The Science Fiction Universe of SB Divya

Daniel interviews SB Divya about her new novel "Machinehood" which explores whether machines can be self-aware.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
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

(00:31):
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,

(01:08):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've 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

(01:28):
on in the hearts of black holes, to how long
our son 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,

(01:49):
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 time the fraction of
the mysteries of the universe, but knowing that many enormous
discoveries lay ahead, hoping at least that there are grand

(02:09):
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

(02:29):
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

(02:51):
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 the complexity and
beauty emerges from the organization of those tiny little strings
or pixels or whatever it is that the foundation of
the nature of reality. But it's also important to think

(03:13):
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 respect, who earns rights, and who
gets self determination. Think about, for example, how differently you
view the universe than somebody did who lived a hundred

(03:35):
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 a

(03:56):
hundred years, in a thousand years, in ten thousand years
and thinking about our 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.

(04:20):
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 a
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

(04:42):
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, specific lee,
how we treat other beings which may or may not

(05:04):
be senttioned. That includes animals and includes artificial intelligence. So
today on the podcast, we're gonna 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

(05:28):
Science Fiction Universe of S. B. Divia as me. Diva
is a geek. She is a nerd, just like me.
She went to cal Tech 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

(05:49):
be a machine and how society should treat machines and
how we formulate questions of respect and rights and sort
of the structure of society to accommodate different kind end
of sension 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

(06:13):
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

(06:36):
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

(06:57):
the future might be like. And there's a few aspects
that are really key to the structure of 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

(07:18):
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're not conscious, they're not sentient, they're not having a
first person subjective experience in the way that you are,

(07:42):
I hope and the way that I know that I
am like they cart 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 experience? And if

(08:03):
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 extrampolining a onto 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.

(08:25):
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

(08:46):
ideas for what we should try to make. And in
this book, the author has gone sort of beyond cyborg ism,
where people are like strapping machines onto their bodies or
replacing their arms with machines, and instead she sort of
internalized this cyborder approach. Rather than replacing your body with
a machine, you swallow these mini machines they call pills.

(09:08):
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 yourselves, and it's really quite plausible, frankly,
and her background in the science and understanding the details

(09:32):
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

(09:55):
I think maybe the last major element of this future
society it 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,

(10:16):
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 micro drone
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.

(10:39):
It's just taken an 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 over all? I was really impressed.

(11:01):
I 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's 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

(11:21):
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 tying little pieces can come together

(11:45):
to somehow have a first persons subjective experience. So, for
those of you who are not into philosophy of science,
this this concept of the philosophical zombie, that's an object
or a creature which acts sentiented act, it's like it's
having a first person experience tells you that it is
but actually isn't. And the whole construction, the whole idea

(12:07):
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

(12:27):
the point is that there's no way to know whether
somebody really in there or not other than actually being
in there. That's the foundation of this question. Also that
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 will never know, because we'll never
be that bad. And the point is larger than that.

(12:49):
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 them. 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

(13:11):
in this complex structure we call 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 hard working,

(13:33):
not just smart, not just intelligent, but actually self aware,
capable of a real experience, capable maybe even of suffering,
of feeling joy, of 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 scan

(13:54):
your brain and uploaded it to a computer that was
able to simulate your brain, so I had exactly the
same sort of information content as 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

(14:14):
the information that's being passed around inside your brain or
is it closely connected to the actual wet wear, 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

(14:35):
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.

(14:59):
In order 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,

(15:21):
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,

(15:42):
scientists solving problems, scientists basing 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 when
we're gonna talk to her about how she wrote this book,
what's important to her, and what she thinks about some

(16:04):
of these deep questions of the nature of consciousness. But
first let's take a quick break. All right, we're back
and we are talking about the book Machine Hood by S. B. Devia,

(16:28):
which has just come out recently, which I thoroughly enjoyed
and recommend to you. The book is all about whether
it's possible to have artificial intelligence that actually is self aware,
and what that would mean for our society and how
we should treat it. So, without further ado, here's my
interview with the author. Alright, so thank you very much

(16:49):
for joining me. It's my pleasure to introduce to our
podcast as b Divia, author of Machine Hood, Say hello
to all of our listeners. 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 so to get them calibrated in our science

(17:10):
fiction universe. We 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,

(17:30):
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

(17:52):
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.

(18:13):
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 treat. 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

(18:35):
I were sixteen again. I don't think I would do
it again at this stage in my life. It was
a lot. But you went to Caltech at sixteen. I did. Yeah.
My 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 skipped a grade because the high school I ended

(18:58):
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

(19:19):
mid thirties. I got way laid 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,

(19:43):
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 two thousand and fourteen.

(20:04):
I had a short novel come out from Towards dot
com in two thousand and sixteen, and this past week,
Machine Hood, 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

(20:26):
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

(20:50):
a slaughter and recreation machine just by the way they
show it. There's never like a particle being 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 know, that much material of that far. So yeah, vaporized, rebuilt.

(21:11):
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 have 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

(21:34):
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

(21:54):
taken apart. You would do it. You would let the
machine kill you and rebuild you. 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,

(22:14):
I would absolutely step in. And 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.

(22:36):
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 cannon, just one, that's tough.

(22:57):
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

(23:19):
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 those environments.
Because you want to drive the Mars rover in real time, yeah,
think about it though. If we had a real time

(23:40):
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 stand words, but they're still a

(24:01):
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 and the vastness of the universe, why haven't

(24:22):
aliens visited us or contacted us the same exact actually
reason that I like the answervill, which is it takes
light time to travel across vast descisances, and even though
there is probably plenty of life out there, much of
it is not a advanced enough to send you know,

(24:45):
extra solar communications and then be we've got to wait
for that extra solar 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

(25:07):
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

(25:31):
years in those delays, 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 were

(25:52):
extinct or vice versa. Right, So we're not gonna be
swapping text messages with anyone anytime soon, even though that's
what we all want. Not without your answer, will at
least and imagine how long it would take to learn
to decode their language. You know, if it takes twenty
years between sending a question and getting an answer, it's
hard enough to decode ancient human languages, you know, just

(26:14):
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 enjoy. 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, which it was an accomplishment
to me. Your book raises a lot of interesting and

(26:35):
important questions about how technology changes the pattern of our life,
how we treat each other, and who deserves what kind
of treatment, what kind of rites? 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
from going to dive into my personal psychology and unearthed

(26:59):
what try as 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,

(27:21):
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,

(27:46):
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

(28:12):
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,

(28:33):
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 machine hood and really examining these
questions of what makes something human sentient deserving of rights

(28:59):
and detections. Thank you. 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.

(29:24):
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

(29:47):
what we know about human beings, we can't necessarily quantify
our intelligence levels. I don't buy into I Q 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 of a grasp on yet, right.

(30:09):
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

(30:31):
increasingly intelligent in that they will 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

(30:53):
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 life, because they
can't help it, especially if it's in their hardware like

(31:15):
it is with us. Write the desire for survival, the
desire for selfhood. So I do think we're gonna 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

(31:35):
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 machine hood. 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

(31:58):
in either direction to ending on the nuances. But ultimately,
I think it's a reflection of ethics in terms of
how we treat each other, and like said, how we
treat the world around us. And if we can respect
ourselves and other human beings, if we can respect our planet,

(32:22):
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 herselves 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 week AI

(32:44):
are in your novel, but are not actually conscious. But
my question for you is, how do we know when
you talk about a being that simulates the experience of
being conscious, But when we always run into the problem
of the philosophical zombie, something which seems to be conscious
but we can't ever tell of it actually is. Me,
I don't know if you're conscious, for example, what I
take it onto faith? How do we know when our

(33:05):
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

(33:29):
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

(33:49):
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

(34:11):
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,

(34:32):
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 beatle in
terms of its level of consciousness, then I think we
are on the path to knowing when the really complex

(34:55):
intelligent machine has also developed consciousness, because then we can
measure or it. And until then I'm gonna 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

(35:18):
the end of the day, it gets defined by our
interactions with the intelligent machine, just like our interactions with
our air quality and you know, 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.

(35:41):
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

(36:03):
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

(36:25):
of you know, speaking like a duck and talking like
a duck, let's think about how we treat ducks or
other animals. Right, If you imagine that these animals are centered.
The chickens and pigs are ascentioned 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

(36:48):
to respect those or not. As 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 would 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, you know, they still don't
deserve rights. For sure. That's definitely one of the points

(37:11):
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

(37:31):
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,

(37:53):
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

(38:14):
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 ZR 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,

(38:37):
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

(39:00):
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

(39:22):
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

(39:43):
entire lives, were 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, you're
always having a great time. I mean, their life is
not very secure. They've work in these gig jobs, they

(40:05):
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

(40:29):
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

(40:53):
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,

(41:14):
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

(41:38):
think the future and machine Hood 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

(41:58):
think the Machine had future is anymore 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.

(42:19):
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. All right, we're

(42:40):
back from break and we are talking to the author
sp Diva about her novel Machine Hood. 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 the sort of post
biological future. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I am not afraid

(43:03):
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

(43:26):
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

(43:48):
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 knees and elbows and back,
you know, to be less painful in my old age,

(44:10):
to avoid neuro degeneration, 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 born
so much from I want to be superhuman as again,
I just want to be able to live life to

(44:33):
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 to
the universe, and we want to learn what scientists are
going to learn in the next hundred five hundred thousand years.
Let's dig into the details of that a little bit,
if you don't mind. In your novel, the people take

(44:54):
these pills you call them their zips and flows and
buffs and jew ers that give you specific enhancement, and
you really have worked them out in gory details, like
what they actually do inside the body. 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

(45:19):
wanted to take one of the favorite aspects of science fiction,
one that I myself wrote about in my novella run Time,
which is the cyborg and the visualization of you know,
a mechanized human being with like these big bulky exoskeletons

(45:39):
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

(46:02):
biotechnology as ministerization, 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,
it makes it harder to fit into those airline seats.
Just it's no good. Everyone can take a pill, you know,
you's like tear the fabric. Things keep breaking. It seems

(46:26):
terribly inconvenient to me. So on the other hand, you know,
we have people in labs today developing micro machines 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 oregamy

(46:48):
unfolding structures and right now, because it's a pill and
it goes through your gut. That's kind of the only
place where really able to use this, and it's still
not being done in medicine, but I can see this
technology moving forward, you know, in fifty years, to nanoscale

(47:08):
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. Two. Then tweak

(47:29):
little things that you know, can maybe like in the book,
speed up clotting 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,

(47:52):
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 hurts 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

(48:14):
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've
got to keep taking more pills. And who doesn't want that,
because that's a great way, you know, for the pill

(48:35):
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

(48:56):
home in your kitchen, but you've got to keep downloading
new design in every day or every week, and so
that's what you're paying for, and the pills keep getting
fleshed 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

(49:18):
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 paths and frustration and limited resources, you know,
the things that some of us actually live, you don't

(49:40):
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,

(50:02):
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

(50:25):
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

(50:45):
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 as popular as it did, just considering the themes

(51:07):
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.

(51:29):
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 and
white lab coats, So thank you very much for that.

(51:50):
And then my last question is about 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

(52:11):
you wanted to speak to issues in our society that
were most relevant to like our actual world. It was
definitely deliberate too, you know, hue 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

(52:35):
radically groundbreaking, even as much as you know, quantum physics
kind of turned classical mechanics on its head a hundred
issue 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

(52:56):
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 were probably going to tease out in the next

(53:16):
few decades. So the one I guess sort of kind
of fun innovation I threw into machine hood that I
don't know if it will happen is this idea of
you know, tabletop genetics, thinking things like Crisper and saying
that it's going to be, you know, the computer revolution

(53:37):
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
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

(53:58):
plausible future than to radically redefine physics. That said, 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 thou one,
bringing in these ideas of dark matter and you know

(54:19):
why the universe is accelerating and maybe there's something in
our field theories that we are missing that. Okay, all right,
I let me, you know, define a new particle and
something that works on larger scales, and maybe we just
didn't have the ability to sense it in But five
years from now we'll have the appropriate technology to find

(54:41):
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, hundred hundred and fifty years. Unless you turn
into a cyborg, you probably won't be around for people
to compare the factor to your fiction. Yeah, Sadly, I

(55:01):
may or may not live long enough to find out. Well,
thanks very much for taking the time to talk to
us about the universe you created in Machine hood Tell
our listeners about your next project and when we can
expect to see something. The next project, unfortunately is still
very in its nascent sort of stages, so I can't

(55:21):
promise anything regarding it at this point. But I'm 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 Machine Hoods. 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,

(55:43):
go to machine hood dot com. There's a little excerpt
from the machine Hoods 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 fully for you know, many decades forward through my fiction.

(56:04):
All right, Well, congrats again on the novel and thanks
again for joining us. All right, so, thank you very
much to the opto 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

(56:26):
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

(56:48):
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 understand what we might learn and how
we might live. And some of these science fiction novels
are so fun because they give you a little bit
of a taste of that. So thanks for tuning in

(57:09):
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

(57:31):
I Heart Radio. Or more podcast from my Heart Radio
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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