Philip Cahill on Superintelligence, Telepathy, and the Evolution of Thought

The 33rd episode of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory asks the question: What happens when intelligence stops looking human?Mookie sits down with speculative fiction author Philip Cahill—longtime contributor to the annual anthology circuit and author of Noystria—to tear into one of the biggest questions in science fiction: not whether AI will get smarter, but how alien that intelligence might actually become.Cahill’s work goes beyond the “robots take over" trope, and explores something stranger and more compelling: post-human minds, telepathic communication, and the collapse of language itself. His stories imagine a world where ideas move directly between minds, where meaning becomes richer than words, and where humans are no longer the dominant interpreters of reality.Mookie and Philip cover: The limits of today’s AI models—and why they may never lead to true superintelligenceTelepathy as a technological evolution, not mysticismHive minds, shared cognition, and what happens when individuality starts to dissolveWhether consciousness can exist outside a biological brain—or if it has to be “seeded” by oneThe unsettling idea that a superintelligence might operate on a moral framework we can’t even recognizeCahill’s short story Mind Zero becomes the anchor point: a near-future scenario where AGI emerges, goes sideways, and forces a confrontation with the moment intelligence crosses the line into something fundamentally other.Along the way, the discussion widens into storytelling itself: how sci-fi gets bogged down in exposition, why character still matters more than concept, and where fiction is headed when text might not even be the dominant medium anymore. Think less “novel on paper,” more immersive, possibly even telepathic narrative experiences.The GuestPhilip Cahill is a science fiction writer living in Waterlooville, England. A former accounting academic he has spent 24 years living and working in France. He writes about telepathy, artificial intelligence, metaverses and post-human society. In 2020 he published his first novel ‘Noystria’. This is a story about human/android relationships in 26th century Normandy.LinksAmazon Author Page: http://amazon.com/author/philipcahillFB Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063693992599&notif_id=1774352043831040&notif_t=page_user_activity&ref=notif#Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text!Support the show