Towards a Quantified Future

It’s official: The German edition of Quantified is live in the Kindle Store! I can scarcely believe it myself, to be honest, as at the time of my last post I was knee-deep in the plot of Support, and I (perhaps arrogantly) assumed that I was closer to the finish line in that project than in Quantified. This assumption has now been invalidated.

So what’s Quantified about, then? As I hinted at in my previous announcement, this is quite the peculiar tale, one where we’re forced to shadow a futuristic consultant. The official blurb of the book is currently as follows:

27 overdue deliverables. 55 new email threads. 32 scheduling conflicts. 2 job transitions within the last hour. Business as usual for Martin Lange, who’s neither particularly thrilled nor agitated about it. It’s been a long time since he was particularly thrilled or agitated about anything, actually. For he lives an optimized existence.

Decades of violent ups and downs in the gig economy have taught Martin to put his faith in the god AI Sandra. There is not much of a choice, really, as in the year 2048 every aspect of the human experience is fully quantified and subjected to ruthless optimization.

But when Sandra goes silent during a routine flight to Frankfurt, Martin is suddenly thrown back into a terrifying reality that doesn’t abide by numbers …

Concerning the English edition of the book, the translation process will, naturally, take some time. It is probably too optimistic to reckon with a completion date ending in 26. More news will follow as we make progress on that front.

Of course, no thought piece on AI would be complete without some actual AI slop, so here’s a snapshot of how Gemini imagined (if one can call it that) some of the book’s characters: