Growing up in Pacific Palisades, California, where he currently resides, Scott Grusky has had a long history with tech. In the mid-’90s, he wrote freelance articles for several publications catching on to the emerging possibilities of the World Wide Web, like Internet World and eventually, the Los Angeles Times. His work focused mostly on people using the web to find employment. As Grusky says, “It was really novel, way back then, just to post your resume and get a job.”
Thirty years later, and after working as a web developer himself, Grusky is writing again about the potential of connected technology in his SF novel, Zero Percenters. A longtime fan of SF, Grusky has always been attracted to authors like Philip K. Dick or Aldous Huxley, who used futuristic ideas to create social satire and delve deeper into existential questions.
Readers will certainly recognize Huxley’s meditations on futuristic utopias in the world-changing events that Grusky concocts for Zero Percenters. At the beginning of his novel, an Apple- or Google-esque tech company uses AI to “digitize” human existence. Seemingly overnight, the entire world adapts the technology, and people replace their bodies with “shells,” which eliminates hunger, aging, sleep, war, and negative effects to the environment.
While other writers have toyed with the potential of downloading our consciousness onto the web to live forever, Grusky’s concept of humanoid shells is a way to make the debate over these technological advancements more tangible. “I just thought that it would open the discussion to these possibilities in a way that is much more exciting,” Grusky says, “as opposed to us all being free-floating electrons in a computer.” The shells and the humanoid assistants that come with them certainly are exciting since they can shape-shift and fly, but they also spark the author’s primary concern over what it would mean to lose our physical limitations.
For Grusky, current discourse on AI usually reverts back to concerns over privacy abuses or totalitarianism. “I don’t think these concerns are insignificant or even improbable,” Grusky says. “But I also feel like sometimes they get overblown…and part of the discussion [is] not really being addressed to my satisfaction.” The discussion Grusky hopes to have is about a world in which AI and digital bodies have actually achieved their most altruistic intentions. “It’s the famous question Bill Gates has asked,” Grusky says. “ ‘How will we find meaning as work and other basic needs in life are addressed by artificial intelligence?’ ”
In Zero Percenters,the protagonist, Anja Lapin, is confronted with this question when she emerges from a disconnected hiking sabbatical in Transylvania to discover that the world has completely changed in her absence. After rescuing a man named Gunnar from an avalanche, the two become an inverted Adam and Eve, the last two people on the planet who are still physically human and reluctant to make the change:
They stared into each other’s eyes, simultaneously absorbing the irony, the paradox, the cosmic absurdity of this particular moment in time, this particular juncture in humanity, in evolution, in the unfolding of the universe.
“I know there’s every reason in the world to go digital,” said Gunnar. “I’m living proof of that. So how come I want to even less than I did before the avalanche?”
Anja shook her head in empathy.
“The fact that everyone has reached their conclusion so easily seems to make it even harder for me to reach mine,” he continued. “I feel like there must be something wrong with me because on paper it’s so obvious.”
“Trust me,” said Anja. “I get that.”
At the heart of Anja and Gunnar’s eventual debate on whether or not to digitize is a logical quandary Grusky found while reflecting on his imagined utopia. In his world with no physical limitations, there is also no special treatment or discrimination. Everyone has become equal. “If people are no longer caught up in wondering who they are in the traditional sense of identity, they can be anybody,” Grusky says. “But if we were all essentially truly equal, then the million-dollar question is: Who are we?”
To find their answers, Anja and Gunnar set out into nature, embarking on the physical challenge of a difficult hike through the Chilean Andes. They meditate and commune with the mountains, which Grusky describes in lush detail, fleshing out their questions of what it would mean to lose these physical connections and constraints as their digitized friends soar above their heads. Thanks to these contemplative interludes, Zero Percenters becomes, as Kirkus Reviews states, “a cloud-minded but detailed spiritual parable that eschews the trappings of hard SF.”
The mountain hike plays such a large role in the book that Grusky has started to organize readings of Zero Percenters that take place during hikes in Malibu, Big Sur, Aspen, and even the Swiss Alps. Although he admits that the natural, philosophical passages have raised eyebrows from some SF fans, he maintains that, “It’s not really about climbing a mountain….It’s about making this difficult decision and how are you going to be better equipped to make it by being grateful for the world and seeing what it really is?”
Grusky himself has always been at the forefront of new technologies. In addition to his internet writing and years of developing websites, his very first job after completing a master’s in economics at Harvard was researching more efficient electricity meters—technology that has now started to appear. With his novel, he’s looking forward once again but trying to ask questions that SF and tech blogs may miss when imagining the future: “What will we be doing? What will we be using to occupy our time? Who will we become?” Grusky asks. “That was the foundation for my novel.”
Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.