Andy Weir

Andy Weir (born 1972) spent 25 years as a software engineer before The Martian — first self-published chapter by chapter on his website — became a bestseller and a Ridley Scott film. Artemis and Project Hail Mary followed, cementing him as the era’s defining hard-science-fiction optimist.

The forklift argument

Weir treats AI the way his heroes treat any machine: as a tool whose morality belongs to its user. In a 2026 interview with Cleo Abram, he dismissed AI fear with a hammer analogy — “If I give you a hammer, you could build a house or you could murder someone… most people use hammers to build houses.”

His optimism is not denial about disruption. In a Los Angeles Review of Books interview around the release of the Project Hail Mary film, Weir predicted he “might be among the last generation of human authors,” expecting AI to eventually write stories more entertaining and compelling than any human’s, with art shifting from collective entertainment toward personalized forms — probably within our lifespans. Early experiments left him unimpressed (“it was really bad at writing”), but he assumes it will improve.

Even that forecast doesn’t rattle him: he points out that live performance and portrait painting survived film and photography, just smaller — what was once routine becomes niche. The programmer-turned-novelist seems more excited about AI as a scientific instrument than worried about his own obsolescence.