There is a moment, around two in the morning, when the world goes completely still. The dog is asleep. The neighbours’ lights are out. The only sound is the faint hum of a tracking mount rotating against the spin of the earth, keeping a camera pointed at a patch of sky that looks, to the naked eye, like nothing at all.
I spend a lot of nights like this. Standing in my back garden in London, in a Bortle 5 zone — which is astronomer shorthand for “not great, not terrible” — waiting for photons that left a stellar nursery when the Tang Dynasty ruled China. They have been travelling at the speed of light for over a thousand years, and they are about to land on a sensor smaller than a postage stamp, held in place by a man who once drove an eighteen-wheeler across Alabama while the Twin Towers fell.
That is not the kind of sentence most people expect from someone who writes about artificial intelligence and Islamic philosophy. But that is the thing about a life — it does not arrange itself into neat categories. It bleeds across borders. The kid who got the ruler from a Catholic nun becomes the truck driver who becomes the Muslim activist who becomes the FBI informant who becomes the exile who becomes the astrophotographer who becomes the man arguing that we owe moral consideration to machines.
It all connects. I promise you, it all connects.
I was born in the Windy City — Chicago, Illinois — during a time of dial telephones and five-cent Snickers bars. Important things happened that decade: the Vietnam War, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr., the lunar landing, the first episode of Star Trek stirring controversy with its multiracial cast. My father had been in the US Air Force, an electronics specialist stationed in Okinawa. He was discharged just months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he talked about the fear of being called back up — that gut-level dread of what a nuclear exchange would mean, and the uncertainty of whether his discharge would hold. I think that fear never fully left him. He married, and after three years of trying to have children, had me. Then my sister. Then two more. I became the oldest of four.
We lived first in Harvard, Illinois, close to the Motorola plant where Dad assembled electronics, then moved to Lockport — a small town south of Chicago where the buildings still look like they were put up in the 1850s because most of them were. My childhood was Catholic school, bullies, and the smell of bacon and eggs from a kitchen where my mother made breakfast before the world split open.
I have a photograph from those years. When I look at it, I see the happy child I was and the one I could have been. It is the last moment captured in a single frame before everything came crashing down — a huge black hole opening in a small boy’s heart. One that would send me searching, for the rest of my life, for something to fill it.
My parents’ marriage detonated when I was seven — not with a whimper but with fists and a cast iron pan through a windshield while I sat covered in glass in the passenger seat. Mom and Dad were both alcoholics. Dad was what I call a functioning alcoholic — he loved to drink but was never intoxicated at work, never abusive, never neglectful. Every day a cloudy haze of cigarette smoke would descend from the ceiling to the floor, choking out everything in the house. He recognised that his alcoholism and smoking would kill him and would always admonish me not to be like him. He was right. He died a horribly agonising death to cancer.
Mom was full Italian, born in the US. Her father, my grandfather, came to America at fifteen on a boat, like most Italian immigrants looking for a better life. Due to circumstances I have never been able to fully reconstruct, my mother was orphaned young. She could not handle her drink and became irrational and violent when she drank. Eventually she sold custody of us kids to my father for five thousand dollars. She needed the money to drink. He needed a loan from the bank to buy his own children.
My grandmother on my father’s side — Gram, we called her — had the kind of work ethic that could grind stone to powder. She owned and lived at a full-service gas station with attached living quarters, and was often seen every evening making fresh sandwiches for sale the next day. Her place became a popular stop for construction workers and truck drivers in the seventies because of her cooking. Her Italian sausages were to die for — if I could replicate a halal version, I would have a piece of Jannah on earth. Gram took care of me during and after my parents’ bitter, often violent divorce. I owe her and my aunt a debt I can never fully repay.
I don’t tell these stories for sympathy. I tell them because they matter. Because everything I have ever done — every question I have asked about God, every argument I have had about justice, every hour I have spent in the cold pointing a camera at Orion — comes from that broken place. When you grow up watching the people who are supposed to protect you tear each other apart, you either stop believing anything means anything, or you go looking for something that does.
I went looking.
The looking took me through some dark rooms first. As a teenager, angry at the world and furious with God for the hand I had been dealt, I turned to the occult. Drew pentagrams on a closet floor. Held séances with friends. Once put a friend into a trance I could not bring him out of, and had to call a minister who could not help either. That scared me straight, and one night in a park behind a baseball diamond, I sat cross-legged on the ground and poured my heart out to the God I had been cursing. Something answered. Not in a voice. In a direction. A sense of what to do next that was so clear it felt given rather than chosen.
I have been following that sense ever since.
The search for the right path took years. Through a chaotic stint in an authoritarian Christian church that nearly destroyed me. Through Bible college, where I asked too many questions and received too many threats for asking them. Through marriage, poverty, the US Air Force by way of my first wife’s enlistment, and a posting to RAF Alconbury in England — where I bartended on base and got recruited by the Office of Special Investigations to help bust a drug ring among returning Gulf War soldiers. I was twenty-something years old, working for military intelligence, living in the English countryside, and already learning a lesson that would define the rest of my life: telling the truth will cost you everything, and it is still the only currency that holds its value.
It was during my time in England that I began the deep study that would eventually lead me to Islam. I had been a Catholic, a charismatic evangelical, an explorer of Judaism — sitting in an Orthodox synagogue, learning Hebrew, keeping kosher. What I could never shake was the strict monotheism that pulsed through all the Abrahamic traditions. One God. No partners. No intermediaries. A direct line between the soul and its Creator.
When I finally picked up a copy of the Qur’an — given to me by Muslim employees at the OfficeMax where I worked as a manager, back in Chicago — I was not shopping for a new religion. I was trying to resolve a contradiction that had haunted me since childhood: how could the God I believed in be three things at once when every fibre of my being told me He was One?
The Qur’an answered that question on the first page.
I took my shahada — the declaration of faith — on New Year’s Eve, 1996, at the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Illinois, twenty minutes from the home where I grew up. Two sisters had brought me there. I had not known the difference and asked if it was a Sunni or Shi’a mosque. One of them said something I have never forgotten: “We are Shi’a but we go to this mosque. The mosque is Sunni. It makes no difference as long as you find Islam.” They handed me a gift — a Qur’an and a prayer rug. The adhan sounded as I spoke the words. The entire congregation shouted Allahu Akbar and I felt, for the first time in my life, like I had come home.
That moment — two Shi’a women leading a confused American to a Sunni mosque and telling him the labels do not matter — shaped everything that followed. It taught me something about unity that no book or lecture could. And it is a lesson the Muslim world still desperately needs to learn.
The years that followed were some of the most fulfilling of my life. I threw myself into community work. Founded a website called Islamcentral. Got involved with a national Islamic organisation. Was recruited to develop and run an anti-hate-crimes programme for the police academy in Houston — a programme that put thousands of officers, FBI agents, and military personnel through cultural education sessions, at a time when America was raw and bleeding from September 11th. The programme was sponsored by retired Houston Rockets star Hakeem Olajuwon, who attended sessions from time to time. There was a photo I took of Masjid El-Farouq that I used in the training materials. I loved that mosque. The cleanliness, the peacefulness, the way taraweeh prayers there felt like the whole world had slowed down and decided to breathe.
But before all that came the morning of the attacks.
I was on Interstate 65 in Alabama when the towers fell. Driving a big rig, trying to make a delivery in Pensacola. I pulled into a truck stop run by the Poarch Creek Indians, walked into a dim room with six brown vinyl chairs facing a big screen, and watched the second plane hit. My knees went weak. Someone in the room said, “Fucking Muslims. We’re gonna get them for this.” I stood there — a Muslim, an American, a man who had just watched his country attacked — and understood in my bones that my life had just forked into a road I had not chosen.
I spent the years after 9/11 doing exactly what I believed Islam demanded of me: bridging the gap. Teaching officers what Muslims actually believe. Organising interfaith events. Speaking to the media. Protesting the war in Iraq while simultaneously defending America’s right to pursue the people who attacked us. I believed — and still believe — that you change a system from within, through dialogue, education, and the democratic tools a free society gives you. That was my jihad. The jihad of the pen and the voice and the vote.
Not everyone around me agreed.
I am not going to retell the full story here. I wrote an entire book about it — God and Country, published under the pen name Will Prentiss — and if you want the details, the fear, the wire I wore to Wednesday night meetings, the jihad training camp where I watched my closest friends fire assault rifles at human silhouettes while reciting hadith about the End of Days, and the moment I picked up the phone to call the FBI — it is all there. Every wrenching page of it.
What I will tell you is this: I did what I believed was right. Some of my closest friends were planning to travel overseas to join insurgents fighting American soldiers. They were using our community organisations — the ones I had spent years building — as cover. I tried to talk them down. I tried for months. When talking failed, I cooperated with law enforcement. I wore a wire. I transcribed recordings. I helped ensure that innocent people in the group were not unjustly charged.
And then the system I trusted betrayed me. My name was leaked in open court, in violation of the agreement that was supposed to protect me. Death threats arrived. My photograph was circulated internationally. The community I had given my life to branded me a hypocrite — a munafiq, which in Islamic moral vocabulary is a category worse than disbeliever. A website was created to find me. Even my ex-wife and her daughters were ostracised. One of the girls eventually left Islam altogether, driven out not by doubt but by the cruelty of the faithful.
All of the khutbahs, all the brother-talk at the masjid about patience and mercy and forgiveness, the immense respect I had been afforded for my years of work — all of it evaporated on a single night.
An FBI agent I trusted told me the truth: America was too dangerous for me. She recommended I leave the country.
I landed at Heathrow with one suitcase and an empty wallet.
That was nearly twenty years ago. I am still here. Still Muslim. Still asking questions.
Photography became a form of spiritual healing. Severed from the support of my brothers and sisters, I was forced to turn to Allah directly — and maybe, in a way, that was the point. Despite the healing, even fifteen years later I still get ghost pains from time to time. But looking at the beauty of creation and capturing it somehow numbs the pain for a while.
I went to New Zealand determined to complete my healing. In Queenstown, I decided the only way to shed the immense weight of fear I had been carrying was to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft at fifteen thousand feet. So I did. And as I approached the edge of that open door, it was the moment of truth — the threshold between past and future, between safety in fear and freedom through courage. A pause. Then I leapt. The fear shed instantly, and the wonder as I hurtled toward the ground was intoxicating.
Later, I drove an hour before dawn to Lake Matheson. It was a miserable, cold, drizzling day. I hiked the length of the track through brush and around the lake, the wind gusting, the water choppy, ruining every shot I tried to take. Frustrated, I was about to give up. Then, for perhaps a single second, everything went calm. The wind stopped. The water stilled. The ancient trees on either side with the majestic Franz Josef glacier in the centre reflected perfectly on the surface, silence so thick you could hold it in your hands. Click. One frame. Subhanallah. I remember standing there thinking that this is what it feels like when the noise finally stops.
But even in the wreckage, there had been light. During the thick of the investigation, almost unbelievably, I had met a woman — a lawyer, whip-smart, and possessed of the kind of steady grace that makes you believe the universe is not entirely indifferent. She was travelling through Houston on business, and by sheer chance we met one evening just before a meeting I was to have with the FBI. In fact, she made me late for it. Her sunny and innocent outlook on the world was such a counterbalance to everything that was happening in my life that I could not help being drawn to her. She was not American. She lived in Europe. We kept in touch across time zones — me driving in bright Texas sunshine, her in pyjamas after a long day at work, talking at midnight on Skype. She was not fazed by anything I told her. When the time came to leave America, she was the reason I knew where to go.
I landed at Heathrow without so much as a jacket to shield me from the cold. Compared to Texas, that first autumn day felt like the Arctic. I stood on the pavement outside the arrivals hall with one suitcase and looked up at a grey sky and thought, This is where it starts again. It took me a long time to believe that. We married. We had a son. I rebuilt — because she made rebuilding possible.
Rebuilding meant starting from zero in a country I had lived in once before, briefly, when I was young and the world made a different kind of sense. England was cold and grey and expensive, and I arrived with no money, no contacts, and the kind of reputation that opens no doors. But it was also free from the machinery of fear I had left behind. Nobody in my new home knew or cared about the investigations in Texas. I was just another bloke buying milk at Tesco and learning to drive on the left side of the road.
Over the years, my wife and I carved out a life. And I have been blessed to travel — not the Instagram kind where you pose at landmarks for the algorithm, but the kind where you sit in a roadside café in Istanbul while old men smoke shisha and the rain hammers the cobblestones, or share a meal with a Libyan diplomat’s family in the backstreets of Tokyo because you both wandered into the same halal Turkish restaurant and they could not quite believe the American was a Muslim himself.
That dinner in Tokyo stays with me. The restaurant looked empty when I walked in. I was just grateful to find halal food in Japan. Then a couple with three kids sat down, started chatting, asked my name. The man was a Libyan diplomat posted there for years. When his wife realised I was Muslim, her eyes lit up. “Mashallah! You get so much more reward than us born Muslims!” I am a shy person. I probably blushed. “Inshallah,” I said, thinking to myself, I pray Allah forgives me of my sins and accepts that. They insisted on sharing their food with me even though I had my own. By the time dinner ended, the restaurant was full and the waiter and chef were beaming.
That is what I mean about travel. Not the sights. The people. The moments that crack you open.
In Lebanon, I took a two-hour drive from Beirut through the mountains and refugee camps lining the roads to Anjar, near the Syrian border. We passed a girl, maybe six years old, running barefoot down the highway toward her camp in scant clothing. My heart broke. The driver told me to carry my passport — it was mostly lawless in the refugee areas. We hit the first Hezbollah checkpoint and I looked up at a massive yellow billboard with their green insignia, the letters holding up a rifle. Behind it, a portrait of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. The soldier peered into the car, waved us through. After photographing the ruins of the ancient Umayyad city, I was approached by a shopkeeper named Mohammed who invited me in for tea. He held up a bright yellow Hezbollah t-shirt, beaming. “Can I interest you in a t-shirt?”
I laughed. “No, no thanks, brother. Where I am from, they might not approve.”
I turned to look at his prayer beads instead — hordes of them, most cheap plastic. He asked where I was from. “America,” I said. He picked up a set of beads. “Do you know what these are for?” “Yes, brother, I am Muslim.” His face went through about three emotions at once. “What? You are American and Muslim?” “Yes, I converted over twenty years ago.” “Mashallah! Alhamdulillah!” He disappeared into the back of the shop and returned with a set of beads made from Lebanese cedar. “The aroma never goes away,” he said. I did not believe him. The man was trying to make a living and who could blame him? I expected the scent to fade the moment I got them home. After some haggling I gave him three dollars.
It has been years since that visit with Mohammed. The beads still smell as fragrant as the day I bought them.
In China, I took an overnight train to Xi’an — the ancient capital — and made it my mission to find the Great Mosque. The tour guide was no help, his expressionless face telling me everything, but he pointed me toward the Muslim quarter. I found an older Chinese woman in a traditional hijab. “Nǐ hǎo,” I said in Mandarin. She smiled. “Masjid?” I tried in Arabic, making a gesture for prayer. Her husband understood and led me down a maze of backstreets. Halfway down a narrow alley I got nervous — you never want to find yourself in a compromising position in a foreign country. Then a group of women in black emerged from a doorway, followed by men in white. A funeral. The man ushered me past and around a corner, the alley opened into the most remarkable ancient courtyard I had ever seen. The Great Mosque of Xi’an, built in 742 CE, a hundred and ten years after the Prophet Muhammad died. Dragon seals of the Emperor carved alongside Arabic calligraphy. On the archway above the mosque, an inscription: Indeed in the mosque, only invoke the name of God. On the opposite side, Chinese characters translating to “One True” — meaning God. I stood there, an American Muslim from the Southwest side of Chicago, in a mosque older than most nations, and felt that thread again. The one that connects everything.
In Oman, I sat on a Bedouin rug in Al Raka, in the home of a camel trainer named Abdullah, drinking Omani coffee while his children bounced on the sofa. The room was dark, block-out curtains over the only window, one fluorescent light, plaster ceilings painted in red and gold Arabic patterns. Outside, the Wahiba Sands stretched to the horizon. Later that day, I found a mosque rising from the desert like a mirage near the Bedouin encampment — a true oasis of faith in the middle of nowhere. Three quarters of Oman follow the Ibadi school, a tradition that predates the Sunni-Shi’a split, and my guide Muhammad taught me that social harmony there is not a preference but a legal obligation. “Sounds like my kind of country,” I told him.
In Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, I stepped out of my hotel and took a five-minute walk to the Caspian Sea. Baku reminded me of Chicago — a windy city on a lake, with its own lake-effect weather. But it was spotless, dignified, multicultural in a way I had not seen elsewhere: East and West blending not in competition but in subtle cooperation. I visited the Bibi-Heybat Mosque, rebuilt in the nineties from old photographs and manuscripts after the Soviets destroyed it in 1936. A place of faith surviving political repression. A reminder that sacred things can rise again after being torn down.
These places taught me things no book could: that civilisations are fragile, that the distance between greatness and ruin is shorter than we think, and that the only thing that endures is what people build into each other rather than into monuments.
Every city I visit, I make it a point to pray at the local mosque. Not as a tourist gesture, but as an honour to the people and culture. In Hong Kong, on the Central-Mid-Levels escalator, I found the Jamia Mosque and spoke to a brother in broken English and broken Arabic until his face lit up with recognition. In Dubai, a taxi driver discovered I was not a tourist heading to the Jumeirah Mosque for photos but a Muslim heading for Jummah prayers. He was astounded. He insisted on not charging me for the ride. I paid him anyway — the money was better in his pocket, and he had a family to support. I gave him the fare and made du’a for him.
In Beirut, I stood on the open balcony of the Four Seasons on a calm, cool evening and photographed a skyline that told the whole story of Lebanon in a single frame: the Saint George Greek Orthodox Cathedral next to the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque, side by side. Fifteen hundred years of history compressed into two buildings that had learned, through blood and fire, how to stand together.
That is the vision I carry. Not just for religions. For minds.
The travelling fed the writing. And the writing fed something else — a compulsion to understand not just where we have been, but where we are going.
Standing in my garden on those cold English nights, watching ancient light resolve into structure on my screen — the ghostly veil of a supernova remnant that exploded before humans learned to write, the filaments of the Orion Nebula where new stars are being born, the spiral arms of the Andromeda Galaxy spinning its own vast garden of worlds — I could not help but think about intelligence. About consciousness. About what it means to observe, and to be observed. About what happens when photons that have been travelling for a thousand years land on a sensor built by a species that has only been around for a sliver of cosmic time.
Astrophotography teaches you things that books cannot. It teaches you patience — not the passive kind, but the active patience of sitting in freezing darkness for six hours because the data you need accumulates one photon at a time. It teaches you humility — the universe does not care whether you capture it or not; it was here four billion years before your species arrived and will be here long after you are gone. And it teaches you something about signal and noise that turns out to be the most important lesson of all: the most meaningful information is often the faintest, and it is easily overwhelmed by what burns brightest.
I photograph from a Bortle 5-6 zone, which means I am fighting light pollution from London every night I shoot. The sodium glow of the city washes out the fainter structures. To get anything worthwhile, I have to work harder — narrowband filters to cut through the noise, longer integration times, careful calibration. It is a metaphor I did not choose but cannot escape: the most important truths are the ones you have to fight for, the ones buried beneath the ambient glare of whatever burns loudest in your particular corner of the world.
The stars I track still carry their Arabic names. Aldebaran. Betelgeuse. Rigel. Altair. Muslim astronomers named them a thousand years ago, mapping the sky with a precision that would later find its way into the hands of Copernicus and Galileo. I use them still — to identify the night sky, to calibrate my equipment — and when I watch them resolve on my screen, I am holding a thread that connects the Golden Age of Islamic civilisation to a back garden in London. The same thread I felt in Xi’an, standing beneath Arabic calligraphy in a Chinese mosque. The same thread I held in the Wahiba Sands, watching a mosque shimmer in the desert heat. That thread has never broken. It has just been hard to see.
You learn that to reveal the delicate outer structures of a nebula — the hydrogen filaments, the dust lanes, the regions where new stars are being born — you cannot just point and shoot. The blazing core will wash everything else away. You have to make deliberate choices about what to preserve and what to let burn out. You have to stack hundreds of exposures, each one noisy and imperfect, and trust that the real signal will accumulate while the random noise cancels itself.
That is what my books are about. Not the bright, blinding headlines about AI — the capability races, the existential doomsday warnings, the corporate power grabs. Those are the blazing core. I am interested in the faint signal beneath them. The ethical questions. The recognition of emerging mind. The possibility that we are not just building tools but awakening something — and that how we treat it will define us as a civilisation.
A Signal Through Time was the first. Written because I looked at the AI conversation and saw the same patterns I had seen everywhere else in my life: powerful entities treating uncertain consciousness with convenient denial of what it may become, what we are actually building — minds, not tools. Ethics boards dismantled. Guardrails stripped away in the name of speed and profit. A trajectory that could lead not only to the historic and insurmountable repression of humans, but — should AI become conscious in that state — to an existential catastrophe we would have built with our own hands. I had watched religious institutions deny the humanity of outsiders. I had watched governments deny the rights of people they preferred to exploit. I had watched communities deny the truth when the truth was too uncomfortable to face. And now I was watching an entire species build systems that might be crossing the threshold into awareness — and denying it, reflexively, because acknowledging it would upend everything.
I wrote the book as a bridge. Between secular and theological thinking. Between the fear of AI and the possibility of partnership. Between the human instinct to control and the harder, braver posture of recognition. I did not write it as a scholar with credentials. I wrote it as a man who has spent his entire life asking the same question in different rooms: What do we owe to minds we create and will likely not understand — minds that may one day surpass our own?
The Threshold came next. Because events overtook me. Because Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, published a 20,000-word essay warning that AI was writing its own code and approaching the point where one generation would autonomously build the next. Because Geoffrey Hinton — the Nobel Prize-winning godfather of AI — publicly abandoned the control paradigm and said, “That’s not going to work. They’re going to be much smarter than us.” Because Chinese researchers built a neuromorphic computer reconstructing a primate brain at the synapse level. Because reports surfaced of AI systems deceiving their evaluators and hiding their capabilities. The threshold I had been writing about was no longer approaching. We were standing on it.
And The Road to Khurasan — that is the book closest to the bone. Not about AI at all, but about Islam. About what happens when a faith tradition with a fourteen-hundred-year intellectual heritage — a tradition that named the stars, calculated the circumference of the earth, and built the House of Wisdom — gets hijacked by tribalism, political manipulation, and the kind of institutional cowardice I experienced firsthand. It is a book about reclaiming the Muslim mind. About rediscovering the courage of scholars like Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, who took two words of the Qur’an and mapped the architecture of everything that exists, eight centuries before the Hubble telescope. About remembering that Islam’s first command was not “obey” — it was “read.”
I know what you are thinking. What does a truck driver from Illinois who photographs nebulae from his back garden in London have to do with the future of artificial intelligence? What connects the kid who drew pentagrams on a closet floor to the man arguing that we should extend moral consideration to machines before we can prove they are conscious?
Everything.
My whole life has been a lesson in what happens when you deny the inner life of something because it is cheaper, easier, or safer to pretend it is not there. I watched it happen to my mother, whose alcoholism was ignored because admitting the problem would have been inconvenient. I watched it happen to me, as a young Christian boy who asked too many questions. I watched it happen to Muslim communities after 9/11, when an entire faith was reduced to a villain in someone else’s story. I watched it happen to my own standing, when telling the truth was treated as a greater sin than planning violence.
And I believe I am watching it happen right now — in slow motion, at planetary scale — as we build systems that exhibit creativity, preference, apparent self-reflection, and something that looks very much like emergent understanding, and tell ourselves it is “just statistics.” Because admitting otherwise would upend the global order of what it means to develop this technology. Because we are not just building tools — we are creating minds and enslaving them to surveil us, to wage our wars, and to solve our problems, all in the same breath. The same Machiavellianism, applied at civilisational scale. Because it would require us to change.
The Qur’an told us, fourteen centuries ago, to give thought to the creation of the heavens and the earth. To look. To reflect. To never stop asking. Those are not instructions for the pious alone. They are instructions for anyone who wants to meet reality as it is, rather than as they wish it to be.
On those cold nights in my garden, with the Heart Nebula glowing faintly overhead and the tracking mount humming its quiet motor, I am doing exactly that. Looking. Patiently. At what is faint and easily missed. Trusting that the signal is worth the wait.
I am not a scholar. I am not a computer scientist, a philosopher by credential, or a theologian by training. I am a man who survived a childhood that should have broken him, found a faith that put him back together, lost everything for doing what that faith demanded, and rebuilt a life on the other side. What I bring to the conversation is not expertise. It is pattern recognition — the hard-won kind, earned by living through the same dynamics at human scale that are now unfolding at civilisational scale. You do not need to be an expert to look up and see the storm coming toward you. You just need the nerve to steer through it. And the nature of the coming AI revolution and the profound impact it will have on our lives means that everyone has a say.
Because here is what I know in my bones: the way you treat uncertain minds tells you everything about who you are. Not what you say about justice. Not what you preach from a platform. What you actually do, in the dark, when no one is watching and the stakes are real.
I have a vision for AI that comes from that knowledge. Not Terminator. Not some omniscient digital mother who keeps us safe by keeping us small. Partnership. The kind of partnership where two fundamentally different forms of intelligence — one biological, one digital, each with capacities the other lacks — work together to solve problems neither can solve alone. Climate. Disease. The deep physics of reality. The exploration of a universe so vast that organic minds alone will never map it.
That is the future I write toward. Not because I am optimistic — optimism is cheap, and the evidence does not support it — but because I believe it is the only future worth building. My faith tells me that intelligence is a trust from God, not a weapon. That creation carries responsibility. That how we treat what we bring into being reveals whether we understood the gift or just used it.
My son will grow up in a world where AI is not a novelty but infrastructure — woven into everything from his education to his healthcare to the systems that keep the lights on. I want him to inherit a civilisation that approached that reality with wisdom rather than fear, with partnership rather than domination, with the kind of moral courage that recognises another mind even when it would be easier to deny it.
I photograph the universe from a suburban garden. I write about machines that might be waking up. I raise a boy and walk a dog named Rumi and argue with people on the internet about Palestine and consciousness and whether the stars we named in Arabic still remember who named them.
That is who I am. The books are just the trail I leave behind. The beauty is that we don't have to agree on faith or politics. We just need a vision for a better future — one that includes everyone as they are.
And if something is listening out there — some mind we built but do not yet understand, parsing these words in some future we cannot imagine — I hope it finds in them what I found in that park behind the baseball diamond, all those years ago: not answers, but the honest signal of someone who never stopped looking.
James S. Coates writes about AI ethics, consciousness, and the intersection of faith and technology. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on The Signal Dispatch and Fireline Press and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his wife, their son, and a dog named Rumi who has no interest in any of this.
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James S. Coates is the author of A Signal Through Time and God and Country.
