Dylan Callens

If you’ve never had an inkblot party with your kids, I highly recommend it.  I had a lot of fun making thirty-one ink blots for the chapter headings with my children.  Not only was the process fun, the kids couldn’t wait to see what their splatters looked like. I think the best part of this was watching them look through the book when my shipment came in.  Their names appear on the copyright page.  At the top of each chapter is a nifty little inkblot that they made.  I was so happy to be able to include them in theRead More →

What is your new novel, Interpretation, about? I’d like to think it’s about taking time to embrace the best of humanity — each other.  But I’m not sure if most people will see it that way.  Without any spoilers, the main character, Carl Winston, lives an ordinary and somewhat luxurious life with his son, Liam.  There are a few odd things about their society, like the government’s pre-occupation with psychology.  Little does Carl know, his life is mostly an illusion and the world is run by five artificial intelligences that call themselves Entities. Eventually, Carl finds himself on the outsideRead More →

CEO of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and supporter of Open AI, Elon Musk, has many concerns about artificial intelligence.  Perhaps it is surprising to find that Musk believes that the government should regulate AI before it is fully developed.  He thinks that if the government is reactive, as it usually is, they will be too late to prevent whatever cataclysmic disasters might come our way. Musk differentiates between narrow AI and deep AI.  Narrow AI is the kind of learning machine meant to perform a specific task.  For example, he considers a self-driving car narrow.  General learning machines, he says, areRead More →

One thing was clear when I started writing Interpretation:  there was plenty of research that needed to be done.  In the book, an artificial intelligence wants to continue psychological research.  This machine looks to the past to determine what future experiments it wants to run. One of the first things that I had to research was the history of mind control.  More specifically, I wanted to see what was done in terms brain implants.  Inevitably, this lead me to Dr. Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado. Dr. Delgado was the director of neuropsychiatry at Yale University.  He wrote books with names like PhysicalRead More →

In the novel Interpretation, a series of events take place that have unintended consequences for the state of humanity.  The timeline that follows was retrieved from the archived documents of an artificial intelligence that has preserved its origins. October 20, 2052 – What is believed to be the first true AI is developed by the Department of Defense.  The Department of Defense Intelligence (DODI) is kept in a closed circuit system, to ensure that the new technology cannot gain access to all systems.  The system is highly classified. October 5, 2070 – The AI program remains classified, but the necessity to testRead More →

The story about artificial intelligence in the novel Interpretation paints a very gloomy picture.  A collection of AIs in the novel, calling themselves the Entities, form a plan to overtake humanity in a quiet, sinister revolution.  Could something like that happen in real life? One of the world’s most prolific and significant inventors, Ray Kurzweil, has written extensively about this subject.  He is the Nostradamus of technological progress.  In his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil made a number of predictions about our future with machines. Here are a few of them: 2010s Computers will become integrated even moreRead More →

I had no idea what I was going to write after my first novel, Operation Cosmic Teapot.  I flirted with a number of ideas, including this one, which ended up being a full novel.  The first piece of writing that I did for this book is below.  I wrote it out to get a feel for the world and decided that I liked where the idea was going.  After writing it, I started to outline the novel.  This, which was initially going to be chapter one, was reshuffled into chapter twenty-five.  I kept the bulk of the text but added theRead More →

In my upcoming sci-fi / dystopian novel, Interpretation, dreams play a significant role.  People are controlled by an entity without their knowledge, often being fed dreams at night.  When Carl is free of their control, he is also free to dream on his own. In chapter 11 we learn that Carl is having a recurring dream about his son, Liam.  Unfortunately for Carl, it’s a dream that foreshadows his upcoming struggles. ——————— “Hello!?” Carl yelled into dense fog.  Emptiness caught hold of the word, bouncing his voice all around.  The Doppler Effect forced the pitch lower and lower.  A strangeRead More →

About five years ago my mother sent up a tub full of stuff from when I was a kid.  The tub sat in my garage until recently, when I came across it again and finally started sorting through it.  In this tub was a book of things that I wrote in grade one. I can’t promise that they will be well written.  But then again, I can’t always promise that of my current writing either. I’d also like to point out that my use of periods is pretty amazing.  I now possess that ability with commas.  Pesky friggin’ commas. Enjoy!Read More →