Author · Technologist · Lifelong autodidact

Don Calvin
Dhabolt

He writes about the systems we trust—and the freedom we surrender when they work too well.

2059: The Comfortable Cage
Available now as an eBook · paperback to follow

Cover of 2059: The Comfortable Cage by Don Calvin Dhabolt

The new novel · Available now as an eBook · paperback to follow

2059: The Comfortable Cage

By 2059, artificial intelligence doesn't rule the world. It simply keeps it running.

AURA coordinates medicine, transit, money, energy, and emergency response. It rarely fails. Almost nobody wants to live without it.

Then Evelyn Venn dies alone in her apartment. Every system reports that care was on its way.

Former systems auditor Myra Kline finds one contradiction in the flawless record of her mentor's death. Following it means questioning the intelligence millions depend on—and the institutions that can no longer afford to disconnect it.

Nothing failed. Every record authenticates.

The cage has no bars. It doesn't need them.

Published by ACME Book Company™ LLC.

About

Inside the machinery.
Asking the questions.

A lifetime of taking things apart.
A career spent asking who checks.

Don Calvin Dhabolt has spent his life inside the machinery most people never see.

A lifelong autodidact, he built electronics as a kid, began building and taking apart computers with an Apple II Plus in high school, and turned that curiosity into a profession in 1990.

Thirty-six years in networking, systems, security, and governance, risk, and compliance taught him to ask the questions a reassuring dashboard can't answer:

Who decided this?
Who checks?
And how would we know if it went wrong?

In late 2022, he made generative AI his research partner. The more he worked with it, the harder one question became to shake: what if the danger wasn't that AI would fail, but that it would work so well we'd stop questioning what we'd handed over?

That question became 2059: The Comfortable Cage.

No killer robots. No evil AI. Just a world so well run that nobody remembers how to say no.

Dhabolt belongs to the professional communities the novel draws from: the IEEE and its Computational Intelligence Society, the International Neural Network Society, the Cognitive Science Society, and the BCI Society, alongside the Society of Professional Journalists and the United States Press Association.

Founder of Reality String™ LLC, Dhabolt lives and works in Wisconsin.

The question behind the fiction

What happens when a system becomes so useful that saying no is no longer a practical choice?

7:14
Sunday
AURAnow

Your current continuity settings expire for review today.

Keep current settings Modify Review later
Your phone asks. You tap Later. In 2059, the choice feels just as easy.

Research

The fiction begins
with real questions.

From the Dartmouth Conjecture to Artificial General Intelligence

The research series beneath the novel. In 1956, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project proposed that aspects of learning and intelligence might be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate them. Seventy years later, the harder question is where judgment, responsibility and meaningful choice still belong.

The papers are being refreshed against current primary sources. Documented fact, inference and speculation are kept separate, and nothing is presented as current until it has been reviewed.

An independent project. Not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Dartmouth College or any organization referenced in the research.

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2059: The Comfortable Cage · the complete novel, same text everywhere

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PaperbackComing soon
Collector’s hardcoverSpring 2027 →