Imagining the Future: One Story at a Time
S3 Episode 12 | August 20, 2026
What happens when a kid who devours science fiction novels grows up to earn a PhD in robotics... and then writes the books he once dreamed of?
Daniel H. Wilson, a Cherokee citizen and Carnegie Mellon University alumnus, has spent his career moving between two worlds: building intelligent machines and imagining what they might become.
Wilson earned his master's in machine learning and PhD in robotics at CMU, drawn by the university's curiosity-driven culture. He wrote his first book, How to Survive a Robot Uprising, while still a grad student, defending his thesis one day and leaving on a book tour the next. That launched a career that includes the bestselling Robopocalypse (optioned by Steven Spielberg), The Andromeda Evolution (the authorized sequel to Michael Crichton's classic), and his newest novel, Hole in the Sky, a first-contact story grounded in his Cherokee heritage and the ancient mound-building civilization of Spiro, Oklahoma.
In this episode, Wilson traces his path from a used bookstore in North Tulsa to writing best-selling novels and screenplays, reflects on his unusual stint as an Air Force "threat forecaster," and explains why he sees today's AI landscape as both exciting and alarming. He also unpacks a powerful idea from Hole in the Sky: that indigenous technologies, dismissed by colonizers as primitive, were in fact sophisticated systems built for balance rather than exponential growth, and what that contrast might teach us about building technology today.
It's a wide-ranging conversation about science fiction as an early-warning system, the difference between technology that exploits us and technology that could make us better, and what it means to keep imagining the future responsibly.