Downloading Tomorrow: How to Embrace Futures Thinking - Synthetic Minds Podcast EP01

Welcome to Synthetic Minds, where we move from science fiction to science reality. I'm your host, Dr. Mark Van Rygmanum, accompanied by my digital twin. In this podcast, we bridge the realms of imaginative fiction and tangible future. Join us as we dissect the narratives of science fiction writers and unravel how their visionary ideas might shape our real world tomorrow. Each episode we dive into the fascinating worlds of futuristic technologies and societal shift portrayed in science fiction. We'll examine how these narratives can inform and inspire real world advancements in business, technology and personal life. From AI to space exploration, from virtual realities to breakthrough biotechnologies, we explore the myriad possibilities on the horizon. If you're captivated by the potential of tomorrow and eager to understand how fiction can inform reality, this is the podcast for you. Subscribe and leave a review to join us on this enlightening journey. My first guest is Carl Schroeder, the visionary author behind novels like Stealing Worlds and Lady of Mazes. Carl seamlessly blends speculation about future technologies like AI blockchain and mixed reality with rich storytelling. His tales don't just envision potential futures, but explore how they could radically reshape society and humanity's role. In this fascinating conversation, we'll delve into Carl's writings to understand how concepts like autonomous AI agents and deceptions centralized economies could manifest in the coming decades. We'll examine the vital role of science fiction in helping organizations and individuals prepare for the rapid changes barreling towards us. Now let's embark on this adventure to the future as we venture into Carl's mind bending world and ponder how the lines between science fiction and science reality may soon blur.

Well, thank you very much Carl for joining me on Synthetic Minds. Before we start diving into the stuff around science fiction, can you share a bit about your background and the one or two books that you are that you are most proud of?

Certainly, and thank you for having me on the podcast. My background was originally in writing and fiction writing. I have published 12 novels to date solo and a couple of other book projects. Around 20022003 I began getting invitations from the Canadian government to help out at foresight events that they were hosting for the National Science Council and later for the the Canadian military and got into doing strategic foresight and eventually got a Master's degree in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University here in Toronto. And I use a somewhat unique blend of science fictioning or design fiction writing and traditional foresight to study trends and wild swans and or sorry, black swans and wild cars confusing them in my head. And sometimes these appear in novel form and sometimes these ideas appear as product for foresight projects for the commercial sector or government.

Nice. Nice. And so 12 novels you said you've written, which is the one or two books that you're most proud of.

It's interesting because you're proud of your kids for different reasons. And there, there are books that I had a ton of fun writing and that I think are lots of fun just as stories. So Son of Sons would come to mind or lockstep in terms of ideas and communicating wild but potentially real visions of the future. I think I would put Stealing Worlds near the top there along with lady of Mazes, which I would only recommend to people who are deeply steeped in science fiction and willing to take on some truly mind blowing material.

Well, we are certainly. I will put them in the chat notes when the podcast notes the links to these books. I read Stealing Worlds, which I thought was an absolutely amazing book, and we'll dive into that a bit more down the road of this podcast. But before we go there, can you share a bit about what sort of the common themes from a technology perspective in your books?

I've always been interested in the future of governance, the future of economics, and the future of humanity's relationship with our technological creations. So that encompasses. But it's more than just artificial intelligence. AI is the current craze, but the technosphere as a whole is an interesting creature. And I've, I've looked at it in different ways over, over the years I became interested in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology around 2000, well over 13.

So you were very, very early on in the books in this sphere.

Yes. So Stealing Worlds, which delves heavily into blockchain technology, among other things, had its gestation 10 years ago or more in those explorations, but prior to that I was already looking at what it would mean for artificial intelligence to exist and to be fully and completely autonomous from humanity. And the little puzzle question I set myself at my first novel was whether AI will always be just repeating our own words back to us in a sense, or whether at some point somehow it will start to speak in its own voice and have things to say to us that we have never thought of.

Well, I guess that would be interesting. You know, a lot of people say that ChatGPT is sort of a parrot, you know, just, just talking back to what it has ingested. And you know, it's sort of a, as I call it, it's sort of a mirror to Our collective consciousness. Consciousness, because it has ingested everything that we've ever said online. So to what extent is it, is it really being creative? Is it really being unique? Or is it just repeating according to a certain statistical pattern? Or is it something, something more than that?

Yes. And the, the, the very first words in my very first novel, Ventus, from the year 2000, are Frankenstein's monster, speaks the computer. But whose wisdom is those cold lips? Is it only our own voices speaking to us or. Or something else speaking, a voice that we have always dreamed of hearing? So, yes. So the, the question posed by AI is can we wake up the physical world and give it voice? Which I considered at the time and still consider to be a question far more profound than is it going to think like us or is it going to take over the world? It was a question about our deeper connection with the world and how that could be midwife by technology potentially, rather than by our traditional attempts at it, such as religion. It was a bit radical.

Well, I think it's, I think it's interesting what you're saying that delay. Can AI be more than again, just repeating to us, or can it. Will it think completely differently to what, how we think? And during my PhD, AI was part of my research on how AI is going to affect organizations. One of the things that I argued as well is that AI is a different form of intelligence and therefore will think differently because it's being constructed differently. Human intelligence is created by evolution, which is inherently a dumb process and it's just trial and error. But we are creating artificial intelligence, so it's an intelligent being creating another intelligent being, so that will by definition have a different way of thinking, a different way of acting. In addition, that the source materials that we use to build this intelligence are optimized for this intelligence, while us, you know, carbon creatures might not necessarily be optimized for the most highest level of intelligence, while silicon is. So I thought that that was an interesting perspective. And to what extent is. Will artificial intelligence be different, fundamentally different in its way of thinking and its way of interacting than human intelligence?

I absolutely agree, and in fact, I've been belaboring this point for 25 years now, that firstly, we think about artificial intelligence using the only model of intelligence that we have, which is ourselves. But secondly, when we do this, we think narratively and mythologically about it, so that our thinking about what artificial intelligence could be like necessarily falls into a set of archetypes, paradigms, or cliches such as the robot revolution idea, the Skynet Various visions of evil, AIs taking over the world. And it's a mistake to do this because what we're dealing with is not like anything that we've had before. So for my first novel, Vetis I, in trying to capture this notion, I decided I needed to invent a new word. So rather than intelligence, I created the word. Athalias. Thalia, being the muse of nature, would be the muse or the spirit behind something that is not intelligence in our way of thinking of it, but is nature's equivalent of it. And the, the novel centers around a world called Ventus that was terraformed by nanotechnology automatically in advance of the human settlers arriving. And when the human settlers arrive, the terraforming system, which is artificially intelligent, does not recognize them. It treats them as a, an infection basically, and knocks them back to the Stone Age. The, the, the story starts about a thousand years later and it, it's about the slow discovery of this, this alternative to human intelligence that has grown up on Adventists. Not Frankenstein's monster repeating our own words back to us, but something new with something new to say that is not us. To me, that was and is the most exciting potential that AI has.

Forbes yeah, and in Stealing Worlds, you describe these AI agents an important part of the story. And I'm not sure in which year Stealing Worlds is playing out, but obviously it's a couple of, I think, decades in the future. From your experience as coming up with these futuristic stories and then linking it back to our world today, which kind of technologies do you envision becoming a reality before, let's say, the end of this decade, or let's say before 2040?

It's interesting because I wrote Stealing Worlds starting around 2016, 2017, and it was published in 2019. I expected that the technologies to make what I was talking about real would become available around 2030-2035. But I believe now that I could build almost everything I describe in that novel with off the shelf tech. We, we have agent swarms now that we can build with large language models that, that can do most of the things that I, I talk about the, the notional AIs in that book doing. So nearly everything that I thought was a good 15 years out is rapidly coming onto us. The, an example is smart glasses. The main characters, most of them wear smart glasses and these overlay extended to reality or mixed reality over the world around them and they're cheap enough that our main character Surah, who basically has no money, does have a pair of smart glasses. But I didn't expect those to really sort of hit the mainstream for probably 10 years. But you know, Apple's just released their, their first mixed reality headset and there are a bunch of other actually functionally usable glasses with this kind of form factor out there now. So once again, you know, what I thought was coming further down the road is really just around the corner.

I think Apple Vision Vision Pro is a great example. We see all these videos now appearing on the Internet of people driving cars or even flying planes with their Vision Pro headset on which kind of crazy to think about it, but anyway, but it. And you see a lot of the videos where you can quickly switch between reality and, you know, overlay on what you see. So you know that I really like that part of Stealing Rules. You know, the whole concept of mixed reality where you can just have an overlay, you can completely literally change every concept with of your reality to something else. And I thought when I was reading it a couple of months ago and that that must be really quite far away at least, you know, the smart glasses is I think still a couple of years away. But we already have working on prototyping. But I will say as the Vision Pro, where you have still rather bulky headset but you have you achieved the same objective as you write in the book, which to me is fascinating to see how fast the world is changing. And I think we can really say that we, we are living in exponential times. And with technology moving so rapidly, what do you envision the impacts would be of such a world where we have smart glasses, where everyone has their own reality, where we have AI agents that have a big impact on society? How do you envision the long term impact of this and what can organizations do to prepare for that?

Well, if we're talking the very long term, I've already written the book on that. The I wrote a trilogy, but in a reverse order. In 2000 I wrote Ventus, which is set about a thousand years in the Future. And in 2005 I published the lady of Mazes, which is set a few centuries from now and is a fully developed realization of everything that's described in Stealing Worlds. And then I wrote Stealing Worlds about five years ago. So it was an unusual gestation of that project. But the middle book, Lady Amazes, describes a future in which people have realized that technology is legislation, that introducing a particular technology is the equivalent of legislating some change in society. But it's a random one. It's the equivalent of spinning a roulette wheel of possibilities and seeing which ones occur? So take the smartphone, for instance. Famously, television writing became a lot more difficult after the development of the cell phone, because suddenly Scully and Mulder were able to communicate with one another even when one was trapped in a basement somewhere across town. Right. So writers had to change the way they told stories and we expected a lot more freedom from them. But a funny thing has happened when I was a kid, when you were seven years old, you jumped on your bike, you waved goodbye, you drove off into the sunrise first thing in the morning on Saturday, and your parents didn't see you until you pulled up around 5 o' clock for supper. And they didn't worry about where you were. And you roved over miles and miles and just had adventures. Now everyone's got a phone and it's kind of required that we always stay in touch. It's become a thing hither, unexpectedly. So when we introduce technologies, we also introduce social changes, but we don't know ahead of time what those are going to be. And often they're, they're paradoxical. They do exactly what the opposite of what we expected. This is what's happened with social media. Rather than being a tool for bringing us all together, it's become this nightmare force that's pulling us all apart. But this is normal for technologies. This is what they do. They produce utterly unexpected effect.

But that's also where the role is of science fiction writers, isn't it, to sort of this future thinking, to thinking different scenarios of how this technology can be, can evolve and its implications on society as well?

Yes. I think it was Larry Nevin who said I could be wrong. The function of the science fiction writer is not to imagine the car, but to imagine the traffic jam.

Yeah.

And yeah, this is very difficult to do, but it's much easier to do with narrative, with storytelling than it is with other approaches to examining the future. The reason this it for this is that when you are telling a story, you necessarily have to involve all of the elements of reality, basically, that impinge on the thing that you're talking about. So when the Canadian army hired me to write a couple of short novels set in the near future on possible future evolution of the military, I found that the stack of pages that they had given me, it was about, oh, I don't know, six or eight inches of research that they had done, had all kinds of interesting ideas in it about laser weapons and telecommunications and satellites and all this sort of thing. And all of them had very well worked out logic for what they could do. But when I Put them all together in a story and played one off against another. I discovered very quickly that many of them just wouldn't work because of the other technologies that were coming, and that some of them could work in ways that were completely unforeseen. That so early on in one of these novels, and this was around 2005, 2006, the bad guys use a. Create a flash model to block the streets so that Canadian peacekeepers cannot get their vehicles across town in order to stop something that that's happening. And then they use a repurposed video game and engine which is photorealistic, capable of basically deep faking video. And they put news items up of Canadian peacekeepers shooting at a crowd of protesters. And this kind of application of unexpected tools such as game engines. And now we have Unreal Engine 5, which is capable of creating photorealistic details.

It's already being used, I think, in online misinformation propaganda in the past couple of months.

Yeah, this is the sort of thing that a standard foresight exercise was not going to uncover for you in 2004 and 2005. But by throwing all of these ideas together in a narrative, the narrative process itself began to generate these unforeseen possibilities. Kind of like a, A verbal equivalent of a. Of a tarot reading. Yeah. Where. Where each, each card changes the meaning of the cards around it. Yeah. So each factor that you add to a story changes or influences those around them.

And, and so, so in, in. In my, in my fourth book, Step Into Step into the Metaverse, which is all about the metaverse, I added an introduction, which was a Site 60 story, to sort of help, you know, my readers understand what the Metaverse is, what its implications will be for the, for the next decade. And I think it is really helpful to have such a, such a narrative, such a story which is, which can help the reader better digest and prepare for what's to come. To what extent do you think our science fiction writers becoming more and more important for organizations to help them prepare for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow? Because the world is changing so fast, and this concept of future, I believe.

It is, and I believe that science fiction is very quickly becoming a mainstream tool in foresight. I wrote my master's thesis on using narrative tools to do foresight. And we of course, have books like Science Fiction Prototype that provide some guidance in certain ways to do this. The point we're at right now is that people are beginning to realize that, as the author of on the Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd, puts it, the default Mode of thought for the human brain is narrative.

Yeah.

In other words, if we can think of something in narrative terms, we automatically will. And if we are presented with a large pile of information, we will automatically attempt to organize that information in narrative terms. This is an important realization to make, and people are having that realization now. The next step is for organizations to figure out how to employ and deploy narrative in a controlled manner. And that's what I went into a little bit of detail about in my master's thesis. How do you control the process of storytelling such that what comes out the other end is what your foresight project wanted to express? Because it's very easy for storytelling to get away from you.

Yeah.

For a story to, for a character, for instance, to dominate a story, for a theme to emerge that is not what you intended to say, but sort of says itself due to the way you've put a story together. So I created a technique at the time, this is about 2011, for very quickly taking a set of foresight findings and translating them into the elements of a story setting, character, situation so that each aspect of narratives that you write would have a onetoone relationship with one of the things that you discovered in your foresight process. Assuming that there was some standard foresight project such as scenario based or trends based analysis, that had gone before. So this is a form of science fiction as reporting as opposed to science fiction as research.

So to what extent then can organizations learn from science fiction advisors? Because I think this example of this process that you've developed, I think it can be extremely helpful to organizations. How can they embed that kind of way of thinking to prepare for this highly uncertain world we live in at.

Well, there are a few science fiction writers who do strategic foresight as well, but not as many as you might think. We do often get hired to create provocative entertainments, shall we say, that are to draw people in or that act as a kind of sort of flashy face to foresight. But there's not very many of us who use science fiction in a deliberate and controlled fashion. And I think that this needs to change because I, I think that science fiction writers. Well, first of all, we need a second revenue stream than, than literary sales. But, but also it's. It's a very difficult craft to, to practice if you're not trained in it and do it all the time. Yeah. So for, for my master's project, I, you know, I. I was trying to see how far can I get an untrained professional in such as engineering to be able to express themselves in a literary mode successfully while conveying these ideas. And you can get pretty far with that. But you will get your best results from a science fiction writer who understands both storytelling and foresight. And at the moment, these are relatively thin on the ground. One example of a science fiction writer who also does foresight is Brenda Cooper.

Yeah.

And her book Wilders and its sequel are both extremely well researched near future scenarios that are also great stories.

Yeah. Tell them. So when you, when you craft your stories, when you try to, to have this, this futurist thinking perspective, what kind of signals do you, do you look for when developing your storyline? And, and, and how important are the signals that you see that you see around you today in order to craft a story that will, that will play out tomorrow?

Well, that's a question about a slightly different approach to using science fiction. What I discussed a moment ago was basically a reporting function, is it? But to use science fiction as an analysis tool, what you need to understand is this concept I mentioned earlier of playing ideas off against one another. And you can, for instance, do an isolated study on the impact that human robotics will have on economics in the next 10 years, and you can do an isolated study on the effect that economic growth is going to have on the environment over the next 10 years. But in order to properly understand what's going on, what you really need to do is write a story set 10 years from now in which you have humanoid robotics and climate change unfolding at the same time. And then you can start to ask yourself, well, what impact does one have on the other? Do we have a exponential increase in pollution because everyone wants their personal robot and all their creature comforts and we go hyper consumerist? Or does having this new labor force allow us to relax a bit and actually practice degrowth? And the scenario that you choose is going to be believable or unbelievable depending on the characters and the setting that you put them in. And that believability is a clue.

Yeah.

I like the idea of SpaceX's heavy lift launch vehicle, which theoretically can put 150 tons into orbit with each launch and is fully reusable at the same time. I'm aware that already with the Falcon 9 rocket, signal launches were punching holes in the ionosphere that could be up to a thousand kilometers across and could take hours or days to repair themselves. And we have no idea whatsoever what stripping the ionosphere does to the rest of the Earth system. So you, you have to be able to take ideas from entirely different domains and mash them together to get a sense of what is actually going to happen in the future. And one of the only ways that you can effectively do this is through narrative.

Yeah, and I think you did that really well in Stealing Worlds where you combine different technologies, in this case mixed reality, blockchain technology, AI, as well as IoT devices, all into one narrative. And you really see how they interacted with each other. And I just want to go back to two technologies that played a major role within Stealing Worlds, and one was the blockchain economy that you depicted in your book, which really suggests like a radical shift from traditional economic systems. How close do you think we actually are to such a decentralized economy? Will we ever achieve it? And, and how would it affect our society?

I think we're very close to having the ability to do it, but we're very close to having the ability to have, say, a universal basic income. At some point we will be fully capable of it and we will decide politically in all likelihood not to. The, the issues that we face at this point in our development as a, as a species are not technological, they are political. The, the hardest problem for us to crack at this point is how we govern ourselves. And I am doing a lot of writing about that. I've written a few stories about it. And Stealing Worlds is, is, is partly about that as well. In terms of economics, I have been working for a while on extending some of the ideas in Stealing Worlds and seeing whether they're doable. Right. And one of them is the. A self administering common pool resource, which is, it's, it's quite a mouthful, which is why I invented the word deodad for, for the book as being a shorter way of describing it. But here's an idea. So every resource, like a board, a brick, a nail, an integrated circuit, is assigned an identity on a blockchain and given a large language model AI that advocates for it. And what these AIs do is they propose uses for the resources. They propose these to each other and they propose them to us. And what you have is a million or a billion or a trillion different minds coming up with all the ways that we can use the things that we have lying around right at this moment. And they talk to us and they allow us to vote on which ones become real. And then they do the complete project management. Effort. Create the projects, oversee them, and we make them. And rather than using the market, we use a global distributed. Economic planning system. Not a centralized planning system like communism, but one where the resources themselves tell us what they're capable of and propose the best possible use for them.

I think that goes a step further than what you proposed in the book Stealing Worlds where I think we only had a crush can that would act on its own on the blockchain was worth 50 bucks. I think if I remember correctly that goes a big step further. And then at the same time, you know, an immediate challenge I see with, with having large language models going back to the start of our conversation. They shouldn't be, you know, parrots. They should be actually creative and come up with new thinking if we want to have that, you know, that, that process that you described actually new work because otherwise it's, it's still us coming up with the, the purposes and objectives of those resources that are on the blockchain.

Well, this is why I'm a big fan of hallucination for large language models. I think we should be encouraging it because it's a signal that there might be some latent creativity in there. To a great extent that creativity and those hallucinations are, are not the kind of creativity that you and I are actually wanting here. It's the stochastic parrot notion of just randomly coming out with stuff. But there is some evidence that creativity at its core is a, a form based or based upon a form of natural selection. And if you take the, the notion that I just proposed of billions of, of minds coming up with ideas and, and competing. If you build in criteria for these proposals, living, dying or mating and having children, then you have the potential for them to rapidly evolve towards points of optimization that are specified by us and specified by other stakeholders in the natural environment, such as the forests, rivers and other living beings that we share the planet with so that we actually do get creative proposals for what to do with the, the fantastic wealth that our technology is capable of creating for us.

Yeah, but, but I think an important aspect there is, you know, you mentioned it earlier already, is the governance. And again stealing worlds. You described it, I think quite beautifully how these AI agents will become part of the governance. How do you see that happening? And how do you see the relationship between humans and AI evolve over the next 10, 20 years? And how would it play out in society?

I have no idea. Well, we are at inflection point right now. We are.

Sorry, yeah, I think I lost you for a bit.

Same sort of point that, oh, we're at an inflection point now where we are rapidly changing and by the very nature of what's happening to us, we cannot see what's going to come next. The French philosopher Alain Badu has an idea. He calls it the event. For him, most of the time, events don't happen because most of the time, the language that we have to describe what's going on around us in the world covers the things that are going on around us in the world. An event happens when something occurs that we don't have the language to describe. And that's the kind of situation that we're in right now. A friend of mine did a very deep dive into Chat GPT before it became widely accessible. And she came back and said, this is not like anything that science fiction ever described. It's not artificial intelligence in the traditional form. And it's not like what we thought could. Could exist. We don't have a word for it, actually. So that's the situation that we're in right now to propose that I understand what's going to happen next. Normally, 10, 15 years ago, one could do that. But I think we're in the middle of one of Badieu's events right now where the language that we're using to describe what is changing around us no longer applies. It's only when we discover a new language for describing this new world that we're going to be able to really tell us the story of what we are living through or have lived through.

So you could sort of say that we are actually going through like a paradigm shift and that we are living through sort of a digital renaissance that doesn't take hundreds or 200 years, but takes like three or five years and within that process, completely changes our society. What do you think are some of the key lessons for organizations that they can learn from such a transformation as depicted in Stealing World? To stay resilient and to stay innovative and to stay relevant in the years to come.

I think the main one is a phrase or a sentence that ends the story that Sealing Worlds was based on. It's an old story of mine called To High From Far Silenia, which is a strange title, I know the last line of the story is, some things are real in any world. And what we have to remember is that there actually is a bedrock core real world out there that has needs that are not going to change. Regardless of how magical AI is over the next 10 years, people will still have to pay off their mortgages in all likelihood, but more importantly, people will still have to eat. People will still need shelter. Organizations, I think, will be successful insofar as they remain grounded in serving the real needs of the real world as opposed to for Instance, buying back their own stock to increase its value. The, the, the, the financial system is a, is a classic example of a hallucination. It's become detached from the physical world.

And don't say that to the financial industry.

Well known, not if they're paying me. But the important things in the world are what they always were. And AI is not going to change. AI, in fact, can only exist in this same physical world as usual. And so its fundamental needs are always going to be to some degree aligned with or at cross purposes with ours with regards to resources. And governance of AI is just a subset of the problem of governance in general. There is nothing about the question of governing AI that does not also apply to us. So governance is the killer app of the next generation. And I'm, I'm not convinced that anyone has yet come forward with. A way to solve that problem.

Yeah, no, I agree, I agree with that. And I think there's, you know, and there's a lot more work to be done to try to understand how this world, how our world is changing as we speak in front of our eyes. You know, we're going through exponential change at the moment, which by definition is very difficult to grasp for humans because we're not exponential thinkers, we are linear thinkers. And I think that makes it really hard for us to, to understand and prepare for tomorrow. But that's also where I think the work of science fiction writers of yourself is so important. As a final question, because I think we can go on for a very long time, because I find it's a very fascinating conversation. But as a final question, how important do you think science fiction stories are for business leaders, and what recommendations do you have for organizations as well as individuals to better understand this exciting future that awaits us?

I think science fiction is extremely important, but I think it's important that if you are going to delve into it organizationally, that you remain current with it. I am watching Elon Musk creating robots and creating mind machine interfaces and creating rocket ships, and I think to myself, wow, this is really good implementation of the ideas of the 1980s. It's, he's doing a really, really good job of instantiating the ideas that science fiction writers were writing about 40 years ago to really get a handle on what's coming in the near future. Business leaders have to be brave enough to read the writers who are writing now and find out what they are writing about. And, and this new world that we're entering is radically different. So I, I, I wish, you know, Elon all the best in, in. In building the dreams of the 1980s. But I, I sometimes wish that he were reading the. The current generation of science fiction writers and spending his billions making their dreams come true. Wow.

I love that. It's a great insight at the end of a very interesting conversation that we should read today's science fiction in order to prepare for tomorrow and start building tomorrow today and not starting to build yesterday today. I think that's fascinating. Well, thank you very much, Carl. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I can definitely recommend your books. I really enjoy Stealing Worlds. I thought it was a fascinating insight into the future. It opened my eyes as a futurist even more and to sort of understand all the possibilities that we have have in the future. So thank you very much for coming on my show.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

What an insightful journey into the future we've experienced with Carl Schroeder. From AI agents advocating for resource use to mixed reality augmenting our daily lives, Carl paints a vivid picture of the transformative technologies and sustainable societal shift that may await us in the decades ahead. As Carl articulated so compellingly, science fiction isn't just entertainment. It's a vital tool for spurring the imaginative thinking needed to anticipate and prepare for the coming tsunami of change. By reading today's speculative fiction, we can catch glimpses of the realities we may soon face. I encourage you to check out Carl's writings, especially novels like Stealing Worlds, and let your mind explore these possible futures. And remember to subscribe for more illuminating discussions at the crossroads of science fiction and science reality. Until next time, keep dreaming, keep questioning, and keep your eyes open for the wonders and challenges heading our way. The future is coming, and it may prove to be stranger than we can imagine.