AI Ethics and Human Futures: Navigating Tech with Purpose with S.B. Divya – Synthetic Minds EP11

Welcome to Synthetic Minds, the podcast where science fiction and cutting edge technology intersect, guiding organizations toward future innovation. I'm your host, Dr. Mark Van Reemen, accompanied by my digital twin as we explore the boundaries between the real and the speculative with insights that shape our world today. We're joined by S.P. divia, a writer and futurist whose work delves into AI, biotechnology and the ethical implications of technology. With novels like Machinehood and Runtime, Divya tackles the profound questions of how humanity interacts with rapidly evolving technology. In this episode, we'll uncover her thoughts on AI ethics, the future of human augmentation, and how speculative fiction can help organizations prepare and for the exponential shifts ahead. Divya's work challenges us to rethink autonomy, equality, and what it means to be human in an increasingly interconnected tech driven world. Join us as we explore these timely and critical issues with SB Divya learning from her vision of the future and her reflections on the responsibilities we carry in shaping it. Don't forget to subscribe and stay tuned for more insights into the future of technology and society.

Welcome Divya. Great to have you on the show.

Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Perfect. So let's start with a bit of your background and one of the two books that you wrote that you're most proud of.

Oh yeah, I remember this question was going to be a tough one. My background is, well, if we start from the beginning, physics and astronomy. And then halfway through my undergraduate studies I switched to the computational neuroscience department at Caltech, which was somewhat young still at the time and not offering an undergraduate degree. So I kind of made up my own with the professors there. And then I went on to do graduate work in signal processing and digital communications. I worked across these various spheres up until 2020. The end of 2020, I happened to leave my last tech job and three weeks later got sick with COVID and two months after that got sick with Long Covid. So no more day job for me, just. Just writing as and when I can squeeze it in. But I have currently three novels as well as a short story collection and a novella out under my name. And I also co edited an anthology as part of Escape Pod's 15th anniversary while I was one of the editors on staff there. And which one am I most proud of? I mean, that's. That's like. I feel like that's always like asking a parent to choose their favorite child. I mean, I. I love all my books for different reasons, I think for the. The interests of this podcast and its audience, Machinehood is probably the most topical, but Loka is my most recent, so perhaps a favorite just from that standpoint that just came out a month ago, but that is Far Future is a lot more philosophical and less grounded in reality as books like Runtime and Machinehood.

Well, congratulations on your next book. That's always a great accomplishment.

Thank you.

From the books that you've written, what are some of the common themes from a technology perspective in your books? And has the ethical use of technology always been at the forefront?

I think the ethical use has always been at the forefront of my mind, and my themes broadly tend to center on what it means to be human, especially in light of how human beings intersect with, interact with, and are merging with various forms of technology as we go forward. Also, the social impacts of technology. There's. There's the impact on the individual and then there's the broader social changes that are affected. The uneven distribution of access to technology and technology is pretty broad, I would say, in my books, because I have this sort of very intersectional background. I tend to look at a little bit of everything. So what we're doing in orbit, as well as what we're doing digitally, as well as what we're doing, what we're doing in terms of biotech and bioengineering. So my weakest link is chemistry. So that's probably the one place I don't set foot very often. But definitely when it comes to cybernetics, when it comes to manipulation of genetics, when it comes to space travel, I tend to look at all of those axes pretty closely.

In machinehood and in runtime, you explore AI, automation, biotechnology. Which of these advancements do you see on the near horizon and what concerns you about their adoption in society?

I think I'm most concerned with biotechnology and digital technology right now. But also climate, which used to be climate science, but is also moving into climate technology as a space. Right? We have geoengineering, we have people trying solar engineering, all kinds of different techniques to mitigate climate change, and that is definitely a pressing concern. I haven't dealt as deeply with that as with some of the other topics, but I think we're seeing a lot of hype around AI right now. And as someone who has worked in that space and followed it very closely, I suspect, as with all shiny new technology is, it's going to be sort of an S curve. Right? In terms of that excitement, there are still lots of amazing things to come, just as there were with the development of computers going back to electricity, going however far back you want. But we're still kind of in that exponential part of the curve. I feel where a lot is happening very quickly, A lot of money is being put into it, a lot of resources, a lot of attention, and a lot of dynamic forces reshaping how people are interacting with us, how comfortable they are, how much pushback there is, where we kind of establish some of those ethical boundaries of what we should and shouldn't do with it. And I think in the next probably 20 to 30 years, we're going to come head to head with genetic engineering as well. We've already seen it a little bit, but it's not yet easy. It's not as widespread. But I think that S curve is, Is coming at us probably faster than, you know, a lot of people are paying attention to.

So do you. Do you think that genetic engineering will become as easy as. I don't know. Using a large language model today is.

I think it's. I think we're getting there. Yeah, People are, you know, I think in that space, people are working on, you know, we have so many techniques. We've gone several generations past crispr, which was already exciting, to refine these methodologies to make the outcomes more predictable. And undeniably we have people with medical necessity who can really benefit from these things. But obviously we have this whole other movement, I think, dovetailing with things like long termism, where people are also looking at, or transhumanism, where people are looking at improving their bodies through genetic engineering enhancement. And those two terms are very, very ethically loaded. What does improvement mean? What does enhancement mean again? Who gets to benefit? Who gets to control these things? Who gets to define what these terms mean to the larger humankind?

So yesterday I was watching a TED talk from Ray Kurzweil, the famous futurist, and he said that he believed that because of technology such as AI or bioengineering, escape velocity will be achieved probably towards the end of this decade. Which basically means that every year you get older, you return, you get a year back because of developments. How do you look at that? The combination of bioengineering as well as AI, sort of the convergence of these two technologies. What do you foresee?

I don't necessarily favor longevity as the outcome of these two. I know, I know a lot of people.

You don't want to live forever.

You know, I used to. It says on my website that I forget if I, if, if I've changed it now, but at one point it said, I'm full of squishy organs. But I hope to outlive that one day. Right. But I will say that having a chronic illness and having become disabled by it has really kind of shifted my perspective on what it means to live for a long time. Because, yeah, a lot of people who say they want to live forever are still younger or healthier or both. And they haven't yet experienced what, being 80 or 90 and not in full control or even, you know, 50 or 60. Right. Not being in full control of your body, having aches and pains. What aging really does. I was on a panel once where, where an older person said that aging should be considered a disability because in a lot of ways it is, it is disabling and it is degenerative and we don't know how to stop it. So longevity without being able to regulate aging, I think is not most people's ideal of what they're pursuing when they're pursuing longevity. So we have to be really careful about that. Yeah, I think it's going to be more, I mean, I agree with Kurzweil, I just started on his new book. I agree that there's going to be a lot more augmentation and human machine interfacing. We have seen that throughout human history. This is another tool that helps enhance our abilities in various capacities. From that standpoint, I think we're going to see further mergings of human beings with various forms of technology in ways that will hopefully benefit them. But as we know, all technology ends up having more than one facet in terms of what it does to us.

I consider myself an optimistic dystopian, which is a bit of, a bit of an oxymoron. But it helps me understand both the good and the bad and the ugly of technology, because as you rightly say, so technology has two sides of it. It can be used for, and it can be used for bad. If we look at artificial intelligence, of course, that's, that's the hype of the day. How do you envision that this would reshape the human experience in the coming decades? And what kind of safeguards, if any, should we as a society or as organizations implement today?

So in terms of how it's going to reshape society, I mean, when I wrote Machinehood, that was actually 2017 to 2018 and the gig economy was also growing at that point. Job security had dropped in general. And we've seen just over the past probably half century, the reduction in long term employment with a single corporation, things like pensions disappearing. So job security overall has Dwindled. And so one of the things I was forecasting in that novel is that the idea of employment is going to gradually whittle away and we're going to end up with everybody being contractual and small, project groups, possibly even self organizing to bid for projects from people with available funding. So a very sort of decentralized mode for the economy as opposed to what we have right now, which, you know, has most work being concentrated with specific corporations. Will that come to pass? I don't know. I certainly see a lot of trends in those directions. It's not always beneficial. You know, the gig economy, again, it gives people flexibility, but even less job security. I had some friends read my novel and turn around and tell me future sounds absolutely awful. They would never want to live in it. But at the same time, you know, we see a lot of people who like some of that flexibility, right? We see people who are minimalists who say that, you know, I can get away with less money and now I can get away with working less and focus my time on what's more important to me that than financial gains. So it's another way of giving people choices. What AI is going to do, I think will depend a lot on what our relationship is with it. We've already seen that some people are feeling very adversarial about it. Especially I see that in creative spaces particularly. We haven't yet seen leaps and bounds in physical robotics, but as that comes to pass, a lot more manual labor is going to be displaced. We're going to probably see some adversarial relationships develop there. And then we have the people who are actually building this technology, who are excited about it, who see lots of great ways to deploy it to help people. But sometimes that's not always the most profitable. Again, coming from the disabled community, there's all kinds of wonderful technologies that could assist the disabled and the elderly, but we don't see a lot of money being put there because disabled people typically aren't working. They don't have a lot of money. So we don't, you know, capitalism doesn't incentivize that as much, right? We have to get that push from governments and nonprofits. And so we see technology being deployed to maximize profit. And so chances are we're going to see a lot more AI in advertising, everybody's favorite, right ways to market stuff to us as consumers, to make people consume more, even if that isn't necessarily what's best for our society at large. But at the same time, you know, we see it elsewhere too. Right. Like in, in protein folding, in medicine. It's not all grim for sure, but. But definitely, yeah, profit margin talk. So I suspect we're, we'll see a lot of deployment there.

Well, I think there's always the balance that we need to, to figure out in society. And unfortunately, I think a lot of the times the balance moves to capitalist, you know, shareholder value and not so much society societal value, where, you know, you can clearly see as you, as you say that a lot of advertising, sorry, a lot of money is going to advertising business to make that even more effective to target sells even more stuff that we don't need. And I do find that that's a bit of a shame that we use this powerful technology for that kind of stuff instead of really improving our lives. But I think that's sort of inherent to the society that we live in, which is a capitalist society, which is all driven by shareholder. Is there anything we could do about that in the long term?

I mean, it's interesting, I think we're using that word again to improve. An improvement very much in the eye of the beholder. I know people who really appreciate targeted advertising, they'd rather see what they're interested in than random ads that are just a nuisance and they discover new products and they get excited about them. Even in advertising, it's not necessarily really all bad, though I do sometimes question, you know, how much of this subliminally sending people what we think they want, or maybe what we know they want algorithmically, then pushes them to buy and, you know, spend more money, consume more products. But setting that aside, you know, they're happy. They're happy. That's where I think it becomes very difficult to be prescriptive about what we should do. Right. Should is a very difficult word. Who, who gets to decide what's good and bad for us? I mean, we all know right now that sitting in front of a computer for eight to ten hours a day is not good for our bodies, it's not good for our brains. And yet all of us, 100%, including most of our children now, that is exactly what they're doing. Even if they have a teacher in front of the classroom, they're all working on, you know, tablets or laptops to take notes, to do their projects, et cetera, et cetera. So it's tough and I think it's going to require a real paradigm shift in considering what is healthy. So rather than talking about improvement in the abstract, I think we have to look at very concrete metrics like physical Health, mental health, what's good for our bodies, what's good for our brains. That you know as far as well as we know with today's medicine and science and nobody likes the words. Do you think it would be possible? I was going to say nobody likes the word regulation but the alternative is counter advertising, right? Like what we did in the US with cigarettes. You know, a heavy amount of messaging from the government that says this is bad for you, this is bad for you, don't do this, this, this is bad for you. Right. Where it gets tricky is nobody had to smoke cigarette to keep their job. But with technology I think there will be a lot of pressure to keep abreast of AI technologies, to use brain computer interfaces when those become common and to be always on. We've already seen that with the pandemic and the widespread deployment of video conferencing and working from home, the, the downside to all that flexibility that many of us used to dream of is that you can never fully disconnect from your job. Right? People are expecting you to be available all the time and again, not really healthy for us. And yet that's what tends to happen. So I'm sure with emerging AI agents with BCIs, we're going to see a greater push for productivity. Fewer, fewer excuses for well, I'm not feeling well. Could get your agent to do more of the work, right? Something and you can just sit there and supervise while you have the flu. There will be ways to squeeze out productivity and that's what our growth based capitalist economy pushes for. That's the minimum solution.

But you see that already in current gig economy where everything is driven, you know, on productivity, you know, the Uber drivers or the, the food delivery people, you know, they really focused on the, they managed by the algorithm and, and they don't have much, much, much say in this. And, and it's very much on, on more and more, more and, and being, being, being more productive and, and we already covered this, this briefly but as you said in Machine Hood, you, you depict this, this, you know, this extreme gig economy. But do you think that will actually happen in the years to come? And with this focus on productivity and this, you know, this drive by more shareholder value, faster basically what kind of signals do you see happening and do you see that today that sort of, it will mirror the scenarios that you describe in your books or is there a way towards a better future?

I definitely see some trends in that direction. At the same time there's some pushback happening. So will we end up Going to that extreme, probably not. There'll probably still be some happy medium, certain jobs that are just not conducive to always being contractual. Right. That said, you know, we're seeing contract nurses, travel nurses, travel doctors, all kinds of jobs that maybe you wouldn't have thought of as being contractual, turning that way, including adjunct professors, even at the college level. Is it possible? Yeah, absolutely. How are we going to avoid it? If we want to avoid it, I think it's going to take a lot of conscious action on behalf of labor to say that this is not the kind of structure we want. We're going to push back against it. We demand some guarantee of employment and benefits associated with that employment. And the other thing on a more broader philosophical angle that I love, is zero growth or degrowth as a different approach to measures of economic success and social success rather than being gdp. And you know, how much did your salary increase? How much bigger is your second house compared to your first house? Right. This philosophy that more is always better to reshape social thinking, kind of shift the overtone window on that particular topic to saying that maybe less is more. Maybe we are happier and healthier with lower productivity, even though that might mean fewer gains in the stock market, less wealth accumulation, slower progress. One of the things that Kurzweil always talks about is the exponential growth of technological progress. One of the things we have seen driven economically via capitalism over the last several hundred years is measures of productivity and how we can continue to grow that. Looking at the stock market, how do we continue to grow that? And I am not totally anti capital. I think it's better to have free flowing capital than to have everything be centralized because that's concentrating a lot of power and an even smaller number of hands and with no way of getting it back to the people. But at the same time, this incessant push for growth and progress as fast as you can get it, you know, racing to beat the next person to market with whatever it is you're doing and not slowing down to think about consequences, pausing to really consider ramifications and whether the fast rollout is the best rollout when it comes to the health of society. That is where I think we could perhaps shift the conversation, shift, try to shift people's thought process, try to change social values, which is not easy, but also not impossible. We have seen social values change on a myriad of topics. One of the things that I really enjoyed putting in Machinehood in order to be very thought provoking and intentionally uncomfortable, was the lack of privacy and People have these swarms of micro cameras that just follow them around every move. Inside, outside, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, on the toilet, wherever. Right. And there were a lot of my readers who kind of came back with, this is shocking and terrible and why would anybody want to live like this? And I said, you know, social mores change, they have changed in all kinds of directions. Used to be in a lot of societies, perfectly fine to go around, mostly naked, mostly unclothed. Then we kind of shifted for a brief period in the Victorian era where suddenly the British wanted everybody covered from top to bottom. And now we've kind of come back a bit from that. But there are still societies on our current earth who would like women especially to be covered top to bottom. So standards change. We other. Another thing is, for example, gay rights, you know, a thing that nobody wanted to talk about again, thousands of years ago, maybe everybody was talking about it, totally comfortable. You know, these types of mores shift over time. And so it is absolutely possible to, I think, reshape society into wanting less and having that be a virtue, going slower and having that be something to look up to rather than look down on. So how are we going to get that to happen? More conversations like this and again, you know, more, I think, more from Hollywood, more from media, from the government, and gradually start getting people to accept that this is a potential good way forward.

Yeah, well, it seems also like a great topic for your next book. How can we create an economy that goes slower with the use of technology, instead of having an economy that goes faster with technology?

So it's funny you say that, because I actually did write that as my next book after Machine Hood Meru, which I wrote in 2020, and Loca, which is a companion, it's kind of a sequel, but there's a big time skip, different characters. So the two books stand alone in the same universe. But this is a universe that I describe as not just post scarcity, but post necessity. It's set over a thousand years in the future where genetic engineering has become very precise and, and also widespread for various reasons and to the point of almost being like Lego bricks. Right? We can pop genes in to do all kinds of different things. And the people of this very far future have elected to use this technology to create the post human descendants of humanity who are still biological beings. However, their genetics has adapted them to live in the vacuum of space, using solar power as their primary energy source, along with a little bit of nutritional liquid that they can then electrolyze into hydrogen and oxygen. They still have metabolics somewhat similar to human and earth biology, but they have different skin that's non permeable. They have again, they don't need food, they don't need shelter. And so they can live with very, very little and be quite happy. And yet they have advanced networks, they have huge knowledge bases, they do a lot of science and art and developing new technologies of their own. But they do it slowly and they live much longer than human beings do. So they're in a bit less of a rush too. I think that's, that's maybe, maybe one side benefit of if we actually manage to live longer, healthier lives that there isn't as much pressure to accomplish in a very short amount of time. Maybe, maybe not, I don't know.

Well, I think that that's sort of the important role that I see for science fiction writers is to sort of depict, you know, a future both good and bad that will then help us sort of understand that future better. Because I think that's, that's one of the challenges that we as humans have. We find it very difficult to, to foresee the future, how that might look like and all the different consequences of the decisions that we make along the lines. And I think that's, that's where I see the role of science fiction writers so important. And you know, given that notice, I'd just like shift gears a little bit because I think that for that reason science fiction writers can be very useful for organizations to help them sort of understand this longer term future and how that will affect their business and the impact that they have on humanity. So what kind of tools and strategies do you use and could organizations use to sort of benefit from understanding this long term future? The emerging technologies are coming to stay ahead of disruption or to be able to, to embrace this disruption in a way that's beneficial to society.

So you're asking a very specific question, which I will get to, but I want to step back a second and say, you know, a lot of that is going to depend on whether these corporations care to do these things. And as we have seen, a lot of them are more concerned with short term profits, you know, for, with good reason, because that's how they stay alive. Right, and how they stay in business. It's harder I think, to do that kind of long term thinking, especially in a public company or a startup. That said, when you go to the think tank model or research oriented corporations, examples like what Google used to do with giving their. I don't know if they still do this, but they Used to give their employees 20% of their time to kind of work on whatever it was that was interesting to them whether or not was going to go anywhere. And for a while, Google had Google X, which I think is mostly defunct, sadly. But, you know, moonshots, right? Investing some of these huge amounts of profits in technologies and science and research that may not pay off for, you know, five to 10 years. A lot of what IBM and Bell Labs were doing in the 20th century, that kind of work that I would like to see more of, you know, especially coming from the bigger tech companies that have the resources to put into. And that's where I think if you brought a couple of science fiction writers to sit down with the researchers and developers there, that not only do you envision and try to build these moonshot technologies, but you also start thinking about the use cases and the impacts and the potential negative consequences. Once you've identified those, hopefully work on strategies to mitigate them to make this more accessible to a wider segment of society, make it more affordable, make it less damaging to the environment, whatever those different axes are that we tend to consider. Once you have come up with the scenarios, it's easier to then, you know, come up with an actual plan to address and find strategies to mitigate those problems. So that's where I feel like, yeah, you, you could dovetail those two things in terms of avoiding disruption or ensuring the longevity of the company. I don't know how much but science fiction is going to help. I think science fiction writers who overlap with futurists definitely, you know, we can sit down. One of the. One of the fun examples, maybe misattributing, I think it was brought forth by Philip K. Dick, was that there are three levels to science fiction. And he used the example of the car. There is the. The invention of the car. You know, how do you come up with the idea for it? How did science somebody managed to successfully build the first car? That's that sort of level one science fiction stories. Level two is how does this car change this person's life? You know, for better or for worse? Maybe they drive it and there's a car accident or they're able to start a successful business with the help of a car. That's a level two story. Level three story envisions the traffic jam and how the traffic jam impacts somebody's life. Maybe their wife is about to give birth and now they're stuck in a traffic jam or they're going to miss their airplane. Right. And so level two thinking would help corporations in Terms of developing their product, I believe finding the right product market fit. Who's going to tend to use this technology? Who might the early adopters be? Who will be slower on the uptake? What can we do to make it more enticing to adopt this new technology? The level three concepts, I feel like, are where the think tanks would really shine. Because we want to envision not just the traffic jam, but the air pollution, the junkyards full of rusting cars, parts that nobody wants because they're obsoleted, the fact that people are out of shape because everybody's driving somewhere instead of walking and riding their bikes. And you know, a lot of people, when they think about technology, they tend to think about the wonders of technology, how it's going to benefit them, and they keep all the good parts of their current life and they don't throw that away. And they don't necessarily think about how technology might get rid of those or erode those over time. And so I think AI is in a lot of ways a great example because it's like, well, it's going to enhance your productivity. It's going to let you do things faster. It's going to get to know you really well. You'll have all this data about your. Your health, your lifestyle, your dating habits, your eating habits, you know, everything. And then we're like, great, now we'll be healthier and we'll find, you know, the perfect date and we'll know which clothes are going to be most flattering and we'll have the perfect job and we'll have so much more free time because we won't be thinking about all these things, right? So we won't have to work as hard and we'll have more leisure. And it's like, are you sure.

It'S good to think about the unintended consequences? I think. I think if organizations would have sort of a scenario mapping of what would be the unintended consequences of whatever product or strategy they're developing, I think that could give some indication of that traffic jam and of those million and a half people that die every year because of car accidents from the car example, I think that would be very useful for organizations to do a little bit more.

I think they also need to think about human psychology. That's something in the purview, especially of fiction writers. We mostly try to build realistic characters. We try to think of how do we tend to behave. And many of these fundamental behaviors don't really change over time. Even when our moral values change, even when our priorities Change. We still tend to be mostly lazy. We still prioritize the safety of the people closest to us versus those on the other side of the planet. It's hard for people to think too far past their neighborhood. I think these are the facets that rarely come up in a corporate setting because they're not necessarily thinking of human nature and psychology and the ways that human beings might misuse the technology or maybe overuse it. Right. So that's where, yeah, may benefit to consult with, especially the science fiction writers who are kind of looking at these second and third degree effects of new types of technology.

Do you have any again, as a science fiction writer? Science fiction writer, you, you look into the future. You look at this type 2 and type 3 of consequences of a future you envision. What kind of tips do you have for businesses to cultivate these qualities and to drive innovation, to stay competitive, but to do so in an ethical way?

I think giving people creative space and encouraging them to think about these types of questions and how they would answer them is a good first start. Having come, you know, from the corporate world and been there for a couple of decades myself, the culture tends to be, you know, come in, meet your deadlines, do your work as best and as fast as possible, and then, you know, go home. When we were back and forth to the office, right, there's always deadlines, there's always some more work to be done. The queue doesn't end. So that's where I think something like the Google model where actively providing your employees with time to sit and dream up uses for this technology, new types of technology that could come from what they're already working on, potential pitfalls and really maybe getting personal with it. You know, like, what would I do? What would my kids do with this? You know, is this really benefiting me in the ways that we're saying in our advertising, or am I doing something completely different with this, or am I doing nothing at all with this in my life? Right. People, people are pretty good once you start asking them to put themselves in the story. And so that's a good way to kind of get that ball rolling. But it needs to, it needs to be a sufficient priority that you're willing to again, kind of slow down on the pace of production, which is really hard in a corporate setting. But if you can do that, if you can set aside even two days a month, right, These are going to be storytelling days, brainstorming days. You know, how did I use XYZ product? Did I use the competitor's product? Or did I use ours? What would happen if we took this piece of technology away? Like I was working on Ted gigabit Ethernet chips for a while and it was like there was a point where we were a little too early to market, where we kept just assuming that we went from, from 1 megabit to 10 to 100 to 1 gigabit. So naturally we're going to go to 10 gigabit, but we really didn't. And we still don't see 10 gigabit in anybody's homes. We just kind of assumed that, you know, video and bandwidth and XYZ will cause people to need more bandwidth and yet still haven't got there. So it can be interesting to kind of sit down and have people now question these assumptions. Well, if I gave you 10 gigabit ethernet in your house tomorrow, what are you gonna, what are you gonna do with it? You know, who are the people that are actually gonna use this? Where do we see applications coming forward that might need it? Like, are we even hitting that wall yet? So that's, that's one example amongst many, many, right. Of where do we take this? And, and again, like a great place to start is just with the people that are working there because they are, they have ordinary lives. And that's one of my favorite things to explore as a science fiction writer is just how do I take an extraordinary sounding technology and make it an ordinary part of people's lives that most people don't give a second thought to how it works like television. Everybody takes it for granted worldwide at this point. The signal just comes and there's moving pictures on your screen like it's just going to happen and it's not a big deal.

I think one thing that you explore, which I think is fascinating is the concept of machine rights, which I think really forces us to rethink our role with our relationship with technology and looking at the ethical implications of the technology that we're building. And thinking of machine rights is something that for most people is really far, far away. It almost requires digital consciousness for us to achie to start thinking about machine rights. How can businesses engage with this kind of very long term, also ethical considerations when thinking about the future.

It's great when they have ethicists, ethics boards. It's sad when they fire them because they don't add much to the bottom line. We're seeing that happening today with AI and that I don't know how to address that other than there are plenty of people out there thinking about these topics, you know, beyond science fiction writers. We have been thinking about it for a very long time. Most people have left it in the domain of science fiction. We're starting to see it creep into getting closer to reality. Right. I mean, I. I had this wonderful conversation with Ted Chang way back in 2016 about whether it matters that the machine wants rights. If the human who possesses the machine or is taking care of the machine or is living with the machine wants the machine to have rights. So I was falling very much on the side of the human relation to the machine is sufficient for us to argue that certain rights should be configured beyond just property rights. Because as these machines become more sophisticated, as the software becomes more sophisticated, human beings are going to form deep emotional attachments to them that will cause genuine human pain. Just like, you know, if somebody runs over your dog, it's going to matter whether they did it intentionally or whether it was an accident. And if it's intentional, then it should be a crime. Same way if you are very attached to your robot or if your robot is necessary for you to get by with your daily activities because you can't get out of bed and somebody comes in and smashes your robot or feeds your robot bad data that causes the robot to perhaps question whether it should be doing what it's doing. These could potentially be violating the rights of the machine in relation to the human. David Gunkel has a lot on this. We see very eye to eye on why this is important to consider these relational aspects as opposed to just the idea of the machine is sentient and conscious the way organic life is. And until we can prove that that is the case, we don't owe it any rights. So these are some tricky questions, Right?

Yeah. Well, I find it a fascinating angle because we saw something similar happening a couple of months ago or over a year ago when Replica decided, you know, the AI chatbot, when they decided to change the algorithm and for it to be, I think, less sexual active. And a lot of particularly men were really angry about that. And then at some point, I think they changed it back again to. Because a lot of, in this case, particularly men had formed relationships, as in your girlfriend, with these AI. So they were, yeah, mentally really hurt when that change. So I think ascribing some kind of rights to the machine or the algorithm, in this case, apart from looking at whether the machine is sentient, I think is a fascinating approach to looking differently at the role that technology will play within our lives.

Yeah, people often jump immediately to personhood and, you know, they start scoffing like, why are you going to let the machine vote? You know, does it get to own property, blah, blah, blah. And it doesn't have to be A or B, right? There's a lot of steps in between a lot of other types of rights that we confer to property, to animals now, to natural phenomenon. You know, the right to exist is a very fundamental right, and the right to not be changed in this case, or upgraded, you know, against your will or perhaps your partner, your conversation partner's will, who happens to be human. And these are more immediate forms of rights and questions that we absolutely need to be addressing. Replica is a great example. Also Lambda, though, we had that one engineer who started to question whether lambda perhaps was conscious, and then he got fired, which, you know, is not great. But I also. One of the things I talk about in Machine Head and that I have wondered even myself as an engineer, is that we are constantly moving the goalposts. And I noticed that Kurzweil brought this up very early on in his new book as well. A thing that we used to say was only the domain of humans. As soon as it becomes doable by a machine, we diminish it and we say, yeah, okay, but humans are still special, you know, and the machine is not us, and it is still not sentient, is still not conscious. And when will we ever accept that those are true as long as we are the ones building the machines? Possibly never. Possibly. We're always going to keep moving those goalposts to say that. Okay, yes, it sounds like it's conscious. It says it doesn't want to be turned off, but it doesn't mean it. It's just picking that up from, you know, all the text we fed into it. Okay, fair, but we also teach each other, and we, you know, we're learning creatures ourselves. Where do we pick up the fact that we have basic human rights? You know, where do we start demanding the vote? We used to dehumanize each other. Apply plenty, and we still do in some contexts. So it's going to be very easy to keep doing that to the machines even as they get increasingly independent, sophisticated. And they are definitely intelligent in their own ways and, you know, learning in their own ways, not. Not in human ways, but in their own ways.

I think it. It seems there's. There's plenty of material for. For more stories. As a final question, looking beyond your current books, what new themes or technologies are you exploring? Is there a new book coming or. You mentioned you just published one, but are you working on another one? There's plenty of material, so I hear.

There is definitely plenty of material out there. I'm not sure what my next book is going to be. I have a couple of ideas. Neither of them is near future science fiction probably. If I was going to pick a next book, it would focus on climate change. And our responses therein and all of these other technologies dovetail. We have heard how the data centers and the databases, both for AI, are very power hungry. They're using up a lot of fresh water, especially in places like the desert where there isn't a lot of natural freshwater. So ethical considerations there, everything we do is impacting our environment. I think human beings, the human population has grown to the size where we're really facing down this growth and sustainability question. And that's mostly where my mind has been, even when it comes to more immediate technology. But no, the next book will probably be something a little different. One of the things I'm thinking about is a contemporary fantasy, so not science fiction at all. However, weighing in on some of these sorts of moral questions. The contemporary fantasy is. It's based on a short story I wrote a few years ago where everybody, the whole world wakes up one day and discovers that people, some people are no longer touching the ground. And how much above the ground they are floating is inversely proportional to how much they own. So the more you possess, the more literally you are weighed down and obviously interrogating a lot of some of these same themes of what is valuable really in our society. What do we really need? Should we be owning and consuming and pushing those particular values as much as we are? So I figured that would be. There's a lot to explore, I think, with the consequences if something like that were to happen, not the least of how it would baffle physicists everywhere. But, you know, even going beyond that, the repercussions and the social ramifications and the personal consequences and the decisions now you start to make of, well, do you want to be grounded or would you rather be floating at the level of the rooftops in the world as you go forward? And then how do you structure your life at that point?

I think it's fascinating to, and that's especially to the work that you do as a science fiction writer is to explore all these different scenarios of what's coming, what's possible, where we should be thinking about as individuals, as organizations, as a society, when these new technologies are having an impact on our lives. So I'd like to thank you for your, for your time, Divya. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on my show.

Thank you so much. It's a lot of fun.

In today's conversation with Divya, we traverse the landscapes of AI, biotechnology and the gig economy, all while reflecting on the profound intersections between humanity and technology. Divya's insights shed light on how science fiction can influence real world strategies and what lessons organizations can draw from stories about our future. Her thoughts on the ethical use of AI and the future of genetic engineering remind us that the decisions we make today will profoundly shape the human experience in the decades to come. We also touched on the importance of exploring multiple layers of science fiction, from near term technological advancements to far future speculative scenarios, and how these narratives can offer both warnings and guidance for business leaders. As we concluded, Divya emphasized the significance of creativity and ethical consideration in today's rapidly changing world, particularly as AI reshapes the fabric of society. Thank you for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe to Synthetic Minds and stay tuned as we continue to explore the boundaries between science fiction and science reality.