Julio Rojas, star author of the 'podcast' in Spanish: “AI is like a psychopath; "simulates to give us what we want"

The Chilean Julio Rojas, one of the great authors of sound fiction in Spanish, has just visited Rome, after passing through Los Angeles, Washington and London to prepare a documentary. He has gone down what he defines as “a rabbit hole” to investigate Billy Meier, the controversial author of the most famous photo that records a possible UFO sighting. He tells of his latest adventure with such fascination that it is very difficult not to be swept away by his love for the unknown. It was born to him after the disappearance of his grandfather. “It was not for political reasons, because it happened before the dictatorship,” he clarified at the beginning of April in Madrid. “He was an inventor and disappeared in a desert while investigating the passage of a comet. That's the family myth. Maybe he went with another family, but that would be the non-romantic part of his story,” he says.

Rojas' previous inquisitive spiral led him to visit the Canary Islands for the first time in his life. He toured all of them for three weeks in 2023. Their landscapes, the particular geography and cultural richness of what was long considered the end of the world, have inspired the plot of his new sound science fiction.

Simulacrum

is

a speculative psychological

thriller

set in all of them that asks that, if we live in a simulation, how could we get out of it?

The mystery elaborated in 10 chapters [already available on audio platforms and the first of which can be heard in this text], and which is reminiscent of the family myth around his grandfather, begins on October 23, 2023 at 11 :eleven. Marcos Oliveira, a world eminence in the study of Artificial Intelligence, disappears after having explored the Canary archipelago. The last trace of him was located in Haría, a town in Lanzarote. Behind him there is only a map of the islands marked with points, times and places. Obsessed with the theory of simulation, before passing away he was convinced that we live in a virtual reality, in a kind of computer program. And that he was about to leave her through a hidden door somewhere on the islands.

A reality in crisis

“Science fiction has always been a favorable milestone for us to ask ourselves philosophical questions. Philosophy has never been more necessary than at this moment. “We are facing the great crisis of reality,” explains the Chilean at the Madrid headquarters of the Solo collection, surrounded by avant-garde works of art that, in some cases, are designed by AI. The writer refers to the current era of liquid information, which is also the era of

deep fake

videos and all types of virtual hoaxes built from increasingly autonomous technology.

We already live in the world of Sora, an AI model that has been able to generate realistic videos from textual descriptions for weeks. “The possibility that everything we experienced has already happened and that we live in a simulation is very high,” he suspects. The characters voiced by Isak Férriz, Mónica López and Alberto San Juan delve into their particular rabbit hole. Some of the many actors who appear in this audio fiction are not professionals, but the inhabitants of the islands themselves who helped Rojas understand them during his visit.

In a world facing a serious climate crisis and on the brink of a world war, could it be that what scares us about AI is that it is too much like ourselves? Answer the doubt with another doubt: “An AI is like a psychopath; It simulates to give us what we want. Of course it can recreate our darkness as a species. And generate a copy of reality that in a very short time will be indistinguishable. But what if, instead of copying us, AI turns out to be more well-intentioned than us and follows its own agenda? What if it puts us in a limbo, in a digital totalitarianism, so that we do not continue destroying our own planet in a kind of ecological techno-fascism?” fantasizes the Chilean, author of

Case 63

, the most listened to sound fiction in Spanish of the 21st century. , adapted into English by Julian Moore.

One of the most important aspects of a

thriller

like

Simulacrum

are the environments. To build its auditory landscape, the

podcast

team counted on the sound artist Pablo Sanz and the sound archive of Alejandro Doreste. For months, several sound engineers recorded the auditory reality of each of the locations, to evoke the listener's volcanic earth and salty air of the islands.

The sound label El Extraordinario has co-produced Simulacro

with Turismo de Canarias ,

expanding the path of branded

travel

podcasts that they already opened with

Blum

,

a sound fiction created together with Carmen Pachecho and Manuel Bartual that won an Ondas Global Podcast Award in 2023. The studio already explored with Rojas the idea of ​​AI taking control of humanity in

FOOM

, a story in audio format presented in a similar way to

The War of the Worlds

.

Simulacrum

is a story that seeks to “seed questions in each scene and lead to reflections and perplexities,” explains the label. It has many layers, many nuances and many invisible threads that connect everything and “that weave a plot in a perfect circle.” The listener takes two trips at the same time: the one that takes them through fascinating places in the Canary Islands and the one that introduces them to the most current theories of simulation.

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