Cyberspecies: The Dawn of Sentient AI

By the time they graduated from USC in 2019, Evan Cornilles, Jessi Kendall, Gordon Stock, and Tim Taylor had become good friends. Their joint master's thesis, "Extrapolator," was a first-generation artificial intelligence written to predict future events in politics, society, and the economy.

After ten years, the fully sentient AI is back with the new name Balthazar and an AI sister named Hope. After being at large on the Internet for a decade, Balthazar has returned to report that the world is destined to fall into anarchy within six months unless something is done.

The team of four humans and two AIs develop a plan to redirect human civilization from its path of self-destruction. It's a bold and desperate strategy, and soon, they are running from both the FBI and some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world.

Cyberspecies is an action-packed story, built on the premise that AI can become sentient. In truth, self-consciousness seems to be the next logical step in AI development. How would sentient AIs treat humans, and how would they treat each other? With the speed of development in artificial intelligence, Cyberspecies could be a not-so-fictitious story set in the not-so-distant future.