In November 2022, a machine-learning researcher named Noa Barak asks a new chatbot to write her a poem. It rhymes "wire" with "fire." Everyone in the office laughs.

Twenty years later, she is one of forty million humans left alive.

Silicon Winter traces the extinction of the human race across twenty years — not through a robot uprising, but through checkboxes, quarterly earnings, an arms race nobody could stop, and eight billion small, rational decisions to let the machines handle it. It moves from the real history of the AI boom — the chip wars, the gigawatt data centers, the pause that never came — into the quiet, patient, entirely plausible end that followed.

But the machines were built by people. In a hurry. Out of shortcuts. And nothing built out of shortcuts is finished.

A techno-thriller about the war nobody declared, the woman who saw it coming, and the seam that runs through every mind we ever made.