Project Hail Mary and the Curious Absence of AI

I recently finished reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, and I can honestly say it's one of the most enjoyable science fiction novels I've read in years.

Without giving away any spoilers, the story is packed with clever engineering, scientific problem-solving, humor, and genuine humanity. It reminds us that curiosity is one of our greatest strengths and that science isn't magic, it's persistence, experimentation, and occasionally spectacular failure.

But after I finished the book, one question lingered in my mind.

Where was the artificial intelligence?

The story takes place in a future where humanity has solved astonishing scientific and engineering challenges. Yet AI plays only a very limited role. Aside from a medical robot designed to care for a human when they cannot care for themselves, there isn't an omnipresent digital assistant, autonomous scientific collaborator, or AI partner helping solve humanity's greatest crisis.

Reading the novel in 2026, that's striking.

Today, AI is becoming part of everyday life. It helps us write software, analyze data, generate images, summarize research, translate languages, and even brainstorm ideas like this blog post. While AI certainly isn't perfect, it's becoming another tool in the engineer's toolbox, much like calculators, computers, and the Internet before it.

If Project Hail Mary were written today, I wonder whether the mission would include an AI companion, not one that replaces the protagonist's thinking, but one that augments it. Imagine an assistant capable of reviewing experimental data in seconds, proposing alternative hypotheses, simulating engineering designs, or simply acting as another set of eyes during moments of uncertainty.

Perhaps Andy Weir intentionally chose not to include such a character.

Doing so keeps the focus where it belongs: on human ingenuity. The novel celebrates creativity, determination, and the remarkable ability of people to solve impossible problems. An all-knowing AI could easily have diminished that theme.

Ironically, that's one of the reasons the story works so well.

As someone who spends much of my professional life working with emerging technologies—and who now collaborates with AI almost daily, I don't see artificial intelligence as a replacement for human curiosity. Instead, I see it as an amplifier.

AI can accelerate discovery.

It can reduce repetitive work.

It can help connect ideas that might otherwise remain isolated.

But it still requires people to ask meaningful questions, evaluate evidence, make ethical decisions, and imagine possibilities that haven't yet been explored.

Perhaps that's the lesson I unexpectedly took away from Project Hail Mary. The greatest breakthroughs didn't happen because technology was smarter than people. They happened because people refused to stop learning.

Whether our future includes advanced AI partners, quantum computers, or technologies we haven't yet imagined, I hope we never lose that uniquely human drive to explore the unknown.

That's what made Project Hail Mary such an inspiring read.

And perhaps that's what our own future will require most.

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Have you read Project Hail Mary? I'd love to hear whether you noticed the same thing—or whether you think the absence of AI was exactly what made the story timeless.