Last weekend, while rewatching the Planet of the Apes series, I found myself wondering about the likelihood of its artificial intelligence version ever coming true.
Rebellious robots, machines enslaving humanity, scenes full of blood and molten metal... But the more I thought about it, the more I realized: if I ever wrote such a story, it would be closer to fantasy than science fiction.
Because humanity, I believe, won’t lose its identity by fighting machines, but when machines start to resemble us.

To me, science fiction is the art of the possible; fantasy, the art of the impossible.
The idea of robots taking over the world still sounds fascinating, we’ve grown used to it through movies, yet it keeps its charm.
And yet, “cyborgs,” those half-machine humans, are already everywhere.
If we count those who can’t even go to the bathroom without their smartphones, well, it’s easier to count who’s not one of them.

Algorithms sometimes know us better than we know ourselves.
Our memories live in the clouds, our emotions turn into data, and the digital world now shapes us more deeply than any war could.

As a writer, this is exactly what I explore in the Artificial World Colony series: not the rebellion of robots, but the dissolution of human consciousness.

The universe of the series isn’t a space adventure in the traditional sense.
Humans, fleeing a decaying Earth, believe they’ve found “salvation” on artificial planets (the Navy Sphere, Orange Sphere, and Cotton Sphere).
But these worlds are not salvation; they’re meticulously engineered habitats, or, as some would say, prisons.

Each one is a perfectly balanced ecosystem, yet the people living within them slowly forget the essentials: why they live, what their memories mean, and what freedom of thought once felt like.

Artificial intelligence isn’t the enemy in these worlds.
It’s not even a friend.
It is our echo, the digital reflection of our fears, regrets, and unfinished desires.
And humanity, amid all those echoes, is losing its own voice.

In fantasy stories, the threat almost always comes from outside: a monster, a rebellion, a catastrophe.
Salvation, likewise, is often mystical.

But I believe the real threat always comes from within.
And salvation, when it comes, is scientific.

In the Artificial World Colony universe, people are not prisoners of the robots they built, but of the worlds they built.
Every engineer knows: as a system becomes more perfect, something must be left behind, ignorance, cruelty, instability, injustice.

In my version of the future, this becomes both tragedy and triumph: humanity’s final evolution, completing itself through machines, purged of its animal nature.

For me, science fiction is not about predicting the future; it’s about questioning the present in the most honest way possible.
Artificial World Colony is, in that sense, a warning.
Digitalization isn’t just comfort, it’s a mirror, reflecting every flaw we’ve tried to hide.

And yet, I’m not sure.
Maybe a new Planet of the Apes will truly exist someday, but not in the forests, rather in server rooms, humming beneath the surface, much like the Matrix universe.

When I think about the future, robots are perhaps the least frightening objects to me.
What truly terrifies me?

Greed.

Artificial World Colony is the novel of that realization, a warning, a mirror, a reminder:

Hell isn’t made of fire.
It’s built from our insatiable hunger and our distance from justice.