Matt Richtel: Dead on Arrival

“There are a million different things that technology is doing well, the question is, can we enslave us rather than having it enslave us?”

Matt Richtel is a Pulitzer prize winning science and technology writer at the NY Times, who explores how humans are impacted by technology in his best-selling novels.

His latest book, Dead on Arrival, opens with an airplane landing at a desolate airport in Steamboat Springs Colorado. Everyone not on the plane appears to be dead and one of the passengers, an infectious disease specialist, must find out why. What follows is a story that takes us from the labs of the Centers for Disease Control to the secret campus of Google X.

The book is set against a backdrop of an eerily familiar political climate, where people are politically polarized and tensions are on the rise. “I really wondered, is something going on that might affect our word and amplify that intensity, hostility, anger, into something even more pronounced and virulent and technology becomes the clue here.”

While the book has a dystopian theme, Richtel says that many technological advances he writes about are incredibly positive for society, but he warns that we need to be cautious in how much of our life we hand over to technology.

“There are a million different things that technology is doing well, the question is, can we enslave us rather than having it enslave us?”