Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel interviews SB Divya about her new novel "Machinehood" which explores whether machines can be self-aware.
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These days, we're all spending a lot of time with our computers, our iPads, and our iPhones. I personally spend more than ten hours every day in front of my trusty laptop. But here's a question. When you're done for the day and you close your computer. Do you say good night to it the way you might say good night to a friend or a coworker, even though that computer is doing so much work for you? I mean, do you ever think about what it's like to be your laptop? If your laptop had more personality like Jarvis in Iron Man, would you treat it more like a person? Would you care about how it felt even if you could never actually know what it's like to be a laptop. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I spent a lot of time thinking about what it's like to be a particle, an alien, or even another person. And Welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, in which we explore all of the ways of thinking and being in our universe, where we talk about what's going on in the hearts of black holes, to how long our sun is going to live, to how volcanoes have formed the atmosphere of Earth. We talk about all the physics in the universe and try to make sure all of it makes sense to you. But we don't limit ourselves just to talking about this universe. In the podcast, we also like to talk about the process of science. The creative element where we are imagining other possible universes that might be ours. Because here we are on the forefront of science, having understood some tiny fraction of the mysteries of the universe, but knowing that many enormous discoveries lay ahead, hoping at least that there are grand revelations about the nature of the universe lying ahead of us, and a critical step to revealing those deep bits of knowledge is imagining them first. And since we don't know which universe is ours, we have to hold in our minds several possible universes, sometimes an infinite set of possible universes which could be ours. And that's the job sometimes of theoretical physicists thinking about how the universe might or might not work. But it's also the province of artists, especially science fiction authors, who think about the possible nature of the universe, the way it is or the way that it might be. And this is important not just for those of us who are curious about the deep nature of the universe, how it's built from its time, the organizing principle, and how this incredible complexity and beauty emerges from the organization of those tiny little strings or pixels or whatever it is at the foundation of the nature of reality. But it's also important to think about how to live in that universe, how our knowledge of that physics and the technology that we build changes our lives and changes how we treat each other. Who is deserving of our respects, who earns rights, and who gets self determination? Think about, for example, how differently you view the universe than somebody did who lived one hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago. They knew so much less about the nature of our reality and our place in it. That surely affected the way they lived, the way they thought of themselves, and the way they treat each other. In the same way, you might imagine somebody looking back on us in one hundred years, in a thousand years, in ten thousand years and thinking about our are a shocking ignorance about the basic nature of the universe. After all, there are huge questions that we still do not know the answer to. What is space after all? Why does time only flow forwards? Why is the universe continuing to expand and accelerate its expansion? What happened to the beginning of the universe? These basic questions should inform the context of our lives, and yet we are totally clueless about their answers. And in one hundred years or ten thousand years, people might, at least I hope they will have some insight into the nature of these questions, which will flesh out for them the context of the human experience, what it means to be human and what it means to be human in this universe. And those folks will look back at us, they will wonder what it was like to be so ignorant, to be as clueless as we are, and they might have trouble understanding the choices that we make about how we live our lives and how we treat each other, specifically how we treat other beings which may or may not be sentioned. That includes animals and includes artificial intelligence. So today on the podcast, we're going to be continuing a series of conversations with science fiction authors about the universes they created and what that means about our universe and how to live in it. So today on the podcast, the Science Fiction Universe of sb Diva SBDVA is a geek. She is a nerds like me. She went to Caltech the age of sixteen. She is an expert in AI and in data science and in neuroscience, and she has written a book called Machine Hood. It's a fascinating novel that explores what it's like to be a machine, and how society should treat machines, and how we formulate questions of respect and writes, and sort of the structure of society to accommodate different kind of sensient beings. I read this book recently and I thought it was very well written, beautifully crafted, with some really good characters and a thrilling plot. It's sort of cyberpunk and very exciting, and I totally recommend those of you who are interested in science fiction and seem to enjoy the same kinds of science fiction that I like to go out and pick it up. And so today we'll be digging into this book, and I have a nice interview with the author at the end of the podcast. All right, so let's break it down. First, let me tell you what the book is about, and then I'll dig into the science of it a little bit, and then we'll talk to the author. So, first, what is this book. It's called Machine Hood, and it takes place in sort of the near future, approximately fifty years from now, and it's on Earth. This is not a journey to some other weird imagined universe. It takes place right here in our universe, following our laws of physics, and it sort of extrapolates cleverly where we are now to what the future might be like. And there's a few aspects that are really key to the structure the novel and the ideas that it fleshes out, and the first one is, of course, artificial intelligence in the future. In her book, artificial intelligence is everywhere, but it's a sort of weak AI. It's the kind of AI that can't answer your questions. It can help you with things, it can order things for you, it can analyze data and summarize it for you in a way that humans can make sense of. And that's already very, very powerful. But the distinction she makes in her book is that while these AI are powerful and intelligent, they are not self aware. They are not conscious, they're not sentient, they are not having a first person subjective experience in the way that you are, I hope, and the way that I know that I am, like Descartes was. So this is an important topic in her book, And the question really of the book is can AI become self aware? Not just intelligent, not just effective, not just good at solving problems, but can it actually have a first person exp experience? And if it does, how should we treat it? What rights does it deserve in that case? And will it be angry at the way that we've been treating it? So that's really the deepest sort of science angle to the book is extrapolating a on to the future and wondering how much further it can go and the impact on society. But there's a lot of other really cool near future tech. My favorite near future sci fi stories are the ones where the author really has thought about where technology could go, what might be possible. And I think this must be like really rich territory for you know, venture capitalists or researchers trying to think about what they should work on next. I mean, books like this are just loaded with clever ideas for what we should try to make. And in this book, the author has gone sort of beyond cyborgism, where people are like strapping machines onto their bodies or replacing their arms with machines, and instead she sort of internalized this cyborg approach. Rather than replacing your body with a machine, you swallow these many machines they call pills. And these things can make you stronger, or they can make you think faster, or they can help you recover from injuries much more quickly. And she's really worked this out in gory detail. You know, she has really microscopic understandings of how these things might work and what they would do to your cells, and it's really quite plausible, frankly, and her background in the science and understanding the details really comes through. Something that's really cool in her novel also is that these things do not require like massive factories to build. You can download the instructions and print them at home in your kitchen. So you want to be smart for the afternoon, you print this flow pill and you'd swallow it and you're just much smarter for the whole afternoon. So it's really super fascinating. And then I think maybe the last major element of this future society that makes it different from ours is the omnipresence of surveillance. So she has cameras everywhere, these tiny little drones with cameras on them. They are literally everywhere every moment of your life could be filmed and streamed online, which means shockingly, of course, that there's basically no privacy couples, intimate evenings, what you're doing in the bathroom, your afternoon on the couch, there could always be a microdrone somewhere filming you. So there's this future society where life is really very different, but not in a totally alien way. When you read this book, you don't feel like, I don't recognize that society. Instead, you see echoes of our society. It's just taken and extrapolated and exaggerated for effect. So I think she can make some sort of social commentary on what it's like to be human today and whether we like the way it's going towards the future. So let me comment a little bit on the science of this story, like, is it robust, does it make sense? Has she taken some liberties overall? I was really impressed think she has thought about this stuff deeply and clearly. She knows what she's doing. She is not writing in an area where she's not an expert. She is a neuroscientist, she is a developer. She knows all about AI. So she has thought about this stuff very carefully, but there are some wrinkles here that are hard. You know, there are some questions here that science just doesn't know the answer to, especially the ones around sentience. We don't even really know what it means when we talk about consciousness. This is a question not necessarily of science, but of philosophy. You know, they call it the hard question of consciousness is understanding how another being, an object that's just made out of particles or tiny little pieces, can come together to somehow have a first persons subjective experience. So, for those of you who are not into philosophy of science, is this concept of the philosophical zombie. That's an object or a creature which acts sentient, acts like it's having a first person experien tells you that it is, but actually isn't. And the whole construction, the whole idea of this philosophical zombie is to make the point that there is no way to tell the difference. Right, a real person who is actually having a first person experience, who's in there or who's feeling these things, can't say anything or do anything to convince you that they're having that experience. That the philosophical zombie can't also do. So the point is that there's no way to know whether it's somebody really in there or not other than actually being in there. That's the foundation of this question. Also, that's in one of the most famous philosophy papers of all time. It's called what's it like to be a bat? And it's not a joke. It really is asking that question, and the answer is we'll never know, because we'll never be that bat. And the point is larger than that. It's that we'll never know what it's like to be another person. So we have the ability to empathize with other folks, to understand, to imagine what it might be like to be them, but we don't actually know what's in So there's this deep question of where consciousness comes from. I mean, if my consciousness is somehow emergent just from like the interactions of my particles coming together in this complex structure we call a human brain, then surely that should also be possible for other people's brains, which means that it should be possible in theory for artificial brains that if you put together somehow a set of particles that operate the way a brain does in principle, it could also be self aware, not just hardworking, not just smart, not just intelligent, but actually self aware, capable of a real experience, Capable maybe even of suffering a feeling joy, a feeling love, of feeling whatever the first person experience is of that intelligence. It's connected to this other question you might imagine, like if you scanned your brain and uploaded it to a computer that was able to simulate your brain, so had exactly the same sort of information content your brain, would that simulated version of your brain also be self aware? These are really deep questions we just don't know the answer to. Is consciousness embedded in the relationship between the objects and the information that's being passed around inside your brain? Or is it closely connected to the actual wetwear, like the brainy part of your brain, In which case, why is that? And what is it about the brain that would make it so? And isn't it possible to reproduce it somehow in other materials. These are things we just don't know the answers to. People are sort of feeling their way around in the dark and trying to come up with ways to tackle these questions. So there's nothing in this book, which is incorrect scientifically. It's just that it dives into a really difficult question philosophically that we might not ever be able to know the answer to scientifically. Remember, not every question you ask about the universe is a science question, because not every question can be answered scientifically. In order to probe the question of consciousness, it might be required to step out of a conscious observer, or to move from one to the other to compare and contrast their experiences, which is not something that an observer can do. So it's not even clear to me whether this hard question of consciousness is a scientific one or will always be a philosophical one that we argue about forever. Now, the rest of the science in her book is really very robust. All of this near future tech is worked out in gory detail. There's a lot of really fascinating ideas in there that, frankly, I think scientists and engineers and venture capital people should read and think about whether or not they want to get into that, whether or not it's a good idea. Something else I love about this book is that there are real scientists in it, Scientists solving problems, scientists facing puzzles, having frustration, not always making progress, sometimes getting too sleepy, so she really knows what she's talking about. I think she's done a great job right in this book. It's compelling, it's got lots of great characters in it. And in a minute where we're going to talk to her about how she wrote this book, what's important to her, and what she thinks about some of these deep questions of the nature of consciousness. But first, let's take a quick break. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. 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Hello everyone, very happy to be here.
Well, thanks very much for joining us and for talking to us about your book. First, we have a set of questions that we ask every science fiction author to sort of get them calibrated in our science fiction universe. We'd love to hear first about how you got into science fiction writing. I know you have quite a background in like actual science and engineering. Tell us about how that happened for you.
I started reading science fiction when I was around the age of ten, and I did my first writing in my eighth grade English class, of all places, we had a little assignment in class to write something short and then swap it with a partner and critique each other's work. And of course, you know, what I wrote was a little snippet of science fiction. And my friend who read it turned to me and said, this is great, but this is not a complete story. You have to write more. And so that kind of put me on the path of enjoying the writing part of science fiction for several years through my teenage years. Then a little thing called Caltech happened to me as an undergraduate. It's called drinking from a fire hose for a reason, and so I put aside my fiction habits. I think the only thing I read while there was Analog magazine, and you know, looked forward to getting that in my school mailbox.
That was my little tree.
That's a very intense undergraduate experience, isn't It's a very small community of students.
Yes, it was fabulous and awful all at the same time. I would do it again if I were sixteen again.
I don't think I would do it again. At this stage in my life. It was a lot.
Well, you went to Caltech at sixteen?
I did.
Yeah, My parents were all freaked out, but we had good family friends nearby to look after me. And yeah, I ended up moving between junior high and high school and skipt a grade because the high school I ended up at just.
Didn't have enough stuff for me. I guess.
So all that happened and I put aside my writing and fiction for a very long time, figuring, you know, it was a nice dream. Maybe when I'm retired, like a focus on my engineering career first, that's where you know.
I made my money.
And then sort of in my mid thirties, I got waylaid by a few factors, including a kid, losing a couple of friends to cancer, and it was all just kind of a big wake up call to maybe not defer my dream for twenty more years. And so I picked up the analog to a pen, which is the keyboard, and said, you know, I'm going to try to make a real go of it this time. I'm actually going to try to get something published, take a class, and really commit to myself to try to turn this into something real and not just a little side hobby.
So I got very lucky. I published my.
First short story in twenty fourteen. I had a short novel come out from tour dot com in twenty sixteen, and this past week, Machinehood, my first novel, is out. Very excited to share that with the world.
Well, congrats, it's exciting for all those geeks out there to think that you know, there are opportunities to get into science fiction writing even if you don't have a long background in literature. So that's always nice to hear people's stories.
Yeah, for sure.
So as a reader of science fiction, here's some questions for you by the science fiction genre. Is it your opinion that a Star Trek transporter kills you and recreates you somewhere else or actually transports your atoms? Like, is it really a transporter or is it a slaughter and recreation machine.
I'm pretty sure the Star Trek transporter is a slaughter and recreation machine just by the way they show it. There's never like a particle beam sent somewhere, which is kind of what you'd have to do, and you'd have to send it at warp speeds to get you that much material that far. So yeah, vaporized, rebuilt. I'm very proud actually of Star Trek for taking that particular leap of faith, because I think it freaks a lot of people out, and I've had many wonderful philosophical arguments with my friends on whether it matters whether the thing that's recreated is you or really just a clone of you, because it's a different set of atoms. Never mind that we are all exchanging atoms with our environment on a constant basis, and our bodies are renewing themselves continually, so you know, we are rebuilt every so many years.
It's just happening very slowly.
So then would you step into a transporter being totally comfortable with having your body, yes, taken apart, you would do it. You would let the machine kill you and rebuild you.
One hundred percent. I would do it.
I as long as the technology was safe and we had rebuilt other things.
I wouldn't be an early adopter of it, okay.
But once it was proven that I wasn't going to just die along the way and stay dead, I would absolutely step in it.
I have no qualms.
Well, it certainly would be convenient.
Well, I'm a tourist.
I like to travel, so the idea of having a teleporter or transporter make travel easier is just way too tempting. It's like, I want to see the universe as much as possible.
Totally agree. I love to be other places. I don't actually enjoy traveling, and so getting there without the traveling part, Wow, that'd be nice. Speaking of technological advancements, what other kind of technology do you see in science fiction that you'd like to actually have become a reality. If you could pick one thing from the science fiction universe and make it real.
From canon, just one, that's tough. I think the most useful, at least initially, would probably be the answable the ability to communicate instantly across long distances, because once we have that communication channel available, we can do a lot more with it in terms of sending data back and forth, gathering that data, and you know, deploying ourselves further afield, even just within our solar system, and having more immediate control and interactivity with the those environments.
Because you want to drive the Mars rover in real time.
Yeah, think about it. Though.
If we had a real time remote operable vehicle, we can directly interact with the controls, collect samples, you know, react to environmental changes. And that's a big struggle right now, right is that we've got to send robots. And our robots, you know, are very sophisticated by our current standards, but they're still a long way from being truly sophisticated and autonomous. So the next best thing is human remote control. It's just that lag is killer.
All right, then one more question before we dig into your novel. What's your personal answer to the Fermi paradox? Given the number of likely habitable worlds out there in the vastness of the universe, why haven't aliens visited us or contacted us.
The same exact actually reason that I like the answer ale, which is, it takes light time to travel across fast desistances, and even though there is probably plenty of life out there, much of it is not a advanced enough to send, you know, extrasolar communications. And then b we've got to wait for that extrasolar communication to show up. See, we have to recognize it amidst all the other signals we're dealing with, and d we.
Have to then be able to capture it and interpret it.
So that's a lot of steps that add decreasing you know, probability that we're actually going to get that communication. So given enough time, if humanity manages to last for millions of years and continues to build our technology, we probably will eventually find some signals if we're lucky enough that some other life form is concurrently you know, across the span of light years in those at that same level of technology sending something over, we'll get it. But the thing that science fiction love is that these things should be synchronous, that we can communicate back and forth. But of course it's going to be deeply asynchronous communication. And for all we know, by the time our signal reaches them, we're extinct or vice versa. Right, So we're not going to be swapping text messages with anyone anytime soon, even though that's what we all want.
Not without your answerle at least, and imagine how long it would take to learn to decode their language. You know, if it takes twenty thousand years between sending a question and getting an answer, it's hard enough to decode ancient human languages, right, you know, just a few thousand years old. So I hope we do get messages from aliens, but I'd be amazed if we ever understood them. All Right, So then let's dive into your novel, which I read and very much enjoyed. Congratulations. It's such a fascinating and complex but also very realistic story. You really feel the characters and they feel like they really live in that universe. As an accomplishment to me, your book raises a lot of interesting and important questions about how technology changes the pattern of our life, how we treat each other, and who deserves what kind of treatment and what kind of rights. So what intrigues you about these themes? Why did you decide to write a book about these kinds of topics and create this kind of world for your characters.
There's probably a few factors.
If I'm going to dive into my personal psychology and unearth what drives me to write these stories. I've always been fascinated by the philosophy of mind. One of the reasons I switched from being on the astrophysics track to the computational neuroscience track was that I felt like the brain, in some ways, especially in terms of mind, was more unknown than parts of our own universe, and it was equally interesting to kind of delve into those questions and ideas. And that intersected with my more practical engineering technology career, which was in pattern recognition, machine learning and signal processing, and looking at, especially in the last five years, the conversations people have been having in Silicon Valley in terms of AI and automation and life, and then also drawing on, you know, the tropes of science fiction, both in terms of literature and film, and its portrayal of artificial intelligence versus the reality of what we were actually developing in labs and at corporations.
All of that kind of mashed.
Up with general human history, the fact that you know, I come from India, which was colonized, and I live in America, which has this history of slavery, and you know, the kind of the social factors of how we treat each other. I grew up vegetarian, how we treat animals, you know, climate change and how we treat the environment. I think all of these things kind of collided to form the themes of machinehood and really examining these questions of what makes something human sentient deserving of rights and protections.
Thank you, Yeah, These are really fascinating questions, difficult philosophically and scientifically. So what is your personal opinion? I mean, if we are able to create intelligent AI that's at the level of humanity, do you think it deserves the same rights? Like should it be illegal to turn it off?
I think we have to separate intelligence from consciousness and sentience. Intelligence is actually easier in some ways to define because we can at least model capability and reactivity to stimuli, you know, the ability to solve problems and adapt to your environment.
These are at least.
The hallmarks of machine intelligence right now, and you know, a large part of what we know about human beings. We can't necessarily quantify our intelligence levels. I don't buy into the IQ stuff, but we can at least simulate it and recreate it in you know, digital and artificial formats sentience and consciousness. However, we don't have as good as a grasp on yet right Neuroscientists are still struggling with that. Philosophers are struggling with that, trying to just define what it means much less, you know, come up with models that are predictive and ways in which we can quantify it. So until we do that, I think the machines we build are going to be increasingly intelligent in that they'll be capable of solving very complex problems. They'll be able to handle increasingly complex situations. But are they self aware enough to develop the desire for rights without us specifically coding that into them?
I don't know.
And then I think that raises a bigger ethical question of do we code it into them? And if so, you know, what are the ramifications of that, right, Like, why would we code that into them? And once we do, then I think, yeah, we do have some ethical obligations to treat them as if they were alife, because they can't help it, especially if it's in their hardware like it is with us, right, the desire for survival, the desire for selfhood. So I do think we're going to have to start tackling these questions, not maybe in the next few decades, but you know, within the next century or two, we're going to get to that level of complexity where maybe it doesn't matter that they're not conscious in the way that we're conscious, that they behave in a manner sufficiently similar that the distinction doesn't matter anymore. And that's really the crux of machinehood. And I don't know if I personally have a strong answer yet. I really wrote the book to kind of explore the question in my own mind, and I can see myself being swayed in either direction depending on the nuances. But ultimately I think it's a reflection of ethics in terms of how we treat each other, and like I said, how we treat the world around us, and if we can respect ourselves and other human beings. If we can respect our planet, then why shouldn't we also respect these intelligent machines that we're building.
I was struck at some point early in the novel when one of your characters asks ourself the question, maybe the creation of consciousness is not possible, right, Like, maybe we can build systems that can solve hard problems and do things and be helpful as the weak AI are in your novel, but are not actually conscious. But my question for you is how do we know? I mean, you talk about a being that simulates the experience of being conscious. But what we always run into the problem with the philosophical zombie, something which seems to be conscious but we can't ever tell of it actually is. I mean, I don't know if you're conscious, for example, what I take it on faith? How do we know when our machines have reached that level?
That really is the question.
And I do think at some point, if we can figure out the underpinnings of our own consciousness, that's how we'll know. Right, If we can get to the biophysics of whatever consciousness is, how we have it ourselves? What gives us degrees of consciousness?
Right?
Not so much amongst humans, but when we look at.
You know, other animals, mammals all the way down to insects and then eventually plants. You know, what is it in life that brings forth consciousness at all these sort of varying degrees? Right, Obviously there is a spectrum, or at least to me, it's obvious that there's a spectrum of consciousness. So that indicates to me that there is some underlying physical structure. I am fundamentally a physicalist. I don't believe in the soul. I don't believe in something, you know, beyond matter and energy. I am very intrigued by the idea of panpsychism that consciousness maybe is an inherent property of the matter and energy in our universe, and when it hits certain types of configurations, that's when we get the emergent property of what we experience as consciousness.
And so if we can really, you know, get to.
The bottom of all that, get to the physics of all that, and understand it enough to model it and predict it that hey, if we build this, it's going to behave like a beetle in terms of its level of consciousness, then I think we are.
On the path to.
Knowing when the really complex intelligent machine has also developed consciousness, because then we can measure it. And until then, I'm going to still go for maybe it doesn't matter. It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. Maybe we should just treat it like a duck, even if we don't see that it has duck DNA. At the end of the day, it gets defined by our interactions with the intelligent machine, just like our interactions with our air quality and water quality and everything else that's inanimate that we still need to interact with in order to survive and live and pass through the world. If we're going to interact with these highly intelligent, sophisticated robots or pieces of software, then we're going to feel emotions about them. You know, our sentience and our own consciousness is going to have us react to them in specific ways. And that might be sufficient of a line to say that, Yeah, at this point, we need to give these intelligent machines some level of protection so that they're not exploited, because that then reflects on how we treat them and how we treat ourselves.
Yeah, that's really insightful. It's a lot about our emotional response, since we have no actual heart evidence of anybody else's consciousness. But speaking of you know, speaking like a duck and talking like a duck, to think about how we treat ducks or other animals, right, if you imagine that these animals are sentient, that chickens and pigs are sentient and have emotions and experience, we don't treat them very well. We raise them in factories and slaughter them for food. There's a difference between what we understand intellectually to be the rights or the experience of a creature and how our society is constructed to respect those or not. As you mentioned earlier, I really enjoyed in your novels a lot of those nuances for how society is built, sometimes on flawed premises. Do you think that will be a difficult transition for us, say we come to this emotional realization, do you think there will still be people who say, well, yes, maybe they feel something, but whatever, that still don't deserve rights.
For sure.
That's definitely one of the points of the book is that when it benefits us to think that way, there will be a lot of people pushing to continue to think that way, and we have only to look at, like you said, factory farming. You know, people know that animals are sentient. I don't think there's much of a question there at this point that they are at least somewhat self aware, that there are certainly living creatures who feel pain, who feel emotions, who feel attachments, who can develop their own sorts.
Of language and communications.
Everything we learn about animals points to them being a lot more sophisticated than we often give them credit for. Similarly, if we can enslave the machines and use them for labor without having to give them time off, without having to compensate them in any.
Way, we're going to do it.
You know, it's to our benefit, right, So it's going to be a struggle to convince those who benefit from that to give that up, just like it was a struggle to give up slavery, right, just like it continues to be a struggle for a lot of people to acknowledge that life doesn't have to be a zero sum game, that the only way they can gain is if somebody else loses. And I don't believe that to be the case, because we don't really live in that closed of a system. At this point, I think we can all gain and we've already shown that, so there's no reason we can't continue to expand that particular ethos in human society. It's just that it does go against a lot of people's human nature.
I won't say everyone.
I think there are you know, vast segments of society that are altruistic in a lot of ways, that are willing to sacrifice immediate or personal gain for a larger good, whether it's family or society. So I think it comes down to what we cultivate, and I think we're seeing that shift already right to plant based proteins. We've got beyond meat and impossible workers and all of these things, partly just for ecological and economic reasons, right, that pressure has gotten to the point where people are willing to trade off animal meat for plant based proteins. But also I think more people have become aware of these ethical quandaries, right, that many of these animals are not well treated for their entire lives, We're pumping them full of hormones and chemicals, that maybe this is not the right way to move into our future.
Well, I noticed in your book. It's not just a question of how many rights we give the AI, but also the humans in your book. They're not always having a great time. I mean, their life is not very secure. They've work in these gig jobs, they have to modify their bodies and take you know, personal risks. They've essentially no privacy. It's not like a future that I would be excited to live in. Necessarily enjoyed reading the book, but I wouldn't want to be in it. So did you intend it to be dystopian?
I didn't intend it to be any more dystopian than our lives today. I intended it to be, you know, a plausible extrapolation.
Of trends that are happening.
And granted, these are fairly linear projections of these trends, and you know, I'm sure there will be disruptions. I don't believe that this is going to be our future. But I wanted to examine these particular aspects of the present, which I think a lot of near science fiction future does. It's really not about the future, it's about what we're dealing with today, the concerns of today, and kind of projecting those forward that if we don't do anything about these trends. Here's where we might end up, and if you don't like that, then now is the time to start making changes to ensure that that's not our future. I think true dystopian stories, you know, carry these sorts of trends to great extremes that are implausible but are there. From a sort of polemical standpoint to illustrate a very specific point, I don't think the future in Machinehood is that bad. There are good things to balance out the negatives, and you know, there's a lot of people in the past several years who feel like we are currently inhabiting a dystopia and we're living through it. From that standpoint, yeah, I don't think the Machinehood future is any more dystopic than you know, the one that we're inhabiting. So if that's your feeling, then it's like, okay, look around you and think about where we've ended up today and how we've allowed ourselves to get here.
Now.
I had this feeling of like uber drivers driving late to the night, drinking red bull constantly, sort of definitely had that feeling. All right, this is a super fun conversation and I have lots more questions, But first let's take a quick break. When you pop a piece of cheese and your mouth, or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite, But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love. With less of an impact. Visit Usdairy dot com slash Sustainability to learn more.
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All right, we're back from break and we are talking to the author Sbdiwa about her novel Machinehood. I noticed on your website you have this line that says, I am currently mortal and full of squishy organs, but I hope to outlive that. And that made me wonder if you were like looking forward to embracing this sort of post biological future.
Yeah, for sure, I am not afraid of immortality.
There's a lot of things I want to do.
I like to learn stuff, I like to dabble, and I love seeking new experiences and knowledge. So the greatest sorrow in my life is that I don't get to live to see the future, which is of course an impossible thing to do unless you're immortal, then you always get to live to see the future. And I also find that this argument that you know natural is best to be very flawed because natural has occurred by random chance and over long periods of natural selection. It's worked out pretty well, but it's not necessarily optimal. I'm enough of an engineer to kind of look at our physiological systems and go, yeah, but you know, we could tweak this and make it better. So from that standpoint, I would certainly like my artificial needs and elbows and back, you know, to be less painful in my old age, to avoid neurodegeneration, to have the brain of a twenty five year old forever, you know, at my peak performance of my frontal cortex and everything else, because why not, right if you could have it and it's not borne so much from I want to be superhuman as again, I just want to be able to live life to my fullest as long as I possibly can, because I'm desperately curious about everything.
Well, that's definitely something we understand on this podcast. We want to know the secrets of the universe, and we want to learn what scientists are going to learn in the next hundred, five hundred and thousand years. Let's dig into the details of that a little bit, if you don't mind. In your novel, the people take these pills you call them their zips and flows and buffs and jews that give you specific enhancements, and you really have worked them out in gory detail, like what they actually do inside them. What's the origin of these ideas? Are these like actual research projects you wanted to work on.
Not necessarily that I wanted to work on, but things that I have seen poking around science news that I find utterly fascinating.
And also I wanted to take one.
Of the favorite aspects of science fiction, one that I myself wrote about in my novella Runtime, which is the cyborg and the visualization of you know, unmechanized human being with like these big bulky exoskeletons and you know, hydraulics and gears and all the stuff that comes with mechanical systems, and turn that on its head and say, can we have a cyborg that looks human from the outside, completely human. You have no idea. They're not superpowers, it's not magic. But it's that same biotechnology as ministriurization, because honestly, who wants to wander around in a bunch of bulky exoskeleton gear? Right that's not very comfortable looking from what I can tell, you know, makes it harder to fit into those airlines seats.
Just it's no good.
Everyone can take a pill, you know, you like tear the fabric, things keep breaking.
It seems terribly inconvenient to me.
So on the other hand, you know, we have people in labs today developing micromachines that you can swallow, that will track through your colon, that can be externally controlled via magnetics, and that are also somewhat autonomous, right they you know, that's lovely like origami unfolding structures. And right now, because it's a pill and it goes through your gut, that's kind of the only place where we're really able to use this, and it's still not being done in medicine, but I can see this technology move moving forward, you know, in fifty years to nanoscale things that can cross into your blood stream, that can cross your blood brain barrier that can sit there and do really interesting things within your body, working in concert with your inherent biochemistry and physiological systems to then tweak little things that you know, can maybe like in the book, speed up plotting and healing of the skin, or you know, bypass nerve conduction for faster communications, maybe change the state of your brain so that you can focus your attention on something a little better. You know, again, not superpowers, because I don't think that's very realistic, but enough that it's going to be beneficial, especially when we're trying to keep up with these highly intelligent systems that are working at you know, gig your hearts and terror hurts speeds and are going to become increasingly complex going forward. And then I threw some capitalism in there, because a everyone's got to make money, right, Like nothing in life is free. So these pills, because you have to take them and they're small and they're in your body, they're going to break down. They're going to be cleaned out by your own bodies garbage collection systems and flushed away.
So you got to keep taking more pills.
And who doesn't want that because that's a great way you know, for the pill designers to make.
Their money, make money on the ink, right, not the printer.
Yeah. Always.
I worked for a medical device company where I learned that lesson. You know, the business model is always give away the razor charge for the blades, right, same thing with the printers.
So same thing with this.
You can print your smart pills at home in your kitchen, but you got to keep downloading new designs every day or every week, and so that's what you're paying for, and the pills keep getting flushed out of your system, so of course you're going to want the latest and greatest on a daily basis.
Well, another thing I really enjoyed about your book was that you had real science puzzles in there. You get things going on that the characters didn't understand, and then they were using their science brain to try to unravel the mystery. And that's not something you see very often in science fiction. Usually it's here's a new technology, let's use it to kill people, or how's it change or society or whatever. But like the actual process of science, the detective mystery of false pasts and frustration and limited resources, you know, the things that some of us actually live. You don't see that captured very often in science fiction. So first of all, just kudos on capturing that, but sort of narratively, why did you want to show that in your story? Why did you decide to include like this actual scientific method as part of the story for your character?
For exactly that reason, I do feel like in older science fiction, you know, from the forties and fifties, especially, scientists were often the heroes or the protagonists and occasionally got to do actual science as part of the stories. The problem to me in those old science fiction stories is the scientists were very sort of cardboard cutout scientists. There wasn't a lot of character development or interesting plot development, and you know, that larger social aspect was usually completely ignored, all in favor of just the scientific discovery part. So I wanted to modernize that concept and bring it all together and have you know, the big picture as well as sort of this localized person who's trying to figure something out.
And we do.
I guess we have one good example that became you know, huge in pop culture, which was the Martian Right.
And that was fantastic to see so.
Many people actually like that because I read it and I was really surprised that, you know, it got us popular as it did just considering the themes and what happens in that story. So I wanted to tell that particular aspect. And also that's again, I guess, a part of my own personality. While I'm an engineer by profession, I think I'm a scientist at heart, and that's kind of where I got my start. And I love this idea of teasing out puzzles, of debugging things. You know, we're really debugging the universe in a lot of ways, right We're trying to understand how it works, how we broke it, and how we fix it. And so it was nice to kind of present that particular aspect as part of a science fiction narrative.
Well, I really enjoyed seeing the scientists not just being nerds in white lab coats, So thank you very much for that. And then my last question is about the the universe that you've constructed. You know, in a science fiction novel, you have the liberty to change the laws of physics or biology or whatever and create a different universe that follows different rules. It seemed to me in your book you really huge closely to what could be possible in our universe? Is that true first of all? And is that because you wanted to speak to issues in our society that were most relevant to like our actual world.
It was definitely deliberate to you know, hw to most of what we know about today in terms of our physical world. But I did it more because I think genuinely in the next seventy five years, were unlikely to find something radically groundbreaking, even as much as you know quantum physics kind of turned classical mechanics on its head one hundred ish years ago and led to the transistor and the digital revolution. I decided not to take that particular path because I knew that whatever I put in there is probably not ever going to happen.
I'm going to be making it up right.
And the places that we're really poking at right now, I feel like that are the big questions, are more large scale stuff like dark matter, where we're genuinely puzzled, and I think those are the puzzles we're probably going to tease out in the next few decades. So the one I guess sort of kind of fun innovation I threw into machinehood that I don't know if it'll happen is this idea of you know, tabletop genetics, taking things like crisper and saying that it's going to be, you know, the computer revolution of this century, that everybody's going to be able to do that in their household. And so that was really the only sort of leap I've taken where I'm not one hundred percent sure that's really going to happen for the rest of it. Especially with near term science fiction, I think it's always better to stick with what we know and build a plausible future than to radically redefine physics. That's the next novel that I have been working on for the past year is that a thousand years in the future, and I have definitely invented some new physics for that one, bringing in these ideas of dark matter and you know, why the universe is accelerating and maybe there's something in our field theories that we are missing that Okay, ol right, let me you know, to fine a new particle and something that works on larger scales, and maybe we just didn't have the ability to sense it in twenty twenty, but five hundred years from now will have the appropriate technology to find those things and then harness those things, So I find it more comfortable to play with that, you know, on a longer time scale than in the next hundred or so, you know, one hundred, one hundred and fifty years.
Unless you turn into a cyborg, you probably won't be around for people to compare the fact to your fiction.
Yeah, sadly, I may or may not live long enough to find out.
Well, thanks very much for taking the time talk to us about the university created in Machinehood. Tell our listeners about your next project and when we can expect to see something.
The next project, unfortunately is still very in nascent sort of stages, so I can't promise anything regarding it at this point. But I am hard at work on this book and we'll see how it goes. Right now, a lot of my focus is just getting the word out about Machinehoods. So tell your audience. If you read it and you like it, please tell your friends so there can be more books like it in the world. And if you want a little teaser, go to machinehood dot com. There's a little excerpt from the Machine Hood's manifesto there, and you know, links to more good stuff. And yeah, it was my pleasure to be here and talk about this. I can talk about this stuff all day and speculate about science and technology, hopefully for you know, many decades forward.
Through my fiction.
All right, well, congrats again on the novel and thanks again for joining us. All Right, so, thank you very much to the author for coming on the show and answering all of my pesky questions about physics and consciousness and artificial intelligence. This is the kind of stuff that I love to think about. I really enjoy a novel that pushes me to the limits to make me think about what's possible, what our universe might be like, what our life might be like in this universe as we grow to become masters of the science and develop new technology that can really change what it means to be human. For me, that's the whole goal of science, is to push back on this boundary of ignorance and reveal the nature of the universe and change our relationship with the cosmos. I'm frustrated by our ignorance of the nature of the universe we live in, and I feel like we're making ridiculous and silly decisions about how to live our life and how to explore the universe just because we are so ignorant, and so I'm desperate to see deep into the future and to understand what we might learn and how we might live. And some of these science fas ls are so fun because they give you a little bit of a taste of that. So thanks for tuning in to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. Where usually we explore our universe, but sometimes we take these detours into the world of science fiction. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural rests sources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
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