Silo’s Creator Says Same-Day AI Movies Are Coming Soon

If you believe Hugh Howey, the television adaptation of his postapocalyptic book trilogy Silo may never get released, despite the millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours Apple TV+ has thrown at the production. Sure, the dystopian drama—which stars Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, and Rashida Jones and was produced by Justified creator Graham Yost—has a release date of May 5, and the show has already premiered at Cannes and in London, but the author still isn’t ready to call it a done deal.

“To be honest,” Howey says, “it's still a gradual process. I think it'll probably hit me on June 30, the day the finale airs. Even when I walked onto the set of the show for the first time in England, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, are we really doing this?’”

It’s an understandable feeling, given Silo’s long road to the screen. The series first emerged via a short story, “Wool,” in 2011, which gradually grew in size, scope, and popularity as more of Howey’s universe began to unfold via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing system. In 2012 it was optioned by 20th Century Fox and set to become a movie, with Ridley Scott attached as one of the producers. That deal was thwarted thanks to Disney’s acquisition of Fox, and the project shuffled off to series limbo at AMC.

A couple of years later, it moved once again, to Apple TV+, where Yost, Ferguson, and director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) were attached, and the rest is history. This month, fans will be thrust into a world of subterranean crime, intrigue, and falsehoods, all buried well underground. WIRED talked to Howey about Silo’s long gestation, the recent wave of AI mania, and why everyone's got dystopia fever.

WIRED: You’ve been working on a potential Silo adaptation for more than a decade now. What does it feel like to finally have this out in the world?

Hugh Howey: In the last week, I've gotten really excited. In the past, I’ve been nervous about readers being satisfied, and about whether we can get people who aren't familiar with the books interested in the show. But about a week ago, I started getting the first messages from people who have seen all 10 episodes, and everyone who reached out to me has been raving about it.

You’ve written extensively about artificial intelligence, including a piece you did for WIRED. Where are you at with AI now?

I think there's a mix of excitement and fear out there now, but I lean more toward excitement. I think people that I’ve talked to who are scared didn't realize this was going to happen.

It’s really exploded in the public consciousness in the past few months, but it’s something you’ve been thinking about for years.

I've been writing and blogging about this for a while, though I said I didn't know what the timing would be. I think on my blog three or four years ago, I said that in the next 10 years, a computer would write a book that's indistinguishable from that of a human author. Some people didn't believe that, and so now they're really scared, whereas I’ve been gradually getting more comfortable with the idea for over a decade.

Sci-fi publishers are already dealing with AI-generated work. As a sci-fi writer, does that give you pause?

I think that these are inevitable developments, but how we use them and approach them is what's not inevitable. We could be optimistic and hopeful and creative with these tools, or we can pull our hair out and be upset and stressed out about them. That's what we can choose, and I'm going to choose to be excited about something that we've created together, cumulatively, because [generative AI tools are] basically based on all of our writing together, even people who don't think of themselves as writers. It's learned from you.

A lot of people are afraid that AI will take their jobs. As an author, is there a part of you that’s like, “Well, to tell something to write a book in the style of Hugh Howey, it still has to know the work of Hugh Howey”?

The reason I'm not scared is that when I got into writing, I never thought I'd make a living at it. I worked in a bookstore while I was trying to make it as a writer, and every week, thousands and thousands of books would come out. We couldn’t even order all of them for our bookstore. We'd go through catalogs this thick and only order 20 from one publisher and 20 from another publisher.

The idea that there was no competition and if I just wrote a book, I could make a living—that’s absurd. Almost none of us should have a career as writers, and the fact that we do is a blessing. The reason I got into writing is because I love telling stories, and just because an AI will do it better than me doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy it. I love playing chess, but a computer will beat me 100 out of 100 times at chess. That doesn't mean I don't want to play it or watch other people play or participate in it.

True, but you’re not playing chess to survive.

We have to let go of the idea that we should be able to support ourselves with something we love, and that’s its meaning. We should do things because we love them, and in a perfect world, some people will make a living at that. Other people like me will have to work in a bookstore or find other ways to pay the bills while we do our art.

You recently tweeted, “We are less than a year or two away from giving AI a film script and then watching that film the same day. Production costs are going to go to ZERO. Within 5 years, great-looking films will be made this way. Within 20 years, almost all films will be made this way.”

With the writer's strike, it’s interesting to think about how something like AI can affect the writing world, but doesn’t your statement discount the work of costumers and props people and grips and cinematographers and set builders, and so on? Those people might be living their passion, but they might also just be doing their jobs.

We have seen that as technology gets developed, some jobs go away. We have many fewer horses and mules in the US now than we did 100 years ago. Buggy-whip makers all disappeared, and everything to do with tractors and automobiles flourished. The jobs that we have today, most of them didn't exist 200 years ago. Most people were in food production. And yet somehow unemployment is still very low.

Automation was going to take jobs, but so far it's only changed jobs. We have to worry about the heartache and the discomfort of people who have to transition to new jobs, because that's real, but I think the fear of jobs going away might be misplaced. We just have to do other things.

There is some discussion in Congress and among tech thinkers about what regulations should be imposed on the industry. Are there regulations or guidelines that you’d like to see put in place?

I'm shocked at how poorly we've managed technology from a policy standpoint. I got to spend an entire day with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and I asked him, “What would you do differently if you could go back and do it all again?” Without pause, he said, “user login.” He said that you should have to log in to get on the internet, and then, once you've proven who you are, you can just get onto any website you want. You wouldn’t need credentials for every individual website, and he thinks that would solve a lot of problems.

I think failing to cover questions of identity online is a political failure, as is ownership of our data, because we’ve been not worrying about that until it's way too late. We've all got too much data out there, and we're probably going to repeat the same mistakes when it comes to AI.

Yeah?

We have people who are too old and don't know anything about technology making policy, and so we're going to have entrepreneurs who are inventing the technology create policy through user license agreements, and everyone's just going to click Accept, and that's going to become the new norm. We're going to inherit that for a long time.

I personally don't worry about what AI is going to do to us. I worry what people with bad intentions will do with not even the best AI.

You have given other authors the freedom to write within the Silo universe. How did you come to terms with being hands-off, especially when people were entering the sphere and universe that you created?

Well, you can't stop fan fiction. I think the thing that I did that no one had really done before is that when the people reached out to me about writing fan fiction, I was comfortable with it. They don't have to ask me, you know.  You can write anything you want. I can write about Kirk and Spock and put it on my blog right now, and no one can do anything, because I'm not making money off of it.

And you encouraged people to make money off of their Silo works.

At the time that Kindle Worlds was really happening, I was very interested in as many writers as possible earning as much of a living as possible. I loved self-publishing. I loved the fact that we could just put stories up there. It doesn't have to make you a life-changing amount of money, but it could buy your coffee, and I was a fan of that.

Silo can be described as a sort of dystopian tale. Why do you think that we, as a media-consuming public and a creative public, are drawn to tales of dystopia or of the future gone awry?

Silo fits into the dystopian basket, but it also fits into the postapocalyptic basket. It takes place after a society has collapsed and something new is trying to take its place, though it seems very tenuous and temporary. Postapocalyptic stories are pretty new, but at their heart they’re really the oldest kind of story there is.

The very first stories we hear as kids are these lost-in-the-woods tales like Hansel and Gretel. Don't wander off, because there’s no civilization there and bad things can happen. It's an evolutionary urge to tell those kinds of stories because they’re survival stories.

The Iliad and The Odyssey are these kinds of apocalyptic survival stories. In the 20th century, Westerns exploded, and they were all about this kind of liminal space where law starts to break down and tribalism takes over. How do you survive there?

Right, and then …

The problem we had is that eventually we covered the whole Earth. We had satellites, and we mapped it all. So how do we tell these stories? We have to put them in space and make them about survival on the moon or on Mars. Maybe we destroy society with an apocalypse? And then we say, “OK, now it’s about surviving the zombie apocalypse or the vampire apocalypse.”

Dystopian stories seem modern, but they're doing the exact same thing that stories have always done. Here's a person out of their comfort zone. That's why a parent has to die at the beginning of almost every Disney story. It's not because we hate parents, but because we need that protagonist to lose their foundation and as a child. Your parents are your civilization, so take the parents away, and now you're existing outside of civilization. Silo and Bambi are the exact same story.

They certainly both involve a lot of visual effects. Speaking of: The rendering of the actual silo in Silo is so impressive. Is it how you’d always envisioned it?

Yeah, because it was about getting the shaft and the stairs correct, and the space and the bridges between them. I get so many questions from readers like, “How does this work?” I would even do meetups with readers when I was on a book tour, and almost every time, in a bar or somewhere in a restaurant, there'd be napkins where everyone was drawing their version of the central staircase.

The version that we came up with for the show is very close to my original version, which we did in the graphic novel for the story. It was easier to show that to production people than to try to explain it, and in the writers room, we all had the graphic novels, so that image just started taking hold. I'm lucky that the overall structure of the silo is very much my original vision.

This interview has been edited and condensed.