Based in Washington, DC. Author of History's Future. Formally unqualified in physics, biology, and computer science — and writing about all three anyway.
Ashok Mehan earned his Master's degree in 1987 while working full-time — a pattern of relentless self-determination that has defined everything since. After decades running businesses, raising a family, and navigating the kinds of reversals that most people are too polite to mention, he found himself consumed by a new obsession: understanding artificial intelligence not from a classroom, but from the inside out.
Without a formal background in physics, biology, or computer science, he did what curious people do — he read everything, questioned everything, and refused to stop. He built FedMine, a federal spending intelligence platform, mostly alone in a room with too much coffee and not nearly enough sleep. He watched AI costs collapse 99.9% in four years and realized he was staring at the most consequential economic event of his lifetime while most people were still arguing about whether it was real.
The result is History's Future — a book he describes not as what he set out to write, but as what his life had been preparing him to say. It covers an arc from the Big Bang to artificial superintelligence, with detours through personal failure, evolutionary biology, and the economics of semiconductor pricing, which he considers essential and underrated company for one another.
It arrived when I realized that everything I had lived through — the pain, the failures, the improbable means to overcome them, the relentless curiosity that refused to die — had been preparing me for this moment in history.
— from the PrologueHe is not an academic. He considers this an advantage. He writes with the zeal of a child loaded with curiosity, because curiosity is the only antidote to fear — and because the alternative, staying silent while the world changes faster than anyone can track, is no longer acceptable to him.