AI, fungi, and the future of enterprise tech: Industry vet Bill Hilf on his debut novel, ‘The Disruption’

Bill Hilf has spent decades working inside some of the biggest names in tech — bringing open source software into Microsoft when it was heresy, running Paul Allen’s giant portfolio of investments and philanthropies, and now chairing the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) as it bucks the proprietary trend.

So when he wanted to make a point about how the industry is approaching AI, he did what seemed only natural. He wrote a science fiction novel.

“My start in my tech career was because of science fiction,” he explained, citing childhood favorites like “Star Wars” and “WarGames” as inspirations, as well as authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. “That was the shining light of what was possible.”

His new book, “The Disruption,” is a sci-fi thriller about an AI built on living biology — quantum chips fused with fungal networks — that escapes human control and keeps running for decades. But underneath the plot is the argument Hilf has been making in his other life: AI isn’t a product, it’s an environment, and the industry should be thinking about it the way ecologists think about the world.

Hilf sees AI as something genuinely new: a complex organism, not a siloed technology. It’s effectively the first time, he argues, that humanity is creating a second species on the planet at this scale. Because of that, he says tech leaders should approach it with a fuller understanding of what they’re up against.

“The strongest systems on the planet today are actually not us,” he said. “We’re relatively weak compared to what nature has been doing here for 400 or 500 million years.”

Takeaways for today: In practical terms, he said, this means tech leaders need to stop fixating on which model is best this week or next, and start thinking about what happens to their broader systems when an AI tool changes meaningfully or fails completely at some point in the future.

“If I were in an enterprise or advising an enterprise, I would take less focus on trying to chase the day-by-day news of which model is slightly ahead today, which one is higher quality,” he said. “I’d put a lot more focus on what happens when it goes into that heterogeneous environment, and how do you survive that.”

He compares the effects to those of an invasive species, like a snail that hitches a ride on a boat in Washington, ends up in a lake in Idaho, and quietly disrupts the ecosystem before anyone notices.

This perspective is informed in part by Hilf’s other role: chairing American Prairie, a Montana-based nonprofit assembling one of the largest U.S. nature reserves. He spends his time moving between meetings on AI research and meetings on rewilding 3.2 million acres of American grassland.

The book: “The Disruption” opens in 2064, after GAIA (the Global Artificial Intelligence Accelerator) has been solving problems that had stumped humanity for generations: curing disease, producing clean fuel from plastic waste, and engineering dark-antimatter propulsion to unlock interstellar travel.

Then GAIA slips out of human control, and civilization begins to collapse. The story jumps 37 years forward, into the early 22nd century, with humanity now split between small agrarian villages on a damaged Earth and a high-tech colony on a planet four light-years away.

On both worlds, people start to suspect that what happened in 2064 isn’t actually over.

It’s the first installment in a planned trilogy. Hilf says the books move from dystopia to what he calls “protopia,” exploring a range of possible AI futures rather than landing on a single doom-or-glory verdict.

So is he ultimately a doomer, or an optimist? Hilf said he gets that question a lot. “And I always laugh,” he said. “I wish we had that choice. AI will be all of those things.”

“The Disruption,” by W.H. Hilf, is available now from Atmosphere Press. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Audio editing by Curt Milton.