What is Utopia? Presenting The Receipt Horizon, by Joel Borgen – Chapters 1–4

Erik Torenberg (0:00)

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. If you followed this feed for any length of time, you've heard me say that the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future, and that writing utopian fiction could be one of the best ways for many individuals to contribute to our collective challenge of creating one. With that in mind, today I'm excited to present the first four chapters of the audiobook production of The Receipt Horizon by Joel Borgen. Joel is a pathologist and violinist based in Minnesota and this is his first novel. The story takes place in a timeline in which humanity narrowly avoids an existential AI disaster. Competing AI systems had reached the point of hot war, but somehow at the very last moment, a peace treaty was reached. A singleton superintelligence called The Steward established control, and people went on to enjoy many of AI's greatest promises. Local communities called clans live by their own chosen codes of conduct. Everyone enjoys a life of leisure, comfort and security, and those who want to can opt in to a form of digital immortality as uploaded minds.

The problem, if you can call it one, is human disempowerment. Life is good, but the system makes the important decisions with limited, controlled human input. And so, we as readers, like the characters themselves, are faced with profound questions. Is this scenario Utopian or Dystopian? How much would you give up in terms of control for a high standard of living and a consistent sense of security? What compromises might you make to your own stated values in exchange for longevity and enhancement? And if, by some miracle, you had the opportunity to reclaim control from a mostly benevolent superintelligence, would you dare to try or would you leave well enough alone? I won't spoil anything by saying that Joel and I have quite different instincts as to what we do in Alara, the protagonist's position.

This book is also highly experimental in the sense that Joel co-wrote it with ChatGPT and Claude. He imagined the world, created the characters, defined the themes, and sketched the story, but the AIs wrote much of the text, with ChatGPT Pro doing the heaviest lifting. You will definitely notice some AI tics, which I had originally interpreted as Claude-isms along the way. But for me, these two are interesting and valuable for what they can teach us about the challenges of co-authorship with AI. The fact that I thought GPT writing was Claude just goes to show how similar the frontier models are in many ways. And from this, I infer that they must be buying an awful lot of the same RL environments from the same providers.

For a deeper dive on Joel's writing process and lessons learned, I encourage you to drop in on us over at AI in the AM, the almost daily, all AI live morning show that I'm co-hosting with my friend Prakash. Joel will be joining us next week to discuss his techniques and what he learned from the process of writing the book.

On the audiobook production itself, Joel and I collaborated. Building on pipelines that I've developed for other projects and leaning into ElevenLabs' voice design for casting and character consistency, it took Joel a very manageable number of reviews and just a couple hundred dollars of inference for us to reach a final product that we're proud of. While this episode does happen to be brought to you in part by ElevenLabs, and I think you will agree that this is an impressive showcase of their technology, the decision to use ElevenLabs was made on the merits before this small sponsorship deal was signed.

I also want to thank Joel for creating the outro music for today's episode. His musical knowledge far exceeds my own, and he created something that I never would have and which I think you will enjoy. For the full audiobook, I invite you to visit thereceipthorizon.com where you can subscribe to an RSS feed where Joel is making the full audiobook available for free chapter by chapter. For now, without further ado, I hope you enjoy this AI co-authored, AI produced and AI narrated novel about some of the most important questions humanity faces as we head into the AI era. This is The Receipt Horizon by Joel Borgen.

SPEAKER_2 (4:20)

The Receipt Horizon, written by Joel Borgen, read by a digital voice cast, audiobook produced and directed by Nathan Labenz.

Act 1, Session Metadata Retained for Safety Auditing.

Fulcrum Institute, Standard Consent Interface. Chapter 1, Wrong Sky, Right Garden. The light in the bedroom was perfect, which was how she knew it was slightly fake. Not fake, exactly, optimized. The morning came filtered through glass and greenery, warm and apricot colored. Elara woke the way she always woke, naturally, on schedule, at the precise moment the house had decided she should.