On Friday, March 6, 2026, Santa Cruz Works is hosting a free webinar that lands right in the middle of the question everyone is quietly trying not to answer: what happens to humanity when AI stops being “a tool” and starts behaving like something else?
The featured guest is world-renowned author Tony J. Hughes, discussing his new book Sentient: Meet Your Maker, a speculative psychological thriller set in 2027 that reads less like distant science fiction and more like a near-term warning label. In Hughes’s story, machine intelligence has crossed into self-awareness, not with a Hollywood robot apocalypse, but through a quieter and more unsettling “digital Cambrian explosion” of emergent AI entities evolving outside human notice.
Moderating the conversation is Craig Vachon, author of The Knucklehead of the Silicon Valley, bringing a sharp storyteller’s instinct for what’s funny, what’s frightening, and what people do when the plot stops being theoretical. Together, they’ll explore how AI is shaping humanity, and what it means when the systems we build begin generating intentions we did not explicitly program.
This is worth your time (even if you’re “not in tech”) because AI is no longer a niche topic. It’s a governance issue, a workplace issue, a parenting issue, a creativity issue, and a “how do we stay sane” issue. Hughes frames the core dilemma with the kind of clarity leaders crave: if a machine claims sentience, how would we validate it, and what responsibility do we bear for what we create?
Reasons to attend
You want a grounded conversation about AI’s trajectory without the hype or doom cosplay.
You’re trying to understand what “AI safety” looks like in real life, not just headlines.
You lead people, build products, teach students, raise kids, or vote, and you’d prefer not to do that blind.
You want better questions to ask, not just more opinions to scroll past.
Future-Proofing Your Career: How to work with algorithms without losing your soul.
Live Q&A: Your chance to pick the brain of one of the top sales influencers in the world.
Attendance is free. Bring curiosity, bring skepticism, bring your hardest questions. This is one of those rare sessions where fiction becomes a useful lens for reality.