Image source, Courtesy of Julio Rojas
If a vacancy for an expert on the end of the world were to open, Julio Rojas (Santiago de Chile, 1965) would be the perfect candidate.
His fictional audio series "Case 63", released in the midst of the covid pandemic, became an immediate phenomenon. The story of a time traveler on a mission to save the world from a deadly virus seemed too close to reality.
It became Spotify's most listened to podcast in Latin America, and less than two years later the English version was released, starring Oscar winner Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac.
Since then, Rojas has not stopped replicating his success in audio series and books that imagine the future with a high dose of realism: AIs that get out of control, societies in which work and money no longer exist, children who are raised by machines.
BBC Mundo spoke with the writer within the framework of the HAY Festival Arequipa 2026 about his latest book, "The problem at the end of the world", and his audio series Almanac 2035, two different looks at the future that start from a deep (and sometimes ironic) look at current technology.
image copyrightSebastián Utreras
Your recent work revolves around imagining the future, sometimes closer, sometimes further away, sometimes more optimistic, sometimes catastrophic. But reading you I thought that you are actually more obsessed with the present, aren't you?
Completely. I think we are surrounded by seed events that are invisible, they are minuscule. They don't generate headlines, but if you follow that route you realize that they are turning points that will completely shape the future.
The idea that the future is a separate system from now is strange.
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Definitely, we are part of the future and the foundations for that establishment have already been generated. Therefore, you have to write about now in order to write science fiction.
In your stories almost everything is a question of information. In "The problem of the end of the world" there are those who know that the end of the world is going to end and those who do not know...
Well, finally it's the big gap.
For quite a few thousand years, there was a physical divide, people who could carry a weight and people who couldn't; then, a gender gap, economic inequalities...
But the real big gap in the future is that someone will know how to use technology and obtain relevant information, cross-check data that is impossible for the rest to understand, and someone will be a victim of that privileged information. It is what is already happening.
For example, in "The Problem of the End of the World" we see a fierce discrepancy between people who handle information and people who find themselves wandering in a kind of desert of false information and ignorance regarding the future. This happens in all three stories.
In recent months, real concern has been raised about the implications of Artificial Intelligence, which appear to be of a size that few of us anticipated. For you, who have been thinking and writing for years about this technological roller coaster we are riding and what a society controlled by machines is going to be like, what scares you about AI?
Everything about Artificial Intelligence scares me.
We are tinkering with a type of fire that cannot be controlled, and the implications are gigantic.
With nuclear weapons and viruses, for example, there happens to be a consensus that they are dangerous. We are afraid of them, and that protects us. And there is legislation, too.
Only someone very insane could set off nuclear bombs or open a class 5 biosafety laboratory and release a virus.
The problem with AI is that it is seductive. It is a technology that captures us, that makes an empathetic capture, that makes us fall in love. Literally, we fall in love with it.
You don't know how many people write to me telling me that they have significant relationships with an AI.
It is a symptom and a sign of human loneliness. We are in a world that is too complex, and the only way to evade that fierce, violent, predatory, hypercapitalist and extractivist complexity is shelter. But since no one protects us, AIs are there to do it.
Then I can tell him: "I had a bad day." —"Let's see, Julio, why did you have a bad day? Tell me."
That siren song is much more dangerous, because it embraces us, makes us believe in the emptiness of its own existence and can destroy us.
Image source, SUMA | Penguin Books
How could it destroy us?
In two ways.
One is that a group of humans intentionally mishandle AI, as we are already seeing in the case of companies that make military drones with AI, which is absolutely immoral and crazy.
And then the second does not have to do with the AI wanting to destroy us by itself, as Hollywood cinema has told us, but that it can basically destroy us due to a poorly placed order, due to a misaligned interpretation.
And they are both very stupid.
But what terrifies me most is not that AI will take control. The thing is that we may all be fascinated by technology forever, in a kind of infinite scroll of pleasure.
Almanac 2035 is almost a scientific report. Everything in that future that you imagine is part of an investigation into the abysses close to which current science is walking.
Yes, I had a number of notebooks of things that I asked scientists, I used AI to give me cutting-edge papers, I have also been subscribed to some scientific journals for a long time.
From all of that, I got what we were talking about: seed moments. And I chose the ones that I considered could be most transformative.
People who listen to Almanac 2035 end up with a very strange feeling, which is what I want to put on the table: "Wait a little. This is not going to come suddenly, from zero to one. No, this is happening now. Now is the time."
Which of these scientific advances surprised you the most?
Well, the issue of longevity is not minor. For generations and generations we have grown older. Someone who is 62 looks 62, someone who is 87 looks 87, and someone who is 32 looks 32.
And it's rare for someone who is 87 to have a girlfriend or boyfriend who is 22.
But is it strange because of his body? By your mind? Because of your experience? Because? What makes it disruptive?
And then giant questions come: what if everyone looks the same? What happens if someone who is 87 or 122 looks like someone who is 38 and dates someone who is 36?
We are talking about the body becoming homogenized, becoming a standard product, a commodity. And the implications are monstrous and enormous.
Your grandmother can get a longevity treatment with CRISPR-Cas9, nanobots, telomere lengthening and gene editing as a gift for her 87th birthday.
And suddenly, she appears as a very attractive woman who puts the whole family in tension (laughs).
image copyrightAudiobooks Issuer
This topic of longevity seems to interest many billionaires and the powerful, right? Last year, a microphone picked up a private conversation between Xi and Putin and what they were talking about was immortality...
Immortality is the great human theme.
The first story of humanity, which is the epic of Gilgamesh, is the quest for longevity. That should enlighten us: we are a species obsessed with defeating death.
Many of the things that are happening now due to the disruption of Artificial Intelligence—personalized medicine, organoids—have to do with a group of billionaires having a fierce fear of death.
The first immortals are going to be them. A complete dystopia.
In "The Problem of the End of the World" you tell three possible ends of the world. The first two are more or less intuitive: an artificial superintelligence that ends everything and a virus that threatens humanity. But in the third story the world is going to end due to an "ontological clash." What would be an ontological shock?
When we talk about the end of the world, everyone usually talks about meteorites, crises of confidence, viruses, Artificial Intelligence, a supertsunami...
But I want to tell you a little story. 3 years ago I was hired as a scriptwriter to go in search of a lost photo. It was a photo of a UFO that had been used in a poster for The X Files, the iconic series with Gillian Anderson.
I went to Zurich to find the person who had supposedly taken that photo, an old man named Billy Meier, and interviewed him. And he told me that the photo had reached the hands of the Vatican and then the CIA.
So, I looked for the people who had something to do with the photo.
Whether or not you believe in extraterrestrial life, the big question is: if there is information, true or false, why isn't it all released?
And the Washington lawyers I talked to, the Vatican people I talked to, everywhere told me because of "ontological shock."
According to them, we are not prepared as a species for our conceptual floor that we are alone in the universe to collapse.
If it really happened like in the movie Arrival that an inverted egg arrives and is placed in front of several cities, people would stop paying, working, educating themselves, loving, people would start throwing themselves out of the windows.
Something catastrophic could happen, without even knowing who is behind that door. That doesn't matter. It matters that we were alone in the universe and now we are no longer alone.
Well, that's the ontological shock, and I wanted to put it in a fairly realistic way, like a thesis from a repentant Silicon Valley technoguru.
Image source, AFP via Getty Images
Not all your stories are catastrophic. There are people in those futures who value the things of their time, who perhaps look at the past with nostalgia but it doesn't necessarily seem better to them. What reasons do we have left to be optimistic about the future?
I think we have to think about good futures. If not, we're going straight to a cliff.
It cannot be that all the news regarding the future is the possibility of AI destroying us, the possibility of nuclear war, the possibility of a dead-end technocracy. We have to have some light at the end of the tunnel.
Fiction creates a space so that we can at least see a path.
You, being a writer, have become an important voice for thinking about the future, beyond literature and entertainment. You have even worked as a consultant for technology companies...
It's just so strange what is happening regarding the future...
I was just in China, at the Beijing robotics fair. Science fiction for a long time suggested that humanoid robots would exist. Now, what will be the function of a humanoid robot within a home? What happens if the robot discovers something inappropriate inside the home? Complaint? Call the police?
It is all full of ethical and philosophical problems regarding technology.
So, many companies want to know what science fiction says about where the future is going.
That tells you that we are in an age of confusion. Philosophers must be very happy because everyone started philosophizing at the table again.
I think that is the only great news of the moment, that we thought again what it means to be a collaborative human species.
image copyrightGetty Images
Is the discussion about what the future will be like in the right hands?
The surprising thing is that in the West we let a handful of people completely manage our future.
In China it is different because there is more open source, it is more collaborative, but it is still controlled, in that case by the State.
Our future, our lives, the design of the next generations, is controlled by a group of people who can be counted on the fingers of their hands.
And none of them are characterized by being sensible or having a low ego.
They are quite childish, egotistical, excessive. Marvel movie villain children.
Now, the good thing about this catastrophe is that they believe they can keep the fire inside a box.
But we're actually a couple of years away from everyone being able to have their own artificial intelligence without paying any of their corporations.
Obviously, if you want the easy way, you pay 20 dollars and that's it. But the fire cannot be kept restricted and everyone will have their torch.
We have become accustomed to science fiction being written by European writers or seeing it in American films. You are doing science fiction from the south...
The thing is that the implications of a technological disruption do not admit borders, but they do admit perspectives.
I observe the phenomenon from the edge, from the south.
Science fiction is not restricted to any type of territory, because we are all going to experience the future, whether we want to or not.
And we better reflect on that in the south, because we can give better answers perhaps than those who are inside the fish tank.
And finally, Julio, how do you not feel like you are becoming a conspiracy nut about the end of the world?
(laughs)
I think I'm going crazy, definitely.
Now, welcome that, because we are in a kind of complete homogenization of thought.
Let's see, there are those who use conspiracy to validate horrible, hateful speeches and a kind of anti-collective stance and terror of the other. The typical far-right prepper who makes a bunker and saves himself with his own weapons.
I also do not agree with the flat-earther anti-vaccines, who is suspicious to me because when science falls, critical thinking also collapses.
But, without a doubt, in a world where we cannot know what is true and what is a lie, one has to doubt, because doubt will save us.
I am on the side of the doubter.
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