, “I'm going to surrender,” or, “I'm going to use what technology I have available to defend myself, and hopefully fight to either victory or some kind of stand-off.”

That's what our societies did with nuclear weapons. Maybe not every American recognises that Churchill gave Britain's nuclear secrets to America as a way of greasing the wheels of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War – but that was our programme: we couldn't afford to lose that war, and we couldn't afford to let the Nazis get nuclear weapons before we did.

So there's the abstract feeling of, “I'm against all war in the abstract. I'm against autonomous killer robots in the abstract.” But if I were the defence minister of Ukraine, I would say, “What will it take for us to build the weapons we can use to defend ourselves?”

That's why all this stuff gets so complicated. And frankly, it's why the relationship between fiction and nonfiction is so important.

If every novel had a situation where every character said, “Oh, I know exactly the right answer,” and then they just did the right answer and it was obviously right, it wouldn't make for great fiction.

We're dealing with really complex humans. We have conflicting impulses. We're not perfect. Maybe there are no perfect answers – but how do we strive toward better rather than worse? That’s the question.

Jo: Absolutely. I don't want to get too political on things.

How AI Is Changing the Writing Life

Jo: Let's come back to authors.

In terms of the creative process, the writing process, the research process, and the business of being an author – what are some of the ways that you already use AI tools, and some of the ways, given your futurist brain, that you think things are going to change for us?

Jamie: Great question. I'll start with a little middle piece.

I found you, Jo, through GPT-5. I asked ChatGPT, “I'm coming out with this book and I want to connect with podcasters who are a little different from the ones I've done in the past. I've been a guest on Joe Rogan twice and some of the bigger podcasts. Make me a list of really interesting people I can have great conversations with.”

That's how I found you. So this is one reward of that process.

Let me say that in the last year I've worked on three books, and I'll explain how my relationship with AI has changed over those books.

Cleaning Up Citations (and Getting Burned)

Jamie: First is the highly revised paperback edition of Superconvergence.

When the hardback came out, I had – I don't normally work with research assistants because I like to dig into everything myself – but the one thing I do use a research assistant for is that I can't be bothered, when I'm writing something, to do the full Chicago-style footnote if I'm already referencing an academic paper.

So I'd just put the URL as the footnote and then hire a research assistant and say, “Go to this URL and change it into a Chicago-style citation. That's it.”

Unfortunately, my research assistant on the hardback used early-days ChatGPT for that work. He did the whole thing, came back, everything looked perfect. I said, “Wow, amazing job.”

It was only later, as I was going through them, that I realised something like 50% of them were invented footnotes. It was very painful to go back and fix, and it took ten times more time.

With the paperback edition, I didn't use AI that much, but I did say things like, “Here's all the information – generate a Chicago-style citation.” That was better.

I noticed there were a few things where I stopped using the thesaurus function on Microsoft Word because I'd just put the whole paragraph into the AI and say, “Give me ten other options for this one word,” and it would be like a contextual thesaurus. That was pretty good.

Talking to a Robot Pianist Character

Jamie: Then, for my new novel Virtuoso, I was writing a character who is a futurist robot that plays the piano very beautifully – not just humanly, but almost finding new things in the music we've written and composing music that resonates with us.

I described the actions of that robot in the novel, but I didn't describe the inner workings of the robot’s mind.

In thinking about that character, I realised I was the first science-fiction writer in history who could interrogate a machine about what it was “thinking” in a particular context.

I had the most beautiful conversations with ChatGPT, where I would give scenarios and ask, “What are you thinking? What are you feeling in this context?”

It was all background for that character, but it was truly profound.

Co-Authoring The AI Ten Commandments with GPT-5

Jamie: Third, I have another book coming out in May in the United States.

I gave a talk this summer at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York about AI and spirituality. I talked about the history of our human relationship with our technology, about how all our religious and spiritual traditions have deep technological underpinnings – certainly our Abrahamic religions are deeply connected to farming, and Protestantism to the printing press.

Then I had a section about the role of AI in generating moral codes that would resonate with humans.

Everybody went nuts for this talk, and I thought, “I think I'm going to write a book.” I decided to write it differently, with GPT-5 as my named co-author.

The first thing I did was outline the entire book based on the talk, which I’d already spent a huge amount of time thinking about and organising. Then I did a full outline of the arguments and structures. Then I trained GPT-5 on my writing style.

The way I did it – which I fully describe in the introduction to the book – was that I'd handle all the framing: the full introduction, the argument, the structure.

But if there was a section where, for a few paragraphs, I was summarising a huge field of data, even something I knew well, I'd give GPT-5 the intro sentence and say, “In my writing style, prepare four paragraphs on this.”

For example, I might write: “AI has the potential to see us humans like we humans see ant colonies.” Then I’d say, “Give me four paragraphs on the relationship between the individual and the collective in ant colonies.”

I could have written those four paragraphs myself, but it would’ve taken a month to read the life’s work of E.O. Wilson and then write them. GPT-5 wrote them in seconds or minutes, in its thinking mode.

I'd then say, “It's not quite right – change this, change that,” and we'd go back and forth three or four times. Then I’d edit the whole thing and put it into the text.

So this book that I could have written on my own in a year, I wrote a first draft of with GPT-5 as my named co-author in two days. The whole project will take about six months from start to finish, and I'm having massive human editing – multiple edits from me, plus a professional editor.

It's not a magic AI button. But I feel strongly about listing GPT-5 as a co-author because I've written it differently than previous books.

I'm a huge believer in the old-fashioned lone author struggling and suffering – that’s in my novels, and in Virtuoso I explore that. But other forms are going to emerge, just like video games are a creative, artistic form deeply connected to technology.

The novel hasn’t been around forever – the current format is only a few centuries old – and forms are always changing.

There are real opportunities for authors, and there will be so much crap flooding the market because everybody can write something and put it up on Amazon. But I think there will be a very special place for thoughtful human authors who have an idea of what humans do at our best, and who translate that into content other humans can enjoy.

Traditional vs Indie: Why This Book Will Be Self-Published

Jo: I'm interested – you mentioned that it's your named co-author. Is this book going through a traditional publisher, and what do they think about that? Or are you going to publish it yourself?

Jamie: It's such a smart question.

What I found quickly is that when you get to be an author later in your career, you have all the infrastructure – a track record, a fantastic agent, all of that. But there were two things that were really important to me here:

1. I wanted to get this book out really fast – six months instead of a year and a half.
2. It was essential to me to have GPT-5 listed as my co-author, because if it were just my name, I feel like it would be dishonest. Readers who are used to reading my books – I didn't want to present something different than what it was.

I spoke with my agent, who I absolutely love, and she said that for this particular project it was going to be really hard in traditional publishing.

So I did a huge amount of research, because I'd never done anything in the self-publishing world before. I looked at different models. There was one hybrid model that's basically the same as traditional, but you pay for the things the publisher would normally pay for.

I ended up not doing that. Instead, I decided on a self-publishing route where I disaggregated the publishing process. I found three teams: one for producing the book, one for getting the book out into the world, and a smaller one for the audiobook.

I still believe in traditional publishing – there's a lot of wonderful human value-add. But some works just don't lend themselves to traditional publishing. For this book, which is called The AI Ten Commandments, that's the path I've chosen.

Jo: And when's that out? I think people will be interested.

Jamie: April 26th.

Those of us used to traditional publishing think, “I've finished the book, sold the proposal, it’ll be out any day now,” and then it can be a year and a half. It's frustrating.

With this, the process can be much faster because it's possible to control more of the variables. But the key – as I was saying – is to make sure it's as good a book as everything else you've written. It's great to speed up, but you don't want to compromise on quality.

The Coming Flood of Excellent AI-Generated Work

Jo: Yeah, absolutely.

We're almost out of time, but I want to come back to your “flood of crap” and the “AI slop” idea that's going around. Because you are working with GPT-5 – and I do as well, and I work with Claude and Gemini – and right now there are still issues. Like you said about referencing, there are still hallucinations, though fewer.

But fast-forward two, five years: it's not a flood of crap. It's a flood of excellent. It's a flood of stuff that's better than us.

Jamie: We're humans. It's better than us in certain ways. If you have farm machinery, it's better than us at certain aspects of farming.

I'm a true humanist. I think there will be lots of things machines do better than us, but there will be tons of things we do better than them.

There's a reason humans still care about chess, even though machines can beat humans at chess.

Some people are saying things I fully disagree with, like this concept of AGI – artificial general intelligence – where machines do everything better than humans. I've summarised my position in seven letters: “AGI is BS.”

The only way you can believe in AGI in that sense is if your concept of what a human is and what a human mind is is so narrow that you think it's just a narrow range of analytical skills. We are so much more than that.

Humans represent almost four billion years of embodied evolution. There's so much about ourselves that we don't know. As incredible as these machines are and will become, there will always be wonderful things humans can do that are different from machines.

What I always tell people is: whatever you're doing, don't be a second-rate machine. Be a first-rate human.

If you're doing something and a machine is doing that thing much better than you, then shift to something where your unique capacities as a human give you the opportunity to do something better.

So yes, I totally agree that the quality of AI-generated stuff will get better. But I think the most creative and successful humans will be the ones who say, “I recognise that this is creating new opportunities, and I'm going to insert my core humanity to do something magical and new.”

People are “othering” these technologies, but the technologies themselves are magnificent human-generated artefacts. They're not alien UFOs that landed here.

It's a scary moment for creatives, no doubt, because there are things all of us did in the past that machines can now do really well. But this is the moment where the most creative people ask themselves, “What does it mean for me to be a great human?”

The pat answers won't apply.

In my Virtuoso novel I explore that a lot. The idea that “machines don't do creativity” – they will do incredible creativity; it just won't be exactly human creativity. We will be potentially huge beneficiaries of these capabilities, but we really have to believe in and invest in the magic of our core humanity.

Where to Find Jamie and His Books

Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books online?

Jamie: Thank you so much for asking.

My website is jamiemetzl.com – and my books are available everywhere.

Jo: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Jamie. That was great.

Jamie: Thank you, Joanna.

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