Navigating Future Realms: Science Meets Fiction with Peter Watts

Welcome to Synthetic Minds, the nexus where imaginative foresight meets practical reality. I'm Dr. Mark Van Riemann, Nam, your navigator through this confluence of ideas, joined by my digital counterpart. In this series, we delve into the prophetic visions of science fiction authors, extracting kernels of truth that might blossom in our technological landscape. Each episode is an odyssey through speculative realms, scrutinizing how fiction's vanguard can illuminate our path forward. We span diverse terrains, from artificial intelligence to cosmic ventures, from digital dimensions to pioneering life sciences. For those intrigued by the horizon's allure and keen on deciphering fiction's influence on fact, your journey begins here. Subscribe and journey with us into the nexus of tomorrow's potential. In this third episode, we're honored to have Peter Watts, a Canadian science fiction maestro known for his intellectually stimulating and scientifically grounded narratives. With a PhD in Zoology and expertise in marine biology, Watts fuses scientific depth with imaginative storytelling, exploring profound future scenarios. Join us as he shares insights from his illustrious works, including the Rifters trilogy and Blindsight, and discusses the potential impacts of of future technologies on society.

Have fun. Thanks for coming to my show, Peter. It's great to have you here. Can you share a little bit about the background, your background and one of the two books that you're most proud of that you've written?

I'm a former marine biologist. I actually decided I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was five years old. I decided I wanted to be. I did not know the term marine biology, but I still knew that's what I wanted to be. I remember it, the moment specifically. I wanted to be a science fiction writer since I was about seven years old. I remember that. That moment as well, bounced back and forth right up until university, at which point I decided that there were a lot more jobs for writers who didn't have degrees in creative writing than there were for marine biologists who didn't have degrees in science. So I decided to go heavily into the science. Kept doing that basically until the degrees ran out. I was working for a consortium of marine mammal universities on the west coast that were presumably exploring why marine mammal populations on the west coast and in the. In the Bering Sea had collapsed by about 80% over a period of 10 years. And I left that in a huff when it turned out that we were getting 95% of our funding from the same fishing industry that had moved into that area and was hoovering up all the fish over about the same period of time. So I basically. I basically left in A huff or on a matter of principle. And I had eight months, I guess, until the money ran out. So at that point, I wrote my first novel I'd written. I've been writing again, as I say, ever since I was a little kid. I'd gotten maybe two stories published in little dick ass magazines nobody's ever heard of. But, you know, unemployed eight months. Write a novel. As of the ones that. That were my favorites. Blindsight is definitely the book that put me on the map. I made a couple of lucky guesses for narrative purposes about human neurology. And through cheer, Sheer, sheer chance, they. They happen to resonate. They ended up in actual neurology labs. As far as I know, Blindside is the only science fiction novel to ever be used as a core textbook in. In a neuropsychology course.

That's pretty impressive.

Yeah, I tried to. I tried to get them to the publishers to sort of put that on the COVID you know, reads like a neurology textbook. But for some reason, they. They didn't listen to me. It got optioned. Right. It's. It's. It's currently under development as movie people wrote music about it and had their backs tattooed with pictures of aliens and. And various things. So obviously, I mean, I'd be an idiot if I was not proud of Blindsight, but Starfish is my first novel, and that's the only one that was actually as good as I knew how to make it when I submitted it, because nobody had ever heard of me. Right. I had as long as I. Nobody was expecting it. Every novel I've written since then, including Blindsight, was. Was under deadline, and I always knew that I could make it just a little bit better if I had a little more time. Starfish. Starfish. I didn't know how to make it any better. Probably still is my best novel. Right. It was the first novel, but. But I was happy when I sent it out. And whatever failings I have, whatever failings that novel has, were my own failings as a writer. I can't blame an editor, and I can't blame a publisher or a timeline, so I guess those would be the two that I'm most proud of.

Well, I can imagine that your first book is the one you're, you know, you're very proud of because it's the first book. You know, it's a major achievement to have to write a first book. You know, it's. It's. I've done. I've written a few books myself, and these are all nonfiction, but it's your first book is something to be really proud of.

Well, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what the situation is with your, your writing, but for my writing, yeah, the first book was an accomplishment. The real accomplishment is trying to come up with a second book after you've done the first one and it goes over well. I mean, Starfish was a New York Times notable book. So like what the hell do I do for non core? So my career is this whole series of wow. The first book in that series is really great. Second book sucked.

Obviously. Blindsided being turned into a movie. That, that's very, very impressive as well. So it's. So can you share a little bit in what are some of your common themes from a technology perspective in your books?

I guess if I had to sum it up to paraphrase what's his name, Keats. Things fall apart not so much because of the technology itself as because of the brains behind them. Remember, my formal background is in biology, so I tend to regard human as kind of an evolutionary context. I basically regard us as very smart mammals with this sort of thin veneer of rationalization over top that lets us pretend that even though we, we pretty much act exactly the same way that sticklebacks and deer and, and spiders do. We, we have completely different and very smart ethical reasons for doing all that. But the brain stem is still basically in control. So we are these weird tangles of cognitive biases. Things that 60,000 years ago were adaptive. They helped us to survive by lying to us. Things like hyperbolic discounting is the biggie, right? You know, if you give somebody a choice between $10 today or $20 in two weeks, most people go for the $10 today. And that makes perfect sense in an environment where the person who offered you the 20 could have gotten by a tiger or something in the meantime. Right. In an unpredictable environment, it's better to get the approximate reward. But now that we have godlike technology, we have this complete incapacity to perceive the future as real. The $20 in two weeks doesn't seem as real to us. So. And that's just one example. You've got tribalism, you've got various religious delusions, you've got cascade effects, you've got basically literally a couple hundred baked in delusions that were really adaptive 60,000 years ago when we were at the mercy of our environment, not so much now when the environment is our mercy. So we've got godlike technology with global short term impact, that is being or long term Impact that is being run by caveman brains for whom today's inconvenience is always going to be way, way more traumatic than absolute catastrophe in 10 years. So my tech, my technological perspective basically is that technology, for all its enormous potential, more often than not, is basically an exponential force multiplier for human stupidity. I probably should have led with that.

Very much. I like that. Yeah. I consider myself as an optimistic dystopian, which is a bit of an oxymoron, but it sort of helps you understand, you know, the. Both the good and the bad as well as the ugly of these different technologies. And I, I like, you know, technology is neutral, so it's how we use it. And you know, look at the AI at the moment. How we use it to, to, you know, put real harm to our societies is astonishing. So from, from that perspective. Yeah, that makes total sense. And I think just having a more long term perspective in society would be very good for humanity.

Yeah, yeah. We're not built that way, but it would be good.

Yeah. I think evolution is too slow to catch up in the progress that we are making as a species.

Yeah, definitely.

The objective of this podcast is sort of to explore future thinking to help listeners move from science fiction to science reality and prepare their work as well as their personal lives for these exponential times that we are going through at the moment. So from your explorations into the future, which technologies that you describe in your book do you envision to become reality now before the end of the decades or in the next 15, 20 years? What is your idea about how the future will look like?

Most of my predictions won't ever happen because science fiction writers generally get the future wrong. We get way more wrong than we get right. And in our defense, our job is not to predict the future. But if you want to talk about the things that I think actually are probable or could get nailed, I guess the first thing within the 10 year horizon would be the head cheeses from my Rifters trilogy. Basically cultured neurons, artificial AIs, but they're basically made out of cultured human neurons.

Spread across, organized, sort of like Organized.

Yeah, kind of organized. And that's why I feel confident saying that's going to happen within the next 10 years, because we already got those things. In fact, I just made.

For the listeners who are not aware of what organoids are, maybe you can give a bit of organizer.

The. The organoids, as the term is commonly used, are just basically little clusters of cells built from stem cells to create miniature versions, if you will, of Various human organs. You know, there's not just brains, they also do it for livers and you know, hangnails for all I know. The brain ones, of course are the most interesting. Now mine aren't, aren't technically organoids because they're kind of spread in a paste. They're not little balls. And in, in my stories they were used to do everything from firewall malware in the, in the Internet to piloting vehicles over complex terrain. But they've actually got them now playing Pong, learning voice recognition or sorry, optical character recognition. And so, you know, I guess actually just have a. The Atlantic came to me a few months ago and wanted me to write it. The piece just came out with them, I guess, just a few days ago, in which I go into the whole head cheesy thing. So I can say I nailed that, but I didn't really. We can get into that with some of your future questions if you want. I, I can't take too much credit for that, even though I, I like looking like a prophet. So, yeah, that's going to happen before the end of this decade because that's happening right now, before 2040. I would say zombie switches. I would say some kind of, of neural prosthesis that allows people to shut off their conscious selves and allow non conscious processes to take over. I think the military is going to really love doing these sorts of things because if you can, most of our heavy living list, sorry, most of our heavy lifting cognitively is already done nonconsciously. Most of what we consider conscious decision making is just receiving a memo from the guys down in the basement who did all the work. And they kind of send this, this post it note up to it and the little guy behind the eyes reads the post it note and says this is a good idea. I think I did it because every time it says that the hand is going to move, it sees its hand move and it mistakes correlation for causation. So the brain can do a lot of things without being aware of it. There are people who, you know, go sexing and clubbing while completely asleep. There's something called homicidal somnibalism where somebody can sort of get into their car, drive across town, stab their mother in law to death, clean up the mess, go back totally. I mean, they get away with it and it's happened in, in Toronto here. They get away with it because they didn't do it. They were non conscious the whole time. It was something inside of them that did the real them. Right. So it Is not implausible to me to think that there's one guy who can do these incredibly complex pencil sketches, like almost photographic, but only when he's asleep. When he's awake, he can like barely sketch a Gary, Gary Larson cartoon stick figure. So, so it's, it's to me quite plausible that, that somebody's going to say, hey, you know, we want our soldiers to be able to like massacre a bunch of civilians, but we don't want them to get ptsd. So what we'll do is we'll simply shut off their conscious awareness and the rest of the body will follow orders. That's something I have in, in.

One. What does that mean for society? That, that seems pretty scary. We, if we, if that becomes a reality, which I, I would not be surprised if it does, but because there's a lot of adv. Say from a military perspective. But how, how would it affect our society?

Well, I mean that's the whole reason you do it. It won't. Because you're non conscious the whole time you're in your bunk, you stay in your bunk. As far as you know, when you wake up again, you know, somebody you might read a news story about, about the Mei massacre or another thousand gazins massacred in, in, in the strip. But, but you don't remember that you're not aware of that any more than the guy who stabbed his mother in law to death is aware of it. He knows intellectually that he did it, but you don't feel personally responsible because you don't remember the act. So I think that that's something that's going to have people being what they are, being the killer apes that we are. I can see technology like that arising from the kind of thing that's happening with neuralink and so on. Now, assuming neuralink doesn't get put out of business by all the lawsuits they're getting for torturing and killing their animals. And Then there's 1/3 1 digital wildlife from my Rifter series. Basically I'm kind of surprised this hasn't happened yet. So it could happen anytime. Anytime with 10 years or 40 years. And that is if you accept that life is information shaped by natural selection, then life does not have to be instantiated in carbon or in silicon. It can be electrons. A program can literally be alive. The concept of a virus doesn't have to be metaphorical. And the reason it has been metaphorical so far is because natural selection doesn't affect these things. People write polymorphic code all the time. People write malware but the stuff doesn't generally evolve. And I think it's only a matter of time before somebody basically throws the equivalent of digital genes into the mix. They, they produce a program, they have a string of instructions that control various parameter values and they have a random number generator built into the code so that every now and then you get the equivalent of a mutation. At that point you've got something that reproduces at electronic speeds. And as in most of life, most of the mutations will be either neutral or lethal. But if you're producing 10,000 offspring every second, it's only a matter of time before you start evolving at breakneck pace. And at that point we're going to have an Internet that's an actual ecosystem, an actual digital ecosystem. And there's kind of the joker part of me that wants to see the world burn, that's kind of interested in seeing what that Internet looks like, because then the thing will actually have come to life. And I'm kind of surprised somebody hasn't done it yet. Program in terms of the programming, the coding, it should be a trivial matter to just throw in those genes. But as far as I know, nobody's done it yet.

But it is. I thought I read somewhere the other day that, you know, from a malware perspective, you know, self replicating, you know, viruses are already coming and that, you know, the interesting thing about these large language models is that it has sort of a sort of creativity in it. Not really, but it's a sort of. Because it's, it can come up with all kinds of ideas in a very short time. It can come up with, you know, ideas to improve itself. So is that sort of in the direction that we're heading?

No, I don't think so. Because, because we come up with new ideas all the time too. And we hallucinate and we believe bullshit things, but we're not evolving. We're a single generation were one brain that's capable of rewiring itself, right? That's not natural selection, that's something that's more Lamarckian. If life is information shaped by natural selection, then what you need is something that replicates, and there's something that replicates with errors and replicates into an environment in which all the replicants can't survive. So you have competition between the various variants. So until Claude or Chat GPT actually butt off an offspring, you, you're not, you're not going to get something that can evolve. And on that basis you can't call it life. It could still be intelligent, but it won't be alive.

We do already have like child, child AIs that are being created by AI. Was Google created as a couple of years ago?

Do they have. Yeah, but do they have, do they have genes built into them or are they simply clones? Yeah, I mean, you know way more about this stuff than I would. I mean if it's, if it has happened, by all means let me know because I think it would be super cool. But as far as I know, I'm not even thinking about an AI here, right? I'm not thinking about artificial intelligence. I'm thinking about artificial life and all that requires. It doesn't have to be smart. All it has to do is replicate with errors and, and evolve a fitness function on the basis of, of its environment. It could be, it could be dumb as a stick as long, but as long as those criteria are met, it's a lot.

How long do you think that will, before we will reach artificial life? Because you know, we're trying to, we're getting to understand the building blocks of life more and more, but at the same time we still in the dark to where life originated from. How long do you think it will take before we create this artificial life that you're referring to?

Talking about like my electronic artificial life? Are you talking about squishy actual.

No, no, just, just the basic, the single cell organism artificial forms of life. You know, that really started the building blocks, I think.

Hasn't Craig Venter already done that? I mean they take a biplat, a bipolar, what's a double phospholipid, double phospholipid membrane and basically built some genes from scratch and kind of threw them in there. I mean they, they did not evolve life. They basically constructed it. They took the pieces and stuck them together just to see if they would run. And I believe at least in a minimally functional sense, it worked for a while. I don't know if it ever replicated, but it was a bunch of organic molecules with, with coding, you know, instantiated in DNA and rna. And it had a metabolism or I could have dreamed it all. I'm pretty sure I remember. But I can't cite the, I can't.

Cite the reference, can look it up, I can put it in the notes. But I think you're right about this one. So when you write your books, what kind of signals do you look into? What kind of, that might indicate emerging trends or transformations that you then can, you know, build on top of that to, to come to a very futuristic scenario that. That's part of your books.

I, I don't know what you mean by signals. Here's my first question. What do you mean by signals as opposed to just reading the literature?

Well, yeah, what, what do you see happening in society? You know, if you, if you, if you see that there's already some kind of artificial life being developed, then you can, you can, you can go from there. You can extrapolate the developments that are coming in and say, okay, well we already here with this, with this development. So probably 10, 15 years fully built artificial lives might become a reality. So it's sort of reasonable to include it in the book. Or do you just come up with, is it just your imagination that comes up with, with the crazy ideas of what, what can be possible the next, in the next 10, 20, 30 years?

Well, I mean sometimes, sometimes my imagination comes up with, with ideas. I remember once I woke up from a dream and I dreamed that the blueprints for making a beach ball, a walking beach ball with feet. And I had this great engineering, engineering solution as to why nobody had ever been able to get a beach ball to walk before. And the reason was that they had jointed both legs and that made it too mechanically cumbersome. But if you made one leg kind of a peg leg with the foot on the bottom and let the other one do all the working, kind of using the peg leg to swing off of, and I was like, was awake for, for 30 minutes before I realized nobody cared about making walking beach balls with feet. It was just this weird dream I had. And in the context of the dream it was like, my God, I know it. I've, I've cracked the beach ball problem. So I have lots of crazy ass ideas, but anything that actually ends up getting into my novels is going to be something that's got a little more grounding. I think I, I have, I have been credited with you know, inventing the idea of the head cheese 25 years before they actually happened. That's. I read, I read an article, it wasn't even a peer reviewed scientific paper. It was an article in Discover magazine and I read something about some guy who was like thinking about maybe putting a few neurons together and I thought, that's a cool idea. I'm going to play with that. And then everybody forgot about this guy. I put it into my novels. 24 years later, somebody creates dish brain that teaches itself to play pong as a test of Carl Friston's free energy minimization theory of consciousness. And it's like, oh wow, Peter Peter Watts predicted, predicted this 25 years ago. And it's not, it's this poor doofus that got profiled and forgotten in Discover magazine. And those are the signals, right? Those are the only signals. Remember, my formal background is as a scientist, as a biologist. And the one thing you can say about us academic scientists is we are scared shitless that our colleagues are going to like mock us and poke, poke every idea we have full of holes. Because that's how you get ahead in academia, right? I am known for putting like a hundred or one hundred forty different technical references at the end of my science fiction novels and everybody thinks that's great, that I'm sharing the wealth and, and I'm showing where my, my ideas come from. And you know, to some extent that's true and it helps people, but the real reason I'm doing it is because all those guys that laughed at me when I was playing Dungeons and Dragons and they were busy trying to get published in science and Nature, right. If they read my stuff and they said a vampire, come on, that's, I will be able to say, don't look at me, look at this paper that I got it from. He got published in Nature. Have you been published in Nature lately? Yeah, and I love it. Yeah. So those, those are the signals. Basically, if you're looking for signals, it's a combination of just keeping your eye on the literature and having really, really low self esteem and being paranoid and you put all that together and you've got a profit of the computer age.

Well, yeah, no, that makes sense. Well, I think, you know, the world is changing so fast at the moment and it's so challenging to keep up with what's going on with how the world is changing. You know what I call the signals of how your environment as an individual or as an organization, how fast that world is changing. So you can have to respond to that and you have to actually have, you know, a long term perspective of how you should navigate your organization for the next 10, 20 years. Because you know, organizations are large ships that take time to switch direction. So I think that makes very much sense that you look at the, in the academic literature to get, to gain ideas from four year books and the next template from there. So but if we, if we go a little bit deeper, you know, if we try to understand how organizations can, can, can use this kind of signals to, to make more sense of, you know, the complex world that we live in by looking at, you know, by, by involving what they call like system thinking. So you look more at the whole thing and the relationship rather than splitting things out. So sort of the broader picture for the future and how that will affect your business. Now, can you describe how that kind of thinking, system thinking, sort of influences your narratives and how organizations might approach that kind of strategy as well to be able to better navigate these exponential times that we're going through at the moment?

I haven't encountered this earth thing called systems thinking that you've described before. I don't think it does inform my work all that much. I think I'm more of a reductionist than what you're describing. And, and that's not to say that emergent properties in a holistic analysis is not a thing. Absolutely. These are things. But emergent properties ultimately arise from underlying causes. And, and again, first time I've encountered the term. So I don't know if I've got my head up my ass. Interrupt me. But from the sound of it, what you're talking about is simply looking at a system as a series of black boxes. Don't look within each black box. Look at a series of black boxes connected by feedback loops or feed forward loops or whatever. And that is certainly a legitimate approach. And sometimes it's the only approach. I mean, all of quantum physics is based on equations that are purely correlative. You do this, the particle does that, or the wave does that. Nobody knows why you invent all these possibilities. Like, you know, maybe nothing exists unless something conscious looks at it. Or maybe the universe splits a trillion times every trillionth of a second every time a coin flips one way or the other. And we've got this multi world hypothesis going on. The, the math, as I understand it, doesn't have anything to say about any of that. The math just says this is how particle wave duality works. And so it's a black box. And we have no way of knowing why that is. And we're just taking wild guesses as to things that would explain the correlation. Back when I was, you know, in grad school and back when I was, I was doing my own marine biology work, I did a fair bit of modeling and black boxes were very much, I guess what you would call systems thinking very much in vogue then. And, and a professor of my very smart guy called Carl Walters made the point, like on day one, if you create a model that's as complex as nature, it's going to be as difficult to understand as nature. And it will do you absolutely no good. You have to caricature things, you have to build models you have to simplify things down. And in that case, again, if I'm understanding the concept correctly, go with systems thinking like we need you.

But is that sort of the risks that we have at the moment with these AI systems that are being developed that we, you know, that most of them are black boxes? We have no idea how these large language models run?

Well, this is the thing. At some point your predictions are going to fail and you realize one of your boxes isn't working, right? It's telling you that Donald Trump has an IQ on the high side of room temperature, which is clearly absurd. It's supposed to spit out B when you input A because that's what it's always done. And all of a sudden it's not doing that. And at that point you got to say, you, systems thinking, we have to pop the hood and see what's inside this black box. Post coital cuddling, there's a, there's a phenomenon that, you know, you look at the whole system, system thinking, perspective, you might say, oh, that's love. You know, that's two SAP beings in profound spiritual communion basking in the afterglow of being joined sexually. And there's like whole industries set up, you know, Hallmark and, and the florists of the chocolatiers, right? They all look at the whole thing and they, they turn it into this, this romantic, hazy, noble, profoundly human thing because only humans have souls, right? And then some, some asshole in the biology department says, hey, you know, there's these other species that do post coital cuddling, right? And it turns out that post coital cuddling tends to happen mainly in species where females have a lot of mate choice. And wouldn't you know, it mean cuddling time maps onto how long it takes for the sperm to find the egg. So it turns out, throwing out systems theory and looking at it from a reductionist point of view, turns out that cuddling is basically a form of mate guarding. You make sure your partner doesn't have an opportunity to get laid by a competitor until your sperm has made it to home base. That's why we cuddle. That's all it is. That's what's inside the box. So you look at the system as a whole. In that case, you are playing into the saccharine hallmarks and chocolatiers of the world. You look inside, you see the origins in the fundamental, you see the heart of the mechanism, and that's useful.

So what? I completely agree with that with you. So what does that mean for organizations that need to have the helicopter view as well as the detailed view in order to understand the future.

Oh God. I mean it's scary because most of the organizations that want that kind of fine grained insight into us are like the Zuckerberg and Google. Right. They make their living out of dissecting us psychometrically. And yeah, they're unfortunately doing a pretty good job of it. First for their stock from, for their stock returns. I should also probably say just, I mean I don't know what your, your audience is. My little post coital cuddling thing, something I learned in grad school. Science marches on. It's quite possible that, that somebody's come up and said that was just a bunch of old white dudes, you know, projecting their attitudes onto post coital cuddling. And we have more data now. That's the great thing about science itself corrects so, so that may know that may not be the case. It was the case when I was in grad school. But in any case it serves as kind of an example of the difference between looking at the black box and looking inside and the different kinds of insights you can get from them.

So it would have also be sort of an advice or tips for organizations to, to, to navigate the uncertainty of, of that we. That we going through at the moment is to, to have both perspectives. You are a science fiction writer. You sort of live in the future. How, how. How what, what kind of advice would you have for organizations?

I don't think I, I live in the future. I mean the, the present is more than bad enough. And if you're, you're organizations should navigate the future. I mean the, the facile answer is build bunkers like the, the zero pointer, like the 0.1% are already doing that quite publicly. But, but more fundamentally this goes back to cognitive biases I think. And it's something that I don't think in. It's something that I don't think most organizations do. I think we have to fundamentally internalize the fact that we're not built to see reality as it actually exists. The optimism, the optimistic part of your optimistic dystopia is, is wired in. There's actually like, like we are all as a species delusionally optimistic and there's good evolutionary reasons for that. They've done studies and they found that there is a subset of human beings that is actually quite objective about reality. They don't come up with self serving explanations. They don't blame other people when they do something wrong. They don't take credit when something Goes right. They're better at assessing how much control they have in local systems with unknown variables. And we have a name for these people. We call them clinically depressed. And I think it's. I think it's kind of telling that our brains are so fucked up that we actually describe people who are the most objective among us as victims of a pathology. There is. There is a movement afoot to have clinical depression renamed as depressive realism for exactly that, that purpose. So we have a tendency to resort to common sense things to feel right in the gut. And if you're being charged by a grizzly bear, you know what to do. Your gut really tells you what to do when you're being charged, like by a grizzly bear. Somebody hands you a bunch of graphs and contingency tables and ANOVAs and says, Climate change. Your brain is not wired to deal with that. The only reason, the only time your gut starts to believe in climate change is. Is when climate change is biting your ass grizzly style. And of course, by that time, it's too late, because much like the organizations you talk about, big ships turn slowly, and the global biogeosphere is an incredibly big ship. So by the time. By the time we actually start feeling the pain, it's too late to dial back the pain. So the first thing we got to recognize.

Sorry, yeah, go ahead, score, go ahead.

First thing we have to recognize that common sense is wrong. But the problem is those. Those cognitive biases are tied to survival. They lie to us about reality. That's what a bias is. But they're also tied to the survival instinct because that's how they evolved. So you got this tension here that you can either see the world through objective eyes or you can care whether you live or die. You can indulge the survival instincts. You cannot optimize along both axes simultaneously. I think that's a really interesting tension. I've never seen anybody else come up with that. And maybe I've got my head up my ass. But maybe the best way to maximize the odds that an organization or a species will survive long term is to stop caring whether it does or not. Because it is the caring that. That provokes or evokes the biases that warp your view of reality. I mean, maybe this is. Maybe this is why we call economics brain damage.

Right?

The idea that, the idea that, the premise is that you can have continual growth in an environment with a finite resource base is. It's predicated. It's predicated also on the notion that humans are rational players, not Mammals and thrall the brain stems. There's some, there's some, there's some niches, right? You've got neuroeconomics, you've got circular economics, but, but they're still not, they're still not mainstream. And so at the very best, conventional economics is like Klingon for MBAs, right? You can go to summer camp and you can learn Klingon. Klingon has its own internal rules. It's got its own grammar, its own vocabulary. People have literally translated Shakespeare into Klingon. In many ways, Klingon is beautiful. The only problem is that in the real world there's no such thing as Klingon. It's an invention. And I think maybe, maybe, maybe that has something to do with these cognitive biases that we can't see that, that we're basically playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons with the global economy and pretending that it's real.

From that perspective, then doesn't it make sense that organizations should learn more from science fiction, from, from understanding all the different scenarios that we can end up with as a species, as a society, as an organization, instead of having this very short term shareholder quarterly perspective? Because that's of course how organizations are driven by quarterly shareholder meetings. So isn't that, isn't there a role to play for science fiction?

Yeah, but I think the role that it generally plays in the futurist community is to give corporations a shiny trendy rationale for something that they're going to do anyway. Something that it. What I think, what I think the, the industry largely does rather than speaking truth to power is telling power what it wants to hear. I mean the classic old school version, remember the Star wars initiative, SDI that Reagan. Okay, you do or you don't?

I don't. No.

Okay. Back in the 80s we had this, this. At the time we thought he was the worst president imaginable. And God knows how that proved to be wrong. But he was very popular and a bunch of science fiction writers, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, I think Jerry Pornell showed up at the White House and said space lasers, low orbit ion cannons. And Reagan's eyes went up, lit up. Because Reagan hated the commies. And Reagan loved the idea that we could build space based ion cannons to shoot down incoming Russian missiles. And it was completely bogus. It, it never worked. Right. But it was what Reagan wanted to hear. And so billions and billions of dollars were spent on the Strategic Defense Initiative, which never really panned out. Now there's been all sorts of other kinds of science fiction. Remember the Handmaid's Tale? Right, that came out in. That was 40. That's 40 years old now. The Handmaid's Tale. You know, I didn't see anybody in the halls of power reading the Handmaid's Tale and saying, oh, my goodness, we better dial back on the whole religious fundamentalist thing. John Brunner wrote the Sheep look up in 1972. I didn't see anybody reading the Sheep look up and saying, oh, my goodness, we've got to control pollution. The world's turning to shit faster now than it ever has.

Maybe.

Maybe we should have.

We should. Exactly. But the point is, you can. The thing about science fiction is that it's like the Bible. There are so many different stories, so many different instructions, half of them contradicting the other half that you can find one that justifies the position you're trying to take. And some k. In some cases, you can find one that actually excoriates the position you want to take, and you can internalize it as a positive thing. This actually has happened to me more than once. I have. I have fans up in the upper reaches of sort of the Silicon Valley tech bro Neuro AI community. And I don't know why they've got. Why. Why they are my fans, because the stuff I write is pretty down on human stupidity and. And so on. But there's this one story, hasn't come out yet. It hasn't been published yet, but it's been circulating behind the scenes. And there are people in the industry which. Whom I will not name, who sing the praises of the story. They love this story. They pass it back and forth. And this story is a cautionary tale about the stuff that they are explicitly doing. I barely even filed off the serial numbers. I ended up changing the company's name to Meta because I thought Meta was such a stupid generic name that no real company would ever call itself that. This was like two weeks before Zuckerberg changed their name to Meta.

But.

But what we have here is a situation where exactly the kind of science fiction that you're talking about, and this has happened to me more than once, exactly the same kind of science fiction you're talking about on point, right to the audience. It's actually being read by the people who are making the decisions. It was like that, that. That Internet meme where the science fiction writer says, I have written my cautionary novel. Do not build the torment nexus. And 20 years later, Silicon Valley is saying, we've done it. We've created the Torment Nexus I think, I think the stories can be corrupted for want of a better word. And so I tend to be skeptical of these field.

So what can we do then to prevent the stories that you tell not to become reality while still preparing for our future that starts to benefit humanity in the long term?

I don't know if there is anything, I mean I have some ideas of how we could save the human race but those are kind of batshit joker crossed with Craig Venter kind of study. Those are like, those are surreptitiously rewiring humanity so that it goes into anaphylactic shape shock the moment it eats a hamburger sort of thing. Right. I think it might, it, I think that kind of thing might be required. I don't think, I honestly think that if science fiction was going to alter the future for the better, I think the future would be a lot better already. Maybe what people should be doing is not so much reading science fiction as sort of cutting out the middleman. Reading science. Find out the kind of animal we are before you can figure out the kind of animal that we're going to be. Read a book by Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist out of Stanford or just go onto YouTube and watch one of his lectures. His lectures are, are so popular that like people will just post a 90 minute graduate seminar on the evolutionary roots of the religious impulse and they're up there on YouTube. Read up on consciousness studies so you can figure out how much of what we do we're not even aware that we're doing. Read the Guardian, the UK paper. George Mombaya gives you at least an unvarnished view of the environmental apocalypse that we are currently experiencing. That doesn't sort of resort to both sides ism, that doesn't, that isn't enthralled to big oil.

I think that's a really good, you know, good, good advice for us as, as humans. Now if we had read science from 100 years ago that, that cars would probably affect, you know, cause climate change which I think there are reports from over early 1900 and May our world would have been a completely different, different world. But so we near the end of this episode. But you mentioned the new book that you're writing at the moment. To what extent can you share a little bit about the technologies that you are exploring in your latest work?

Well, this is really bad timing for you to ask me about my next work because my next work isn't a novel at all. I'm actually working on a screenplay which is a Science fiction allegory for the black experience in America. And as you can plainly see, I am uniquely well qualified to write a story about the black experience in America. Being the palest, whitest Pillsbury Doughboy of a dude you have ever seen on, on the Internet, I've basically been recruited by a guy who, he's kind of a hot shot artist in, in sort of cultural circles in New York and in, in la. And he's worked with Spike Lee and he's worked with Stanley Kubrick and and so on. And he's recruited me and I keep reminding him that I'm not black, but he recruited me because he thinks I write aliens really well. He thinks I write the other. And, and the black experience is essentially a story of alienation. So, so he's the one that basically comes up with the, the story beats and I'm the one that rationalizes them and makes them and then ultimately writes the screenplay. So that's what I'm doing. And sorry, but there's not a whole lot that your, your organization's organizational clients are going to be able to take home from that. The next book that I plan on writing. Well, there's two things. One is actually, I haven't mentioned it yet, the cycle of stories called the Sunflower Cycle. And it actually takes place, it's probably the most optimistic thing I've ever written in that it takes place over a span of billions and billions of years. It's a series of, of of short stories. There's a novella called the Freeze Frame Revolution. And it basically is this. You know how in classic science fiction we wander out past Mars or Jupiter or something and all of a sudden there's this portal, right, that allows us to have faster line travel. It's like it was left behind for us by the Ancients or the progenitors or some ancient Forerunner species that conveniently went extinct, but left us with our mass transit system to sort of play around with, right? And it's a first couple of times, it's really interesting. There've been some good books written about it, right? But I couldn't help but think, what about those poor Forerunners, right? What about the guys who actually had to build the gates? They didn't, they didn't have anybody else's leftover. Nobody handed them the car keys to faster than light jump gate travel, right? They had to crawl from star to star like ants, right? They had to like spend thousands of years at normal sublight speeds and then they, then they kind of build a Stargate and and hope that their own species hasn't gone extinct in the meantime because it's been so long. And then they have to like drag on to the next. So basically my story, like the sunflower cycles is these poor bastards, the road crew that has to build the interstellar jump gates and, and they're run by an artificial stupidity which is like, it's kept, it's kept. They call it the chimp because it's got the synapse count of a chimp. Because everybody knows that if you build an AI that's as smart as us and you set it on its own for like 5 billion years, it's going to develop its own agenda. So they have a very dumb AI, but a very fast AI. It's kind of a savant and it handles most of the gates themselves in an automated way. But every now and then because it's dumb, it runs into a situation it can't handle and then it thaws out one of 3,000 Corpsicles and says, help me, I need human intuition on this. Right? So the story is told from the point of view of these people who basically are awake maybe three or four days out of every 10,000 years and the universe is aging in, in stop motion around them, right. And so the entire. It's told from the point of view of just three or four different people, but it lasts halfway to heat death. And I'm having a blast with that because, because it doesn't show us going extinct. Well, it kind of does, but part of us made it out. Right. Whereas all the, all the studies that you're looking at, all the, the peer reviewed literature says that, that our current global pop civilization is going to start collapsing around 2040, 2050, and then we're going to like lose half the human population by the end of the century. Even my most dystopic stuff, Blind Blindsight and Echopraxia has, has by the end of this century we've got spaceships that can, that can leave the solar system. So that stuff's like delusionally optimistic, but it's fun. And, and I managed to sort of say, you know, the world is still in bad shape, but I pushed it off a few decades to give me some breathing room in the story. And the next book I'm going to read that isn't part of. Right, that isn't going to be part of the sunflower cycle is called Omniscience. And it's basically a conclusion to Blindsight and Echopraxia. It continues to sort of delve into the various cognitive subspecies that humanity is branching into. And it's going to be heavily informed by Carl Friston's consciousness work. Free energy minimization principle. The same, the same principle at the time. Guys who made dish springing, we're testing. So yeah, it's, it's. I mean more of the same but hopefully more erudite and with less talky info, dumpy bits. And, and it's going to be more of a road trip. I mean I, I won't bother talking about the characters because I, I assume that you're not familiar with the work, but it's, it's, it's got vampires, biologically plausible vampires and, and decorticate zombies. But it's hard science fiction. I have many, many scientific references peer reviewed on how vampires could work.

I love that.

So yeah, so that's more of the same. Basically I'm going to finish off the trilogy and I'm going to keep writing my Sunflower Cycle. And you'll probably have more fun with the Sunflower Cycle, but you'll probably learn more from omniscience.

Nice, nice. Well, looking forward to that. So yeah, as a science fiction writer, sort of. Final question. What are your recommendations for anyone who wants to understand the future better?

Oh Jesus. I'm going to sound like a broken record. But the future is going to be informed by our technology and our society. And our technology, like you say is the hammer, it's morally neutral. So it's not the technology, it's what we do with it. So understand us. I think the problem is people have separated themselves from the beasts of the field. We consider ourselves, you know, there's everything else and there's us. And we are God's chosen. We have souls, right? We are conscious, we are self aware.

I mean the whole arrogancy of the human species.

Yeah, the whole, the whole punchline of blindsight was that this thing that we exalt ourselves for, the, the presence of our conscious self awareness is actually in evolutionary terms a misstep. And that there are things out there that are just as smart as us, but they're not burdened by consciousness. And when we run into those things, they will kick our ass. But so much of what we already do is non conscious. And I think we need to know ourselves better because the shape of human history is, is, is a function of human behavior. Barring an asteroid or something that reset hits the reset button. And I don't think we understand ourselves well enough to predict how we are going to use any tools. The the if we manage to somehow squeak past climate change, we've already got an AI apocalypse waiting in the wings, Right? If not that and a grey goose scenario, nuclear war is back on the table. Right. No matter what crisis we solve, our own short sightedness is going to create another one. And so that's what we've got to fix. Climate change is not a problem. The war in Ukraine is not a problem. Pollution is not a problem. Those things are all symptoms. It's human cognitive biases that are the problem. And until we kind of wrestle with that, I think we're. Isn't that a good way to end it?

I love it. Well, on that enlightening note, thank you very much, Peter. I really enjoyed having you on the show and to discussing, discussing this.

Yeah, no, it was fun. I'm glad, I'm glad to have, I was glad to have spoken to you. I, I admit I was a little nervous when I saw some of these questions. Everything was like, how can we synergize our informatic organizational substructure? And I was thinking, oh my God, this guy's a corporate futurist. But, but it was fun. I enjoyed myself.

Lovely. Perfect. Well, thank you for coming to the show.

My pleasure.

What an insightful journey into the future we've experienced with Peter Watts. Thank you for joining us on this enlightening journey through the speculative worlds of Peter Watts. Today, we've delved into the intersections of technology, society and human consciousness, offering a unique lens through which to view our future. As we reflect on these thought provoking discussions, we invite you to continue exploring the vast possibilities and implications of emerging technologies in our lives. Stay tuned and subscribe to Synthetic Minds for more conversations that bridge the gap between science fiction and science reality, guiding us toward a thoughtful and informed future. Until next time, embrace the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and courage.

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