Barry Martin completed his graduate studies in Australia. He traveled extensively through SE Asia, briefly living in India, where he studied Buddhism. Subsequent adventures took him through the Middle East and around Europe, after which he resided in England before moving permanently to the US, where he has lived for more than three decades.

Now a retired professor in the biomedical sciences and former university administrator, he has turned his hand to writing literary fiction entwined with mythology, mystery, and philosophy. His novels parallel “reality” so closely that it’s hard to tell fiction from fact… as with the oft-quoted Oscar Wilde phrase, “life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

Though a serious scientist, he has a cheeky approach to serious topics… not a nihilist because absurdism does the job just fine… skewering sacred cows (a fan of Monty Python, Kurt Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams)… and has a sardonic wit.

The current book, Krill-Swatch, takes on the existential threat of general artificial intelligence (so-called inference machines)… what, me worry? But here he turns the tables… where we pose a threat to AI. On hearing a visiting professor talk about the “problem of evil,” Dr. Martin realized that the problem is us. If evil is to proliferate and persist in the world, it would seem that the logical solution is to… Perhaps AI is a godsend; even the Pope has recently weighed in with his encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, that urges ethical oversight and “disarmament of AI,” appreciating that this potentially sentient technology is like no other (bombs go off but once; algorithms can reproduce), and yes, there are messianic overtones here. So as we approach Kurzweil’s singularity, maybe we’ll learn to treat each other more humanely, putting the kind back into humankind.