Why Did Kevin Roose Write the AGI Chronicles?

Kevin Roose wrote The AGI Chronicles because he was afraid the record of this era would vanish. He loves histories of the Wright brothers, the electrification of rural America, and the PC revolution, and those books rest on notes kept at the time: lab notes from the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, and letters between the Wright brothers, their friends, and their business partners. Reporting on AI every day convinced him nothing similar would be left.

The people building these systems are private-company employees, not government employees required to preserve their mail. Lawyers set Signal messages and Slack messages to auto-delete after a period, so each year would erase artifacts he thinks will matter later. The researchers are too busy to keep notes. They are grinding, in his phrase, to build the machine god. He has never officially been a historian. With a ringside seat, he got some of them to sit down and tell the stories, much of it on background so they were protected from the consequences, and he put that material where future readers could find it.