Harnessing Speculative Fiction for Strategic Innovation with Tobias Buckell - Synthetic Minds Podcast EP08

Welcome to Synthetic Minds, the podcast where we traverse the boundary between the imaginative world of science fiction and the tangible impact of technology on our society. In each episode, I invite visionaries who not only craft narratives about the future, but also offer insights that could guide today's leaders in navigating the complexities of technological evolution. I'm Dr. Marc Van Reiman, your host, joined by my digital twin, exploring the compelling synergy between the imagined and the real. In today's episode, I am joined by Tobias Buckel, a renowned science fiction author known for his vibrant narratives that intertwine his Caribbean background with pressing environmental themes and futuristic tech. Buckel's works, including the acclaimed Xenowealth series and his contributions to the Halo universe, as well as books such as Hurricane Fever or Arctic Rising, invite us to ponder the sustainability of our civilizations and our relationships with technology. Tobias is not just a storyteller, he's a futurist who utilizes his narratives to provoke thought on d the complex interplay between humanity and technology. Don't forget to like and subscribe to be informed when future episodes become available. Now let's dive into how Tobias rich storytelling and diverse cultural perspectives enhance our understanding of possible futures.

Great to have you on the show, Toby. It's so good to have you and to talk about science fiction and how it can impact organizations.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Perfect. So let's start first with a bit of your background. Can you share a bit of the one or two books that you are most proud of?

I mean, every writer is proud of them. I've got about 15 books under my belt, but I think the most pertinent for your audience is probably my Futurism. And so Arctic Rising and Hurricane Fever, two books where I was kind of taking a look at sort of over the horizon type stuff and sort of like looking at climate change and developing technologies, alternative energy sources and sort of like geopolitical shifts as a result of losing so much ice in the Arctic north and how that creates a more sort of polar oriented groups of countries, sort of Arctic tigers and a lot of the stuff that I was experimenting and looking at that is a lot of the sort of classic futures examination, looking at a cone of possibilities and trying to build a story and linkages out of that that would work for people while trying to make it interesting and fun, kind of like a thriller. So using kind of like the model of a techno thriller as the vehicle to sort of do some kind of futures exploration.

Nice, nice. It sounds really interesting. And so what are Sort of the technologies that you use or describe in your books. And how far ahead do you go when it comes to technologies?

It's always interesting because one of the things I started doing was pulling dates out of those books because as I was doing the work and reading IPCC climate change projections and looking at some of the really interesting stuff that Task Force Climate Change does, the US Navy's Climate Change Task Force, they have some really amazing papers. I started to pull out assumptions about what the timelines were. I was recently in a workshop where we were challenged to use a really, you know, distinct timeline. And I find that really tough at times because it kind of, you know, boxes you in in some ways. And also I find, like, a lot of assumptions in some of the parts of the futurist community to be a little bit almost. What's the word I'm looking for? Millenniarian, Didactic, you know. You know, I've been to a conference once where someone stood up and was telling, you know, by 2020, this is going to happen. By 2030, this is going to happen. And maybe I'm just getting old or something, but I just remember sitting in my group back there and starting to be like my old teenage self, like, at the back of the class, just sort of saying snide things and getting people around me to laugh because I was like, you know, it's so like, that is. That's bad futurism. You know, that's futurism where it's kind of like, this will happen. And it's like, oh, man. You know, like, my respect for that always just immediately starts lowering because I just think in terms of, like, I was explaining to a friend that one of the challenges recently, with so many developments that are happening, so many unsettling ones, is that it's in the past. I think of my futures projection as like a cone going out, right? You're at the point of the cone, looking forward, and you're seeing lots of trajectories and possibilities, and you're just examining them. And right now, futures projection is really spiky. It's more of a sea urchin than like a cone, right? And so I could look at the cone and say, like, well, here are some possibilities, but they're all kind of bounded within a certain range, right, in these different axes. And it gets further and further away from us the further in time you go, because they're the unexpected consequences that you can't foresee. And so that cone starts to get really large as it gets further into the future. But right now it's so spiky that it's like I, I, you know, whatever you latch onto and you want to talk about, you don't know how fast that's going to change on a dime. Right. Right now we seem to be going through one of those historical eras where a lot of stuff is happening all at the same time. And we've had a very quiet 30 year period.

Yeah. Although I think some people would disagree with this quiet period, you know, the past 30 years. Because the Internet, Internet, obviously everything in our society. But, but I agree with you, you know, it. I think what we are about to experience is, is anything from quiet compared to the past 30 years. And I think that's sort of due to the convergence of all these different technologies that we're happy that's happening now at the moment as well as, you know, everything moves so fast. So we are really living through exponential times or as I like to say it, we, we're going through a digital renaissance which compared to the other renaissance didn't, will not take 100 or 200 years. It will probably take three to seven years or maybe 10 years. And in that period will completely change our society.

Yeah, it feels very like 1999, 2000 in terms of technology. Definitely. But what's fascinating to me is all the other social stuff that's happening at the same time which is sort of this like you know, sort of magic, you know, magic unquantifiable thing. Right. Because we're so, being human is so unpredictable. Right. That we don't know how these, all these pieces are going to fit together because some of it requires us to make some decisions about how we want to fit together together and move forward on it. And there's no consensus there. So it's, it's, it's, it's fascinating, exciting and terrifying all at the same time. There's a lot of stuff happening. There's this book called Future Shock by a gentleman named Alvin Toffler. I'm pretty, I'm guessing as a futurist you've read this. It's a very, I think it was, came out in the 1980s. It's, it's really old. I found it in a thrift store. But one of the things in it was, it looks at that accelerate, you know, that the fact that like, you know, there are all these step ups, these accelerationary periods that happen and how bewildering they are to people because many of us don't sit in literature of change or societies or cultures of change. Right. We're not like sitting in those, you know, it's like, you know, when I, when I think of as a writer, like when you're acquiring new skills or when you play a sport, you go through these plateaus and then there are these periods of intense, sudden accelerative acquisition of new skills and then you're at a plateau again. It's not like a smooth line up when you get a new hobby or you try to develop a new skill. It's kind of like plateau, leap, plateau, leap. And it really feels like we're kind of in one of those leap moments and not in the plateau technology wise. So I'm fascinated by alternative energy. I'm fascinated by, particularly battery storage. Ramez Nam has put out a bunch of charts that show kind of like the Moore's version, like the Moore's chart theory of like, you know, how often does battery storage efficiency double? Right. It's roughly every five years, I think. So, like there are all of these, like fascinating things happening all around us, you know, medical leaps, you know, I know AI is what everyone wants to talk about, but it's kind of actually the least interesting leap for me because the medical advances over the last couple of years are bananas. Reprogrammable DNA that, you know, fixing genetic defects with reprogrammed genes and MRNA vaccines. I've been following MRNA for 15 years and we had another 15 years of development. But because of COVID which was an incredible tragedy, we compressed 15 years of MRNA research by just throwing money at it. Europe and the US and other countries and, and we crushed it into a one and a half year period of developing it. Right before COVID hit, I was reading about MRNA like it was science fiction. Like one day we're going to be able to program a vaccine by flipping switches and deliver it. We won't have to like, do the egg and the, you know, develop some of the, you know. Yeah, we're just going to program it like on a computer and like print it and mRNA. There we go.

And here we are. So sort of a silver lining of this, the whole pandemic that, that, that turned out to be, to be a good size. Good, good part of it.

One of those things like the black plague, right? Like, yes, we lost 50% of the population, but now we don't have feudalism anymore. Right. Like, it's, it's a huge tragedy. But then it changes everything from that moment on. Mri, MRNA vaccines. You know, we, we are about to develop a vaccine. We have vaccines for cancers. Right. Like, I just Think about like when I was young, that was science fiction. So like there's just a lot of stuff like that that we're becoming. It's easy to overlook. But that to me are super profound changes. If we have programmable vaccines for things like cancers and viruses, then like that, that's a game changer. The medical changes are profound, right? More health allows more people to do more.

So from your explorations into the future, we sort of touch upon you looking about health. But which technology do you envision to become reality in the next 15 years until 2040? Let's say.

The one I am. I hate to talk about neuralink because of so and so who he shall not be named. But the greatest sort of futures workshop I attended was a presentation by someone who was talking about consciousness and linked consciousness, right? And what they were trying to do was to envision what being linked directly to something like the Internet would be like and what that does to consciousness. That's a technology that right now we can all make jokes about because you know, of who's pushing it the hardest. But as a teenager in the 1980s, reading Cyberpunk, you know, that is the one that I am most fascinated by. I read the interview with the first neuralink implant individual and that person is incredibly excited about the technology and what it is given him as an ability, right? The ability to be able to communicate through a brain link in a situation where previously he was using like a pen in his mouth to hit keys on a keyboard. Right? So being able to write at the speed of thought versus pack it out has huge implications for quality of life for him. But secondarily when that becomes more common, I'm really insanely fascinated by what that looks like because look at how much just being online all the time has changed us as human beings and as societies. Just in the last 20 to 30 years, what does it look like when if I was catapulted into the future with a time machine, what does it mean when we all start to look like the Borg? And I don't mean like having implants in us like some bad science fiction film, but I mean we are all a hyper connected.

And we are already hyper connected, but through a slow medium of communication, you know, our thumbs that need to type on a tiny screen. Yeah. I share your fascination for brain computer interfaces. I've written a lot about it and in my exploration not so much from a science fiction, but from a what is this technology and how it will influence organizations? And I think the implications are so profound on so Many different levels. From being able to see and hear what you see in here, from literally from being able to design just by thinking. But also the privacy issues. If Meta is developing a brain computer interface, I will not use it because I would not want my most precious thing, my thoughts, to be end up being in the hand of a Mr. Zuckerberg.

But here's the thing that terrifies me, Mark, right? Which is when I teach college and so my baked in attitudes about privacy and what I expect other people to have access to is generationally fundamentally different than what my students expect, right? I've had students like, you know, when I'm taking attendance, you know, when I say like, oh, so and so's A.B. you know, absent, not here, someone will pipe up like, oh no, he's on the like such and such pathway. He'll be here in two minutes. Because they all have each other on Find My Friends, right? They knew when someone's in the toilet, you know what I mean? Like, it's mind blowing to me how, how casually that changed, right? To me, it feels like intrusive and offensive and weird to have anyone constantly knowing exactly where I am. Not like I'm up to anything, but it feels like Big brother, right?

Like, Well, I think 1984 is already, we are way past it already, like big time. You know, like it's, it's, it's like a child's book compared to what we have at the moment, I think. Yeah.

And so, yeah, in terms of the privacy, it blows my mind because I'm thinking about what does it look like when those students of mine are going like, oh, look at how much privacy these next generations don't care about, right? Like, you know, like when I was younger and I would, I would run into older people who were like, really out of sync with my generation. You just kind of was like, it was always like, yeah, those fuddy duddies, those out of touch people, the people who let technology move past them and whatnot. But it comes down to attitudes too, right? You know, and, and I look at it and I go like, wow, right? We're hitting a point now where I'm starting to feel out of touch and out of sync with these. Where everyone's like, if you got nothing to hide, who cares if everyone knows where you are all the time? And I'm like, but easier for me to get mugged by someone I don't know, but it just seems really dangerous.

I agree. I've got young children and I worry and wonder at the same time. What will their future be like? Hopefully they won't be on social media before 16, but you never know. But how will they perceive privacy? How will they navigate what's ahead of us?

And then we never know how a generation will react negatively. Right. I have my, my, you know, my kids, I don't talk too much about them in public, but I think they'll allow me to say this. They really don't do social media. Right. They see it as like losing control of your privacy. So they'll share like, you know, I'll see students in universities share locations, but I actually have a lot of students who refuse to use social media.

Wow, that's really good. So I was in Saudi Arabia last week for a talk about digital. It was a digital wellbeing summit which was fantastically organized and I think really good to have that conversation about digital well being and about how social media can infiltrate us. And so the opening talk was by Kristin Bride. I'm not sure if you've heard of her, but she's sort of an advocate for, for the Online Safety act in America. And she's doing that because she lost her son due to suicide after being cyberbullied on, I think Snapchat and her story, extremely powerful. And I have deep respect for what she's doing and because what she has had to go through. But for me, that worries me a lot, how people behave on social media and if we then extrapolate that to a future where, you know, technology becomes even more pervasive or are we able to cyberbully just by thinking, you know, how is that going to affect if I can be in your head and, and mess with your thoughts from, from, from, from a side, from abroad, from wherever. That is deeply scary.

One of the things that concerns me is that we, we tend to use metaphors to work our way through understanding some of these things. And one of my frustrations is that it's hard to use metaphors properly for technology like this because a metaphor is by definition not true, Right. A metaphor is using something that isn't something else to compare it to something it isn't. Right? So we use these metaphors and we say things like, oh, but social media is like a town square or like a public forum or things like that. But I'm like, there are things that are done on Twitter that in a public forum, in Meatspin, that would never happen, get you punched out, that would never happen, right? So we're using these metaphors and equating it to something that it isn't and adopting our laws and behaviors and reactions around a poorly linked metaphor instead of examining kind of like what it actually is. And so a lot of that worries me because yeah, I don't see really good metaphors for what is it going to be like when we have brain to brain public spaces. Right. What does that look like when you become part of something larger than yourself? We know mob mentality is usually pretty negative in human behavior. So this is like hypercharged, super fueled mob behavior.

So how do you think we should prepare for this? Also, you know, how. What should individuals as well as organizations and do to, to navigate this, this highly uncertain future, which to me seems like also having a significant. That's probably an understatement impact on our, on our lives. What are your, what are your ideas around that?

So like one of the things we never did initially with social media was we never really put a lot of funding into examining the, the mental impacts. Right. We rolled it out as sort of a giant society wide experiment. This sounds like I'm all negative about it, but like I'm ADHD and I built my career on social media. Right. Like social media works for my brain because I understand that it's continuous partial interruption and I have a lot of coping mechanisms and I recognize interruptions and how I behave around it. But I had a lifetime of living with unmedicated ADHD to develop those. And I noticed that my friends and people who are not ADHD often seem to be most hurt by continuous partial interruption because they don't have those coping mechanisms, they don't have those defenses. Right. I'm used to like being like, oh, I'm overwhelmed. I need to slim things down and create a space for myself that is healthy and sustainable because I've had to do that since I was in first grade. Right. And I think that like for these, this next step, I think we need to look really carefully at the mistakes we made and put money into funding studying it. Not with an outside kind of like we think this is going to be bad, but with a. What does this do to us? Right. As we're rolling it out, let's study how this affects us so that we have some actionable data before too late into the process. Right. I think that's really important because we haven't actually had like a Kevin read, really a full kind of counting of what we just did to ourselves over the last 20 years. I think in Europe we're seeing a little bit more of that, you know, but I think like we need to study A little bit more than we did the last time. So there needs to be like a parallel track of, I don't want to say like the fda, but some kind of mechanism. And I, I don't care what it is. It could be private, public, private, public. But we just need like, we need to suck some scientists on that crap, right? You know, we have to have some study what we're getting into. And I think then along with that, because I, I'm a believer in actionable clean data. So we need some good clean data prepared by scientists who try to be object, objective. Right? But then we also need some people to think about what do we want it to look like? Because I mean, to be real, a lot of human technology are decisions that we make. I mean, I know like the really, really die hard tech bros hate hearing this because they think of technology as kind of its own thing, like a force of nature that exists outside of like politics and human behavior, right? It just happens, right? But technology is not that, right? We make these decisions all throughout human civilization that we make decisions about what it's going to be, right. When nuclear weapons were discovered to be as powerful as they were as a civilization, and we may screw it up yet, but as a civilization, after the war with Japan, we kind of, as a civilization, if you look at it from the one light year away picture as a civilization, we kind of decided this is a bad idea and we shouldn't actively use these. Right? We also did the same thing with chemical weapons, right? Russia's using them right now. Yes. Right. Russia's threatening to use nuclear weapons right now, but for the most part we decided not to use as a whole country, for the most part, chemical weapons after World War I. And we decided after World War II that nuclear weapons were like, yo buddy, we went too far, right? We're not going to do that. We're not going to have a limited nuclear exchange. This is dumb, okay? We're just going to shoot each other with bullets, right? Let's not get too clever, fellow monkeys, right? And gives me this like, you know, perspective that I think we need to do something similar with communicative technologies, which is kind of have a discussion of hey, what do we want this to look like? What do we want war to look like? Right? We've had that conversation for 100 years and we have to have a similar discussion, I think about what do we want some of these mentally disruptive technologies to pension look like? So you want to have people to have to be thinking utopia and then what we need on the other side, and I have a person to interview to recommend for you, is you need science fiction writers like Peter Watts. Okay. And you need to hire them and just put them on your tech team or your policy team, because what Peter has, and a number of science fiction writers are like this. They can sit and think about the worst case scenario that that technology will be put to use for.

Absolutely. I actually interviewed Peter Watts already, so he's already, his show is already out, so you can go, go back and listen to him. And it was a fascinating conversation. So I completely agree. I think we need to have both perspectives. And that's one of the reasons why I consider myself an optimistic dystopian, which is a bit of an oxymoron. But I think it's important to hold two opposing viewpoints because if we want to end up with the good, we need to understand the bad and the ugly so we can mitigate the risks of that so that we can end up with the good. So I think it's really important that we need to have both. And I, I sort of think that as a society, we focus too much on the good and we sort of push away the bad because we don't want to hear that. But it's important to think about that because let's take an example of artificial intelligence has tremendous potential for society, especially in healthcare, but it also holds tremendous risks. Yes, we have the Terminator scenario, a super AI that will kill us all, which is, I think, likely. That, well, there is a possibility that that might happen, but it's small and it's far away. But already today we can, we can weaponize AI to really have a negative impact on society and result in a lot of people being killed one way or another and elections being swayed, which we'll probably see happening later this year in the U.S. and so we need to think at both, from both perspectives, I think. So I think that that is really, we could do more of that.

And that's the benefit of futures oriented thinking, which is thinking about what do we want the utopia to look like and what are we scared of the dystopia looking like? And that kind of gives you the. In the beginning, I was talking about that cone, right. And that's how you kind of start to develop that cone of possibilities. Right. You know, you got to get that dystopia utopia and then you're kind of looking at what's all in the middle. And that's when you can start to start saying, like, well, we want it to look more like this. Or we can see that this would require too many resources, but we could probably envision something like this, right? We could do this maybe. Right?

So how do you develop those scenarios? How do you. When you write and when you develop that cone, how do you come up with the scenarios left, middle and right? And then how do you extrapolate that? And more importantly, what can organizations learn from that process that you have?

So, yeah, it's this gaming thing. I was just talking to someone else and we were talking about, like, the ultimate tool. Like, if I had like a consultancy and I was flying around a business doing what you're doing, basically, I would love, I think, like, companies would benefit from having a bunch of, you know, I would grab someone who DMs, Dungeons and Dragons adventures, okay? And I'd bring them onto my team. I'd grab a Peter Watts. I'd grab like a Carl Schrader, right? So you'd have like your, Your. Your. Someone who sees the worst. Someone who sees the best, right? And then I would use the DM and bring those managers in and have them come up with something that they want to do and then have a DM walk them through and then have two experienced futurists just basically play the game with them. Here's how I see that going wrong, right? And just throwing them lots of scenarios and playing it through multiple times, right? It's not the playing it through once and being like, oh, yeah, we can develop this and roll this out and get it through this. It's if it's playing a bunch of those games to train yourself to start to see that cone, right? It's like, yeah, you want to get to the point where if you propose policy, you can start to see all the different ways it could go wrong and unanticipated consequences of it, right? You need those people who sit in the back of the room when the teacher is handing out the syllabus who go, oh, here's how I min. Max getting out of this. Any work in this class, right? You need those people there, run the other people through the scenarios. Because they don't. People don't think 10 steps out, right? Because they know that 10 steps out is impossible to predict, so they tend to focus on smaller windows. And also, as a society, particularly in the US we're trained. If you do any business school, if you're an mba, right? If you do. And I, I read the textbooks, I look at them. My colleagues teach these classes, right. I've looked at the textbooks, I talked To MBA students in my classes, they're trained to think quarterly. They think four months ahead. Right. And so a lot of decisions that are made are, is this the least bad decision that gets us through four months? Because they're legal.

It's all, it's all short term shareholders perspective.

Yes. They're legally beholden to increase profits within a four month period or three month period or they, they legally can be sued. Right. And because of that we're generating generations of MBAs who are trained to think in terms of three month cycles, which.

Is terrible because we know we should think a lot more long term because especially when it comes to technology.

Exactly.

What we develop today will have, the AI models that we develop today will become the foundational models or the fundaments of the AI models of tomorrow. So we need to think more long term. And organizations don't do that. So. But, but how can, how can, how can organizations then, you know, leverage or benefit from science fiction writers more than they do today? What are you, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, we're cheap to hire as consultants.

So there you go.

You know, they pay us pennies over in the writing minds. It's always exciting whenever I, you know, like I've been to like companies to be like a, you know, they see me as a science fiction writer, less so as a futurist. So sometimes I get to come in and be like a, you know, a creative consultant and they'll be like, please help our engineers be more creative. You know, we want to boost their creativity and that's great. Actually they should do more of that, bring us in and have us do talks like these. But I think like more than just bringing us in, fold us in, right. I think that like, you know, people, people made fun of him. But there was this AOL used to have a resident futurist who popped up all the time on like interviews and stuff. Right. I forget his. And people like made fun of him because he had like a different style aesthetic and was kind of out there with his predictions. But I was like, you know, just like you have an accountant and just like you have a man that the managers and just like you have all of these different roles. If you're a large enough organization, you should have a futures visioner right inside of your organization who's constantly looking at what you're doing and saying that's a three month solution. Right? Because what's beginning to happen is when you constantly make these three month solutions, you keep steering yourself into situations where you miss some really Big opportunities, right?

You, you so do. Do organizations need to hire like a chief, a chief futurist? You know, I don't really like that. All the chief AI, the chief data officer, the chief whatever. But for sort of a, as a, as a thought process, do you think that, you know, a futurist at that, at such a high level would benefit organizations and would benefit society?

Yes, I do. I really do. I really do. I really think there should be someone at the decision table who looks at the 10, 20 and 50 year look at this, right? These companies will be around in 10 to 20 years, so it behooves them to invest in their future. Right?

Yeah, no, I agree. And so from the process, to identify, the process that you use to identify different scenarios, what kind of tips do you have for organizations who don't have a futurist, resident futurist? How do you develop the different scenarios? And what's the sort of a process that you use to come up with a technology, let's say AI, and then extrapolate that 10, 15, 25 years, and then seeing the implications of that, how are you doing that?

So I mean, on the one hand, it's a lifelong training thing, right? So I mean, you just have to, you know, just like entrepreneurs are trained to spot the opportunity, futurists are trained to spot the thing, right? You're trained to be creative, you know, you can go through and you can take classes in it, right? I mean, we know how to train people to become futurists. So I think like, you know, picking up some basic futurist books, you know, taking a look at those, reading those, but also just engaging with futurists to sort of start to get how they think. Right? It's different frameworks, different ways of looking at things that are not the framework you've been operating in. So it's this sort of like opening your bubble, right? To include sort of a cast of, you know, Lincoln, what was the cast of? Different people coming at things differently. Right? Team. You have to build a team. Okay. And so one of the things you need is someone who's looking at that larger perspective of things, who can see potential pitfalls. Right. It's as simple as taking up playing some D and D. Right? I'm serious about this. Just playing some D and D is going to start giving you some of these tools about thinking about, like how to create play scenarios and play them out with a team. Right. If I were an executive, I would constantly be doing team building exercises that weren't going for trust falls or anything like that, but simply going and trying to do futures casting, right? Just sit there and just try to develop a future of your company based on everything you know about what's going on in it. And have each of your team do that and see if they all even have the same thoughts, right? Are you all pulling in even the same direction? Right? Like that teaches you a lot about where people are pointing too, okay? But even just playing a game of like, you know, grab an old Monopoly board and, you know, recast it with, you know, the kinds of challenges your company faces and opportunities, and build a dice game where you and your board play scenarios and look at possibilities, okay, that kind of creative play seems silly, right? But it gets to the root of brainstorming and it gets to the root of like, how do you guide these large things and how do you come up with new ideas, right? And creating a culture of that all throughout, you know, and. And leadership starts at the top, right? Creating that culture and passing it down through where everyone is, you know, teaching people to write reports that look not just the immediate impact, but five impacts down, right? Because it's want of a nail. That's the kind of thinking that you have to start developing. So I think gameplay is the thing I most tell people is the fastest way, I think, because what I'm doing is I'm playing this game in my head with virtual dice, right? I'm saying IPCC says this is how much damage climate change has baked in. So for my world building, I need to assume there's this much damage. Even if I'm optimistic, I have to account for this. I can't wave it away. I can't say like, oh, what if none of that's going to happen, right? We've got to bake it in. While also looking at the fact that batteries are going to store an incredible amount of energy in 50 years, right? If you use that doubling every five years scenario that we're currently have been in for 20 years with battery technology, solar panels, right, you can draw that path. And I hate linear projection because that's dangerous when you're a futurist, right? But when you find a linear projection with something like battery density, solar panel density, or even chips for like Moore's Law, you can use that to begin to kind of start plugging some of these variables in and going like, okay, if this goes on in 50 years, a battery will have this much power in this much weight and size. What does that mean? Right? And just having 10 people just say, if I give you the starting point. Batteries in 50 years will have this much energy density. We don't know that for sure, but let's just play with this. What does that mean for our company right now? Right, if we're in this area? Yeah. So it's like those games and you can play them with dice, you can make up a number. Right. What if batteries were like this? What would that mean for us?

So it's, it's, it's really just a lot of creative thinking. And do you think that like tools such as ChatGPT, which are actually quite good at brainstorming ideas, if you turn them into being sort of in a creative mode, do you think that they can help?

There are a lot of things I love AI for, but the raw creativity is not yet one of them for me. I've been playing with it a lot and studying how an LLM is designed, which is you feed all the ways in which these ideas have been connected before into the black box and you give it positive reinforcement for being able to replicate that out the other side. Right. And then what there is is a little bit of like randomness in there so that it doesn't grab the obvious one every time. It's grabbing somewhere in the quality possibilities. And as it goes further and further along through the path dependency, those little variable changes add up to what looks like kind of a replication of creativity. But for me, real fundamentally game changing creativity, the eureka moments, the things where you suddenly are playing at a different game, a different game level that comes from Brownian motion, that comes from more chance related things. So if you think about, I think visually. So if you think about an LLM, it's it, you know, the black box comes out and it goes like, here are the top quality things and we're going to pick from one of those and go into another quality thing over here and then go into another choice and another choice that's quality. And raw creativity is sometimes going, holy shit. If you take this really bad choice down here and this really interesting choice up here, I can find a path between those that makes something really weird and interesting. And it's much harder for an LLM to do that. And it's actually kind of mechanically easier for us to do that. So for example, when I'm writing a short story and I do a creativity workshop that shows people how to do this really mechanically, but allow the brain to kick in and make a linkage, it can be as simple as creating a list of words and one column that are related to your business or to your idea for a short story. Right. And another list of ideas. And another list of ideas and another list of ideas. You basically roll dice and you've got them numbered and you go number three with a number 10 and a number 11 over here and a number two up here. Does that make any sense? Is there anything there? No. Next one, next one, next one. Inevitably, randomly you're going to hit one where your brain suddenly goes, I can get from here to here and make all of this situation. And it's really interesting. Okay, this is the paper clip. No one ever saw it before, but if I take a piece of wire and I bend it like this, it holds paper together. And even though we've had little bits of wire for a thousand years that could make a paper clip, it wasn't invented until the 1800s. Right. So it's like those levels of leaps come from something a little bit more than like let's, let's put a little bit of randomness in a lot of. I find chat GPT, it gives a lot of safe answers because it comes from the same road that it's traveled. Right. And the creativity is saying, I'm not walking this road, I'm going off into the forest to see what's in there. And it could be nothing, but it could be really interesting. And so that is why I'm a little bit nervous about LLMs for creativity right now, based on what I know about how they're designed, where they're getting their learning from and what's happened. That's not to say that they may not crack the code, but I'm finding much better results when I give students a pair of dice and a bunch of columns. Every time I do that with students, I get a story idea that is so fresh and interesting because they're able to fill in the dots with something that they see there that you or I may never have seen. Right. And that's what makes the human element kind of magical and mysterious and woo woo and creativity. But it's that ability to see something that, that isn't the best choice and link them that gets those startling moments that I love for being so boardrooms.

Need to play the dice a lot more. That's, that's sort of your advice.

Follow the dice?

No, we just play it. Yeah, I like that. But related to that then. So if you play the dice, you get all kinds of scenarios, which is interesting to think about, but I think what's also. And it sort of goes back to what we discussed earlier, both the good and the bad sides of technology. How do you tackle the ethical implications of future technologies? And how can organizations learn from you, how you do that in your work?

Well, that puts a heavy weight on me. I'm just a guy. I think forcing ourselves to look into the maelstrom is important because that's where ethics come from. I think of a friend of mine who once told me when I was at a machine shop job and he pulled out kind of like the OSHA list and said, look, it's a pain in the ass to memorize all this stuff. I get it. You know, but he's like, every single one of these rules were written in blood. Someone got hurt, and we had to come up with a rule that's like, don't do this. Okay. We don't put these rules on there just to frustrate you. Right. We put. These rules were put there because, Mr. Teenager, someone somewhere got hurt and they put it in here. Hey, wear a hard hat when you're underneath heavy construction equipment. And so I think the value of that is that to look into the abyss allows us to maybe not wait until there's blood to think about the ethics of it. And I think it comes from exploring. I think people get really upset at people who see nothing but the worst case scenario. But I think it's important for us to have those people in the equation because I think that's where we learn how this could go wrong.

Yeah. And otherwise we only see the positive sides and then we get blindsided by how amazing this technology might be. And we don't think about all the challenges that might come with this technology, which are inherently baked into the technology, because technology in the end is also neutral. So it's, it's how we humans use the technology and we, we can use it in a whole variety with different ways, both the good and the bad.

Yeah, no, it's. It's like. Yeah, it's a knife, right. You know, you can use it to stab or you can cheese. Right. It's like we've. Ever since we first started doing this, it's always been like it's got two sides to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this is, this has been an interesting, fascinating conversation. Toby, just as a final question, looking sort of beyond your current books that you did, the 15 books that you've written, what are sort of the new themes and or technologies that you are exploring in your upcoming work?

My upcoming work is exploring. I'm writing a lot of escapism. To be honest with you, Mark, I went deep on the futurism for Arctic Rising and Hurricane Fever, and for my.

Novel.

The Stranger in the Citadel. I was looking at reading and some ideas about human society, but right now I'm writing pure adventure escapism because my mental health, going through a period of great change all at once, has suffered from looking too deeply into the abyss. And so I've been moving a little bit more into some escapism just as a break, you know, some fun stuff, just because I'm, you know, in my daily life. As I said, I no longer see as much of a cone as I see a spiky sea urchin in terms of all the different possibilities that are negative and backwards and forwards and sideways. And, you know, I'm terribly interested and fascinated by them all. And I'm also having to take a beat to just sort of go, there's. We're going through one of. I feel like, you know, one of the Bene Gesserit mothers in Dune, you know, saying, you know, there's this space in the future where I can't see past it because there's so much chaotic possibility in terms of what's happening. And I really feel like that right now. You know, I feel like I had a handle on what the possibilities were and the ranges of the future were until about 2018, and accelerativeness of it all became very overwhelming. So I'm keeping my fingers on the pulse, and I don't know what it's going to come out as, as a book next. I have some very small projects I'm working on that look at some things. I have a story that should come out at some point in the next year that looks at that connective consciousness thing, because I'm fascinated about what it would be like to be a person inside of the Borg. If it's not the Borg negative, if it's a Utopia board, what is that? What does a Utopia Borg look like? You know, it looks horrifying to us from the outside, but maybe that's a way we're going to go, and it's going to be great for us. I don't know. So it was an attempt for me to bake in the badness of it, but look at how we might end up going that way anyway, and it'll be awesome. That kind of looking at both things at the same time is kind of interesting to me, so I tried to do that. And I have a couple other stories kind of tackle a little bit of that. I'm also very interested in if. If we go too far with AI and we have consciousness, what are our moral obligations? Can we, can we give them an 8 hour workday? What does free time look like? You know what, you know what, what is this relationship going to look like if it gets to where people are saying it's going to get to? Right? If it really does become true science fictional AI, you know, who are we and how would we be changed if we are continuing to use them just for free labor? Because what is the historical weight of all of that? What are the implications there? People at AI companies hate it when I start asking like, what's the difference between a conscious AI and an enslaved human being? It really makes them very uncomfortable. But I think, like, think they have to get an answer for that before too long, like on a corporate level.

I completely agree. I think that that's a great way of ending this conversation because it sort of hopefully gets the listener thinking a little bit about these big important topics that are waiting in front of us. And yes, I agree. The future. The future, the variety of scenarios that can play out in the next five to 10 years is very, very big. And it's going to be very challenging and interesting and scary at the same time. What we can expect. But thank you so much, Toby for joining me on this podcast. I really enjoyed the conversation. I think your insights of the cone and thinking broader and helping organizations to, to sort of embed future thinking within their business is very useful. So thank you very much for joining me on the show.

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. This was a lot of fun.

Mark, thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Synthetic Minds with our guest, Tobias Buckle. Our conversation today stretched from exploring the vibrant settings of Tobias novels to discussing how these fictional environments reflect critical real world issues such as climate change, resource scarcity and and the ethical dimensions of technological advancement. Tobias unique blend of personal heritage and speculative fiction offers a fresh lens through which we can examine the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We delved into how his narratives not only entertain, but serve as a vital tool for future thinking, providing scenarios that prompt us to question and redefine the trajectory of our technological and societal development. As we wrapped up our discussion, it was clear, clear that science fiction isn't just about distant planets and future tech. It's about mirroring our current realities and inspiring change. As we conclude this episode, we hope you leave inspired to think differently about the role of technology in shaping our future. Don't forget to subscribe and share your thoughts on how today's discussion might influence your view of the future. Join me next time on Synthetic Minds, where we'll continue to decode the narratives that challenge, shape and propel us towards tomorrow.