Cyberpunk Insights: Navigating Tomorrow with T.R. Napper - Synthetic Minds Podcast EP06

Welcome to Synthetic Minds, the podcast where the boundaries between science fiction and technological reality blur, offering insights that help organizations navigate the future. Here we engage with leading thinkers and writers to unpack the narratives that could shape our world. As your host, Dr. Mark van Reemenam, accompanied by my digital twin, I invite you to explore with us the intricate dance between the natural and the artificial, to question what it means to be human in a world brimming with technological marvels. Our discussions aim to harness the power of future thinking, a crucial skill set in these rapidly changing times, drawing lessons from those who dare to dream about what lies ahead. Today I am joined by the esteemed T.R. napper, whose unique background in diplomacy and humanitarian work across Southeast Asia and infuses his award winning cyberpunk narratives with a profound understanding of geopolitical dynamics and human resilience. In this episode we delve deep into the intertwining of real world experiences with speculative fiction, exploring how Napper's journey from a diplomatic career to a celebrated science fiction author impacts his views on technology and society. Through his novels like the acclaimed 36 streets, Napper offers us a window into the possible futures shaped by today's technological choices. Napper's narratives not only captivate but also provoke thought about our technological trajectory and its impact on human values and societal structure. Don't forget to like and subscribe to be informed. When future episodes become available, join us on this enlightening journey where we seek to understand the future by examining the thought provoking narratives and insights provided by Tim Napper.

So welcome Tim to the show.

I'm very excited to have you here on the show and to discuss your.

Books and to discuss sort of the. The future of organizations.

A pleasure. I don't know if I can, I don't know how good my predictions will be, but.

We'Ll see how we go. So maybe before we dive into some of the questions I have for you.

Can you share a bit about the.

Background and some of the books that you, that you've written and the one or two books that you, that you're most proud of?

My background, so before I came to writing a little bit later than most of my peers, I didn't start writing fiction until I was in my 30s. I was an a. I mean I had lots of jobs but I was an aid worker for about a decade. So I was a. And a diplomat as well, living in different parts of Southeast Asia, running poverty alleviation programs. So I lived in, I lived in Laos, I lived in for three years. I lived In Vietnam. I spent a lot of time in Myanmar, Indonesia, all through the region. But it was in Vietnam I was living. My partner and I lived there for three years. And our son was 12 months old at the time. And we had kind of a deal. Like, my wife accompanied me to the previous posting, and then I said, the next time, like, I'll support you and I'll be the primary carer. But that was like the first time in my life I probably wasn't working full time, you know, since I was 18 or whatever, so. And I'd been thinking about writing and I dabbled a little bit, but I threw myself into it for three years. And with the kind of. I did my. I did a. I had a deal with myself where if after three years, if I suck, that's it. But after three years, if I'm getting somewhere, well, we'll see what's happening. And I. I had a few short. I started with short stories. I'm a novelist now. I still write short stories sometimes, but I started with short stories. And one. And. And I was cursed with some early success, so I stuck with it. But as we mentioned briefly before we came on air, writing for me has become something, almost a sickness. Like if I don't write, I don't feel good. You know, I get. I'm not myself. So now I just become. It's something that I need to do, but also something that's enormously rewarding. So. And the second part of your question was the book I'm most proud of? Well, I have a collection out. I have my debut out. I have a couple more novels. I've got two books due out this year, but I suppose my debut, my debut novel, 36 Streets. In fact, coincidentally, I have a framed picture. That was my debut and I wrote that. And the 36 streets is another name for the old quarter in Hanoi, the 36 streets, representing the 36 guilds. So it's a cyberpunk near future, science fiction year 2100. America has collapsed. China is the sole superpower. What does the world look like? And that, you know, I took a long time to write that book. I probably took between starting it and publication. Might have been seven years. And I lost an agent over. This is why I'm proud. This is why I'm proud of it, because I lost an agent over it. And everyone rejected it and the like, everyone. And the very last publisher we submitted it to, and it was the last one on the list, there was none left, accepted it. And then of course, it went on to win a whole bunch of awards and get critical acclaim and just showed me how fine the line is between success and failure in the publishing industry. Like a book that no one wanted suddenly became. It's not huge or anything, but it became a very well regarded cyberpunk novel. In fact I did, I wrote the book also as part of my. I did a doctorate in. I did a creative writing doctorate. So when I changed careers from a. To becoming a writer, I did a creative writing doctorate. And in Australia doesn't happen in every country, but in Australia you can do a creative work as part of your thesis. So I did a long essay but then the book I wrote as well. So it was part of my doctorate. So in terms of what I'm most proud of, it'd be that because it gave me. It's my first book, it won awards, no one wanted it and I got my doctor in front of my name. So yeah, I'd have to say that.

Well, I've done my, I have my PhD as well and I remember how much work it is to, to write a dissertation and to write a book and to do all that work. So kudos to that. So I can imagine that you're proud of that. So you mentioned that 36th street is a cyberpunk cyberpunk novel. What is sort of the common themes in your books from a technology perspective? Are they all cyberpunk or do you.

Cover different at the moment I am in the future. I'm. I'm planning on writing in other genre in another genre. But so far it's all cyberpunk and it's all set in the same universe I've created. So I've got. Let me think. I did write one tire novel, but that's separate. I did write for the Aliens universe and conveniently that's the book over here on the screen. But that's quite different. So I don't, I don't think of that in quite the same way. Because it's someone else's intellectual property. No, I think once you've built a world and that is an incredibly time consuming process for a writer, you want to spend some time in it and you want to add more layers. So I've did a short story collection and the novel and the other books coming out all set in the same world. So it's all the time periods range, but it is set about the year 2100. Why cyberpunk? Cyberpunks? Well, not why cyberpunk, but what is the technological aspects. Cyberpunk thematically is Very skeptical of tech, and not skeptical in the sense that tech is bad. We're not Luddites. Some people might say we are, but that's not at all true. Cyberpunk rather looks at the way technology is used to subjugate, to oppress, to surveil people, to accumulate power into very few hands. Cyberpunk in general is looking and it likes. I think it's fair to say one of the themes is how to remain human in an inhumane society, how to keep the spark of rebellion alive in a system that demands subservience. So from the technological perspective, you know, I'm fascinated by it. I do a lot of reading, but it's usually. It's usually exploring the ways that. That can use to exploit us and dehumanize. When, of course, technologies in my. That I write about could be used for the common good. Absolutely. But that's in this. In the. In that sort of imagined future. That's not normally the case. So the relationship with technology in cyberpunk and in my work is not. Is not a positive one. And it's, in a way, I'll try and be brief, but there was a movement in science fiction in the 50s, 60s, to some extent the 70s that was very positive. All progress is good. Technology is fantastic. And cyberpunk is one of those subgenres that came out in the 80s, 90s, that pushed back a bit and said, wait a minute, not always. Progress isn't always good. Technological change isn't always for everyone's benefit. Let's have a look at it. So I think that's the genre. That's certainly where I come from in my books.

Nice. And so in 36 streets, the main character is sort of capable of moving through the physical and the digital world. Augmented reality, mixed reality, the metaverse obviously has been quite a hype in the past couple of years. So from your exploration into this future, into 2100, as you mentioned, which technologies do you envision to become reality of the ones that you have envisioned next decade or so?

In the next decade or so? I think for me, I like what Urschel Le Guin said about this being predictive. She said science fiction, in her opinion, isn't predictive, it's descriptive. So if I had to answer that question, I look at what's happening now, and I think in thinking about the future, I say, well, what are the trends now? What are the tech now? And which ones will, I think, will still be there in the future and expanding and becoming more influential? So it's more a question of looking at our world now and then what will be more prominent in 10 years. So 10 years from now, I think surveillance, if we think surveillance is bad now, it will be amazing in 10 more years. I think unfortunately, I think unfortunately tech, I mean I think communication technologies should and could be used to bring people together and communities together over time and space. But what we see in the current environment, which I suspect we'll continue to see in the future is societies in part because of tech, because of social media more atomized politics will be more fractured and the capacity to as I'm sure you, you've, you've, I'm sure you've talked about it on this show. But data, personal data is the new gold rush. It's the new gold rush because it's, it can change the way we behave and it can predict our behavior. I think companies are going to get better at that. I think on the positive side, renewable technology is going to be amazing in 10 years. It's going to, it's always I remember 10 years ago, yeah it would have been 10 years ago. I remember people saying renewable technology will never hasn't got the capacity to replace fossil fuels ever. It's impossible. And look at it now to become more and more efficient and cheaper all the time. So, and I have that in my, my world. I do imagine it's a bleak world but the renewable tech is ubiquitous and I do think it'll become more and more so.

But I think that's sort of the common problem that we overestimate the short term and we underestimate the long term that we, it's very difficult for people to, to extrapolate their thinking of what is today to, to, to envision the future of tomorrow. Which I think that's that, that's, that's why one of the reasons why I'm interviewing the science fiction writers because I think very capable of doing that by creating the books you sort of have created the art of imagining the impossible and to extrapolate the current age technology to a far future and then start to envision what that means. What's your trick?

How do you do that? What's my trick? Oh well, I don't think I've been asked that question before. What's the trick? Well, I think it's partly what I said. I do, I'm very engaged in current events and of course I was being, my previous expertise was in and current really is in geopolitics. So I understand geopolitics very well and I Think I have a good sense of what the geopolitical future would look like in terms of the tech. Some of it is just stuff that's obvious. I think the renewable one is a pretty easy bet to make on what the future will look like. And I think, and I think if we look at, if you look at the changes between the last 10 years and now, I was thinking about this before this interview. What's changed in the last 10 years? Most significantly, I don't know if there's been any massive revolutions except in refining the collection of data, refining surveillance and, and I think psychological warfare, which is part of my work, is really quite sophisticated these days. And we have, there's many mechanisms to deliver it. So I'm not answering your question. My answer is that I'm looking at, I do think about the last, where we've come in X amount of time and some of it's this, we look, things will look the same and some of them, some of that will be completely alien to us. And that's why part of the reason I said it in my book in the old quarter in Hanoi is that's a place in Vietnam where parts of that old quarter have not changed in thousands of years. But it's side by side. It's high tech, low life, which is what cyberpunk is about. So how do I do it? So, yeah, it's being invested, interested in current politics, it's reading about, you know, I'm not a, my background isn't a scientific background, but I read about tech and where it's going. I'm also very skeptical about a lot of the claims because there's all these big claims happen all the time. Metaverse was one. What happened to the metaverse? You know, I'm convinced it will come.

I think this, this is one of the problems of, you know, overestimating the short term. I mean, what I've noticed as being a futurist for over 12 years now is that, you know, it always takes longer. So we're going through the hype cycle. And I remember 10, 12 years ago was the hype cycle was big data. And everyone thought big data is new gold and the new oil, which it is now. But it wasn't 10 years ago. And then we had blockchain in 2017, and everyone thought our blockchain is the new fundamental of how we run a society. And that didn't happen yet. And then we had the metaverse and now we have AI. So I think it's sort of a continuous way that we we, you know, we go through this hype cycle and we are, as a humanity, we are very excited about the new technology that's going to change everything. But the reality is that change is difficult and change takes time. And I think often people forget that.

And I think, I think one of the things that I think about is systems as well, what type of system we live. We have a free market economy. We have democracies and dictatorships in the world. But how do each of them adapt to tech and what are their motivations? What does the most influential tech barons, what do they want to happen with tech? What does Musk, what does Zuckerberg, what does Google? What do they want to happen now? They're pretty influential people. If they want something to happen, they might. Now there is opposing forces. There are governments and so forth. Governments are very slow in cubism though, so that's another thing. So I do think about whenever I read about a new tech, my mind, it's almost like an instinct immediately leaps to what are the human consequences? Because someone will be saying, oh, I can. It's this new tech and it's a robot dog. And the robot dog can be your companion. And my brain will go, they're going to put a gun in the robot dog and then they're going to put it on the battlefield. And then like a few years later, I'll see an image of that robot dog with a gun strapped to it and the military trying it out. So if you think about the. This is a terrible way to predict the future. But if I always think the worst thing someone could do with a tech, and I'm normally right, they don't necessarily succeed, but they will try it. So that's one of the. One of them is the human consequences of change. Who that affects affects different parts of society in different ways. So that's certainly something I'm always almost on instinct just thinking about. Yeah, yeah.

So is it sort of your, your intuition that you see a technology, you're able to see how it will converge with other technologies, and then you're able to extrapolate from that? And is that sort of how you navigate the uncertainty of the future? Is that sort of correct?

Yep, that's. That's absolutely an aspect. I think sometimes it's good to look at history too, and to think about cycles in history and how cultures adapt to certain things as well. I think about that. Like, for example, the way China might deal use surveillance tech in general is extremely different to how America uses it. You'd think, oh, but it's surveillance tech. Isn't that the same thing? No, it's used in very different ways. And that's a cultural and political aspect. So that's, I think that's part of it as well.

We live in fast changing times. You know, there's almost on a daily basis, there's something new in the newspaper. But of course, in this case about artificial intelligence, there's a new large language model. There's another prediction that artificial general intelligence will arrive by 2025. How should organizations navigate this disruption, this rapid change? Because I believe we're going sort of a, sort of a phase transition as a society, sort of a digital renaissance that doesn't take 100 years like the first renaissance, but that happens in like two or three or five years. What, from your experience as a, as a science fiction writer, what can organizations do to. To. To prepare for that and to. And to. To embrace this, this change and to, to see the future that might be fundamentally different 10 years from now than it is today. How can they prepare for that?

I think the first thing is.

It.

Depends on the organization. But for whomever they are, I would be wary of the hype. That would be the first thing we get. I've seen a lot of absurd takes on AI. Magic wand, all disease cured, all movies made, personalized, shot into your brain like it's just nonsense. These nonsense takes on AI but people love to imagine technology like the hand of God, like it's divine providence and inevitable. And what I think my argument would be, there's still people in the equation. We haven't been taken out of it yet. So for organizations, I'd say you don't know what governments are going to do in the future or what legislation is going to do in the future, what wars they're going to be. You can make predictions on these things, how populations are going to react to certain types of technology, when they might say, enough is enough. You don't know. You can't, you can't even. Even being like us when we're thinking about the future all the time, you can't necessarily. You can't predict everything that's going to happen. So if you're an organization, I would say have really good people who can think critically and are flexible and are committed to whatever your organization is the capacity to be. Critical thought is a sadly underrated quality that is so useful no matter the organization. You don't want drones. We can probably make them at some point. You want people. If you're in an organization, you want your People to be good and to be able to react and adapt. And they're something that you can control. You can't control a lot of external forces, but you can control the people that are working in your. Well, control. But you can choose the people that are working in your organization and encourage certain cultures and ways of behaving.

Wouldn't you say that encouraging certain behavior is, I think, is of course you want to steer your organization in a certain direction, but having an open mind and having the perspectives of a science fiction writer that can show you a different future of a future that where we might or might not be heading to. Is there a role to play for science fiction writers within organizations to advise them?

Yes, there is. And someone should hire me immediately after when say, listen to this. I look, I do. These are the. I think that not all of us, But some science fiction writers are very serious thinkers. I'm not talking about myself, but I'm just in general serious thinkers and serious philosophers of technology in the future and have thought very deeply and thought. One of the things we do, I think, which you don't see very often is something that I mentioned before is think about the human consequences and the social consequences. New texts are proposed all the time and people can only see the good, the most optimal solution. But culture and society and human beings are complex. And understanding the ripple effect within a society is, I find, a strangely rare ability. And I think science fiction writers, I love that one of the great things about science fiction is every now and again you just read someone who blows your mind, who thinks about something in a brand new way, thinks of a way of deal, managing a problem or constructing or constructing a society or whatever it might be who is engaging in thought experiments. And so these people are thinking of the world in a way through a social lens, through a human lens, but also through in a way that it's explicable because if we. You there's a report is one thing and you know, a dry statistical data is another. But when you put a human being in a story and they're walking through the world clicks. And then you can have people going, oh my God. And this is the consequences of this and this is what society will be like. And this is. So I think science fiction writers can. As I said, we're not necessarily. They're not. I don't think they're prophets, but I think they're just really canny observers of the present and are canny enough to be picking the DNA strands of the future that are here now. And saying, well, this is where we're probably going. It might be a warning, it might be a guide. I'm on the warning side of things normally, but that good science fiction writers can absolutely paint a vivid picture of a world that resonates in the mind.

I think as a futurist, I love reading science fiction because it opens my mind as well and it gives me a different perspective of something that I might not have thought about before, especially if it's a bit longer term, towards the end of the century. And then you can think back to today of how that might impact society. And I think that is really fascinating thing to do, to have that broader perspective and to see the world in a new light. And I think organizations can benefit from that because organizations, especially the very large organizations, they are big mammoth ships, they take time to turn. So they need to know long before where to go. And I think science fiction can direct you of what might happen in the future. Then you can base your strategy upon that.

No, I mean, I agree completely. And I think, I mean a great example is Kim Stanley Robinson, whose book the Ministry of the Future, I think it's called Obama read that and recommended it to a bunch of people. And a lot of his ideas, which are very. Kim Stanley Robinson looks at political solutions and policy solutions and tech solutions. And he's really. And I think he's one of the more influential in that sense of a very deep thinker who's can spread his mind across a whole range of issues around the environment, around. He does things like terraforming planets and all this sort of stuff, but the nature of societies that will grow from it. So he's been, he's one example of a writer, I think, who's been quite influential on that point.

I want to shift gears a little bit. So in 36 streets you explore sort of a dentist dense virtual reality landscape. And we already briefly mentioned the metaverse. When is that going to happen? Obviously in your, in your world there's this metaverse or mixed reality or augmented reality or however you want to call it. I think these are just semantics. It's just a digital layer on the physical world. How do you think? When do you think it will happen? And then how will. Once we have this digital layer over at a physical reality, how will that impact society? How will that impact organizations? How will it change things? Are we ending up in a black mirror episodes? So what's going to happen?

VR is an interesting one because VR has been hyped. It has cycles of hype. So going back 20, 30 years now least 20 years. And it never lives up to it. But VR is getting pretty good now. Augmented reality is a good one because I think that will happen. It's a bit clunky. It's still clunky, but I don't know. Give it in my. In my future, which is the year 2090 or 2100. Yeah, I mean, I think the kind of augmented reality where you put on some glasses and you can walk out the street and it has facial recognition and it sees your friends and it might prompt you about the last time you met. That might give you a thing that you might want to talk to them about if you're feeling lazy, like beep. And then it gives you the lines to say, hey, George, how's the dog? And it's just. That is very easy to imagine happening. So all mental.

Well, I'm not sure it's a good thing, but it's. I agree it's very easy to imagine.

But I don't think it's a good thing. But it's a different story. No, but I agree. And even augmented reality, I mean, it's a short story idea where. A good short story idea where you just have someone who's. Who's deluded, who has a thing on and they're walking around and everything's, you know, what is the Stepford Wives or whatever that movie is, where everything is shiny and perfect and then if they ever take the glasses off or like you. Have you seen the movie they Live? It's a John Carpenter film. It's amazing. He puts on these sunglasses and you can see people who are aliens and they have their billboards instead of advertising, just says obey and consume. And they have money. And he looks at money and it says, this is your God. But anyway, I've digressed. But that's easy to imagine. Fully simulated realities are. I have in my book. That's an interesting one because that's tougher. It's tougher to fool the mind. But I think people want to be fooled. And people love the idea. People fantasize about the idea of leaving their bodies behind and going to a virtual world. And they want to leave their bodies behind for different reasons. But some of them, I suppose, are good. If you're in a physical form. That's. If you were quadriplegic, it's pretty. It would be an amazing thing to be going and you're running and you're swimming and you're doing all these other things. But I do feel like it's A form of. I think that will, if it happens in the future, it won't be used for that purpose. It'll be people using themselves in it, people living. And some of the work that I've done explores the connection between body and mind and how much we need these bodies, how much of our spirit and our personality resides in touch, taste, the scars we carry around with us.

But if you can mimic that, all those sensors in the digital world, which I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future we'll manage to do that. So like the holodeck, but then like next level holodeck, I'm sure people would love to leave their physical body behind and have the freedom of doing anything in the digital world. That seems to me. I wouldn't want that. But that's just one opinion, obviously. But it seems to me that, that whether it's good or bad, it will fundamentally change society, and society as we know it will no longer exist the moment we have that advanced augmented or virtual reality.

And who owns the space. I mean, you would be so knowable right now. We're still a black box at the center of who we are that they will never quite figure out. They can manipulate us, but there's still a black box at the center of the human condition that no one really knows. But when you upload it all, and it has to be the thing is the. Marnie, I mean, I guess it's a simulation. It's not an upload, is it? So we're talking about simulation. So you're still in your body. See, this is the thing. Uploads and simulations are two different things, because I can imagine, and I'm doing it right now, I'm writing a story right at the moment, which is about a. Something called a sink suit that you go in. You. You go into a suit, and then you go in a sphere that has all directional movement. And then there's. But the twist is inside the. The virtual reality, there's an augmented reality on top, and people are manipulating people inside. So I'm going down the rabbit hole.

Sounds a bit like Inception, the movie where you have a dream and a dream and a dream.

I'm imagining, but I'm imagining that in the terms of autonomous warfare. And how far. How far, how, what level can you. How far can you go with a fully autonomous army? And is it a war if there's only one con, one sentient combatant, and the other one has just been unleashed? And who unleashed it? And what military objectives can you take with just drones and various autonomous machines and, and can you do it in a way where you'll never be sanctioned and never be blamed because you're all at arm's length? Yeah, you, you press a button, the machine runs. So it's, I'm doing a lot of the things I mentioned. I'm, I'm exploring a lot of things we, that I've, I've said that as part of my past, which is geopolitics and imperial ambition and use of tech and imagining how far we can go with fully in autonomous warfare, but then also how much we can fool people through augmented reality as well. So it's a tricky one though. It's a tough one to write, so it's only about halfway through, but excited about where this one's going.

But it sounds very much exciting to read, so I'm looking forward to reading that, reading that one because I think in my fourth book I wrote a short story, science fiction story, sort of as a way to help people understand what the metaverse is and where we're heading 10 years from now. And in my story I had still augmented reality glasses that you put on and it sort of creates an overlay of whatever is happening. But I think, you know, even that was, was quite short sighted because you can, you can go so much further if you really take it, you know, next level, we can filter out people that we don't want to see and that, you know, we can, we can have full information about someone else's personality, about their nonverbal communications that we can't see, but they can easily see. So that will completely change everything, you know, will change. It will. And that's quite interesting to hear your thoughts on that because you have explored this. It will change identity. It will change. It means to be to me, deeply human. And I believe in your, in your book 36 Streets, you, you, you know, intertwined the idea of, of identity as well as memory, which I think in this case, you know, if, if we have a digital reality in front of us is what is, what is reality? You know, and so how do you, where, where do you see this happening? Where, where do you see this going? That our identity, what it means to be human in the next a couple of decades?

Well, it's a good question. And one of the things about cyberpunk is that it wants to see how extreme the changes that technology can wreak on a society and in the individual. And are we still human after all of it? That's the idea of cyborgs for Example, cyborg is both a metaphor and a description. As a description, we're kind of cyborgs in a way, because a lot of us have fake hearts, pacemakers. Some of us might have cochlear implants in our brains, but we also have our phones, our exo memory. Exomemory used to be a book or a library. Sometimes memory can be contained in a city and architecture. But now we have all our human knowledge, not all of our human knowledge, but a lot of our human information that we carry around in our pocket. So we're cyborgs. So in a figure in a. In a. In a literal sense, but also as a metaphor, the cyborg metaphor is. It's changing us, it's changing society, it's changing our brains. And one of the things I'm. I'm particularly interested in is memory, as you mentioned, because memory is everything we are. What are we without memory, without our loves and our lusts and the traumatic events, but the glorious events that we had? Everything is memory in a way. But smartphones, for example, affect the way our memory works. Again, it's both a metaphor, but it's also literally what's happening. Literally. There's pretty good evidence to show about concentration spans, about recall, about the way we read books now shortening. Pretty good studies now that are showing that our attention spans are shortening. But we need attention to remember. We need to hold something in our short term memory for about 10 minutes and then it goes into long term memory. So it's something that I'm worried about is the effect on memory of having all these exo memories around us and not. The brain is like a muscle in a way. We've got to exercise it.

It becomes lazy.

The brain, if we don't use it, it becomes lazy. But it's also a metaphor. And the metaphor of memory is the soul or the spirit, because you're playing with the. The building blocks of what it means to be human. So I talk about memory editing and false memories, which are sort of a common theme in cyberpunk. There's a fast. It leads to all sorts of fascinating storytelling situations. But also it's this. It's this symbol for our soul being played with and how if our memories aren't. Aren't our own, who are we? That's. That's the situation in. That's the. The question posed in Ghost in The Shell, the 1995 anime. The main character, Majimotoko, doesn't even know if she's got a cyborg body, but doesn't even know if her memories are her own and if she ever leaves the police, her memories of everything she's done while she was with the police are there. She has to. They take the memories because it's their property. Is she still human? That's one of the questions. A very existential film as well as being an action packed film. So I, I kind of went off on a tangent, but this is the cool thing about science fiction. It's all it's and being. And someone like yourself who's a futurist. All these, the changes we talk about in science fiction are both metaphor and literal. They're really happening. But it's this deeper things we're talking about as well. And it's usually about us and who we are and so how far we can go. It's a fantastic question. And this is something that, you know, really is, in your example is one of the ways we can understand it really is only through fiction and film. Black Mirror explores it in a lot of them. You said one about deleting people we don't want to see. I think they have had a black mirror. There's an episode, I think there's an episode where a non person gets blurred out and they can't interact with anyone. I think it's a form of prisoner and part of their, their penalty is they. I think they're blurred out and no one will and they can't even speak. It's like they're trying to speak and it just comes through. It's, it's muted, which is extraordinary how invasive that is. But I've certainly had that in some of my works where certain words are censored by the government. And if you ever try to translate it. So someone tries to speak to you in another language and you have a translator in your head, but they're saying things that are censored. It gets bleeped out when they're trying to talk.

Well, if we're moving to brain computer interfaces, which is sort of the brain, our memories are sort of at the moment, sort of the last domain that is at least we believe, truly ours. But the moment we are hooking up our brain to the computer, to the Internet, which is like it's already happening with neuralink, but it's probably a matter of time before it becomes commonplace, then that will go as well. And then I consider myself as an optimistic dystopian. So I look at both the positive and the negative. It's a bit of an oxymoron, but it helps me sort of understand where we're heading. But if I think about those things and what we just discussed, this topic side really flares up. And you know, we already mentioned at the start of, you know, surveillance obviously is good. 1984 is going to be like a child's book compared to what's going to happen. How do we go about that? You know, how can we create a society where we don't end up in that, you know, extreme surveillance? And what role do organizations have to play?

Well, I mean that's a good question. That's the big question. What a. And I mean I can really only touch on it. But I would say this. I do and I mentioned it before, I do often get a sense from some people and it's sometimes people in business and sometimes it's politicians, but sometimes it's just general people you're talking to that everything's inevitable, it must be so. But this is not the hand of God. We still live in a democracy and even people who don't can still change their government and change their society. People still. But if we're talking about the democratic part of it at the moment, we're still living in a democracy and we can still make laws and we don't have to make let all this be so it doesn't have to be. We can moderate the worst impacts and that's government really at its best is that's one of the things you should be doing moderate the worst impacts of. It might be the market, it might be technology, it might be an oligopoly or whatever it is an oligarchy. It's moderating the worst parts of that. But then it becomes a question of policy. And these are complex issues I do have in my work. One of the ideas I have is there's like a human quota in industries and they have to have a human quota of workers. But that's in the book. It's described in my work that's kind of. It's crumbling all the time. The human quota is going down and down and down and down and people are trying to maintain a certain amount of human workers in a particular industry. But I quoted Ursha Le Guin before, but she gave this great speech a few years ago before she died where she said something like capitalism seems inevitable, but so did the divine right of kings. Now I'm not saying we should. I'm not saying overthrow capitalism, not quite. But I'm saying we. It's actually not that hard to imagine a different society. And writers do it all the time. And so all these things that seem inevitable right now, and I don't blame you, I'm the same. I feel, I do. My. My dystopic mind takes over. But societies can change and people change it. If we forget that, that's the problem. And sometimes it feels like we're so divided and that we can't agree on anything and we're so lacking it, unable to communicate. Communicate or compromise or show empathy towards our opponents. But that's how societies work.

But at the same time you mentioned it before, is you have this big tech that sort of plays this role in society, and we see it happening in Australia at the moment, where Elon Musk is just ignoring what the Australian government says about removing the videos of the church stabbings. So big tech is so powerful nowadays and they have one objective function and that's as much profit for the shareholders as possible. And, and they base all the decisions, all the decisions on that. If, you know, if, if we extrapolate that and, you know, we, we know that in a world where AI plays a big role, you know, you need, you need a lot of money to run AI, and if you have that money, then you can create AI, which will bring you more money. So you get this vicious circle of, of an ever smaller group of people running and controlling societies. How can we stop that? How can we? Yes, we have. As users, as consumers, we are in control, but we also bloody lazy. I tried switching my way from Facebook, which fortunately I left a couple of years ago, but I tried switching away, for example, from G Suite to a more privacy centric version called Proton. And it's very, very hard to do that because there's a reason why G Suite is so easy to use and so seamless.

What can we do here?

What are your thoughts?

Yeah, well, I mean, my thoughts are negative. So when I write about it, I am thinking about the endpoint, what you're talking about, that vicious cycle. What can we do? Well, there's the individual level and there's the policy level and then there's society as individuals. I do think part of it is what you've just articulated is opting out. It. It feels like I'm in a very difficult situation because I was never on any social media. I didn't even have a smartphone until the pandemic came. And then, you know, you had to, because you had to bloody check in everywhere and it became impossible. So I only have a. I got a smartphone quite recently because I try and minimize the amount of data that I can have. So if you minimize in just in a personal level the amount of information about yourself that's out there. Then their data set is that just this tiny little bit smaller. Right. But the problem being a writer is you always have to engage with readers. And, and so it would be a foolish rider, especially someone like me who's early to mid career who would just go and live in the woods as a hermit, as much as I'd love to. But part of it is opting out and part of it's being smart and part of it's being informed and all these things on the personal level. But that only can take you so far at some point. Governments are so slow and unfortunately policies come in often too late. The big tech is very canny. They're donating a lot of money and they're muddying the waters. But you, well, you fight and you could have legal fights. Copyright for data sets, for AI, that's a legal fight and a very winnable one. There's legislation which is, we've broken up monopolies in the past. We know it can be done. If you look at the cycle of history, once something gets too big, it's not healthy for a society, it's not healthy for an economy, it's not healthy.

For.

You know, you don't. Do you really want to push it so hard that democracy doesn't work anymore and people are getting the pickaxes and, and smashing down, trying to smash their way into corporate headquarters because that's the end point. Unless they, unless they're planning a brave New world type dystopia where we're all dulled and drugged by Soma with our phones and our distractions. Well, we're always a mix of Brave new world. In 1984, every society just, just has different policy levers. China goes more 1984. America does a lot more Brave New World. But it's all at different levels. But I think it's, it's raising, it's also raising awareness. Like it just. I don't think people are aware of how much of themselves they're giving away with all their social media to just one example. I don't think we have this idea and we have this, it's a small cultural thing where early on we decided it has to be free. The Internet has to be free. Facebook has to be free. It's a good model, it's accessible, but we're paying for it in a different way. I'm at the point now, I would happily if you told me 50 bucks a year for Facebook and will never extract any data ever. And you'll never see an ad. I'll be like, yep, fine, I'll pay you. I will, I will go. And if Elon Musk, he wants to change Twitter, he wants the worst of both worlds. He want us to pay and feed his data sets and be manipulated. Like, if we paid and they're all gone, all the bots were gone, all the data, data scraping was gone. And you paid 50 bucks. I'd probably pay it. But we don't have that. We have a mindset of things must be free. Not knowing that the price we're paying is so huge. But that could be a company that chose a new way, but no company wants to. I don't know many that want to do it that way, but there's some, there's some out there. So it's at all different levels. Sorry, Mark, that I'm sort of meandering, but it's such a difficult question to answer because there's, there's cult, this. It's individual, cultural, legal, and social. I'll give you one more example of cultural change in the writing community. We. I won't. Am I allowed to swear on your podcast? We fucking hate AI. But there's a culture in the writing community where, if you like, yeah, I, I, I'm helping the AI companies steal your work and I'm getting paid. That person is gone. They're an outcast. There's a cultural expectation about it being an artist. So you have individual, cultural, legal, and social, and you can. And then take those four levels and then imagine the ways you can change them. I change on a personal level. You do too, from what you've been saying. I try to contribute to a culture. Legal ways. I have in my contracts for my books, I say no AI on covers. You can't use this book in any data set. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's a legal way, a very small one. And then, I don't know. The problem is, at some point, you've got to rely on a legislator.

I want to see if we can end on a positive note. Let's try. So we've talked about the, the different technologies that we are, we are seeing coming or you see coming in the next decades. You know, big techs playing a role. But there's also the mom and pop shops, you know, the small, the very small entrepreneurs. How can they, how can they use science fiction? Can they use science fiction to help grow their business? What are your thoughts on that? And is there a positive way out where technology can help these, the smaller entrepreneurs, you know, sort of almost compete with the big tech. Do you see a way out there?

It's so hard because you have to think about all different industries and all different types of small business. But I would say if I. Being a writer, you're sort of, you're, you're running a small business or a big business if you're George R.R. martin. But most of us are running small businesses and there are very. And I think the human dimension of connect and this will go be true of a lot of industries. The human dimension of, for example, a run of 500 books that are expensive. Now I haven't done this, I'm not big enough, but there's some authors out there, they might have a $50 book, right, but it's got illustrations and it's got signatures and it's a personal connection between you and the writer, between, sorry, the reader and the author. And only. And when writers, and they can use technology like Kickstarters, they can use, they can use self publishing in a way that is beneficial for them, for themselves, and they can do it in a way that gets them that much closer to their audience. And you can do something we probably could never have done in, geez, I don't know, even 10, 15, 20 years ago is had this close human connection. You can't replace that with anything. No tech bro can come in and change and get something out of that. So what you are giving them is an experience, human experience with an artist. This is just one example of my particular, of the, of the industry that I'm working in and a lot of writers very canny about that and leveraging it and you know, it might be just newsletters and it's just this personal relationship, but again it's facilitated by communication technology that's building little communities and they might have a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand, but when they have that what feels like a close human relationship, they're readers for life and they are loyal and they will buy and they will, you know, they'll buy all the swag and all the books. Now I'm saying all this, I don't bloody well do it myself, but I am. There's something called a hybrid career. Have you heard about this in publishing where I'm a traditional published author? So my books are published by uk but it's published internationally. But I am going to, my next work is going to very likely be self published because I'm going to do exactly what I was just talking about. I'm going to try and get a closer bond connection with my readership for a work that I'm going to put out. It'll still be published everywhere as well. But that experience is from a business sense, if it works, can be very, very beneficial. But also from a relationship sense and a sense of building a hardcore readership. So that's from a small business sense. The problem is you have to be very agile and very clued in or you have to get someone to help you is very agile and clued in because there's ways to do it. But it's you keep having to be that old dog learning all these new tricks. That's publishing, you know.

Well, I think that, I think that's life, you know, we need to, we need to continuously adapt. But yeah, I think that's a great ending. You know, that in the end we still need that human connection, we still need that experience, that one to one experience. And technology can help there. But I think as long as technology doesn't take over, I think we still, also, the smaller, you know, entrepreneurs will have a chance here if you can offer that human connection. And I think with that the time is up. But thank you very much, Tim for joining me on the show. I very much enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. Thank you.

I probably got meandered a couple of times, but that was great. Thanks for having me on.

And that's it for today. As we wrap up today's enlightening discussion with TR Napper, we are reminded of the powerful role that science fiction plays in shaping our understanding of future technologies. Napper's insights, drawn from both his novels and extensive real world experience, challenge us to consider not only the possibilities, but also the responsibilities that come with technological advancement. This episode of Synthetic Minds has not just been a journey through the captivating narratives of cyberpunk fiction, but also a call to action for all of us in the business and tech communities. It urges us to use foresight and critical thinking as tools to navigate the complexities of the digital age. As we conclude this session of Synthetic Minds, we hope you leave inspired to think more critically about the technology you engage with daily. This episode isn't just a discussion. It's a call to integrate foresight and ethical consideration into our strategies and innovations. Make sure to subscribe and join us next time as we continue to decode the future with the help of visionary thinkers like Knapper. Helping you to prepare and adapt in an ever evolving world, and helping leaders like you envision and craft a future that is not only possible but also equitable and inclusive.