Telling Stories to Envision the Future with Brenda Cooper - Synthetic Minds Podcast EP04

Welcome to Synthetic Minds, the confluence of imagination and reality where the stories of tomorrow are intertwined with the technologies of today to help organizations navigate the future. I'm Dr. Mark Van Reemenam and together with my digital twin, your Navigator. Through the complex interplay of fiction and tangible innovation, where we dissect the narratives that shape our understanding of what's to come, I believe organizations can immensely benefit from the perspectives of science fiction authors whose creative explorations into future technologies and societal shifts open windows to possibilities, trends, and challenges. In today's episode, we are joined by Brenda Cooper, a luminary at the intersection of technology, fiction and future studies. Her acclaimed works such as Edge of Dark and Wilder's or offer profound reflections on humanity's path forward, addressing pressing issues from environmental sustainability to the ethical use of artificial intelligence. As we unravel the narratives and innovations depicted in Brenda's novels, we'll delve into how these speculative fictions illuminate potential futures, urging us to ponder our roles within them. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, an environmental advocate, or simply curious about the horizon of human possibility, this conversation promises to enrich your understanding and inspire action toward a more thoughtful and inclusive future. So tune in in, embrace your curiosity and let's embark on this journey of discovery together. Remember to subscribe and share your insights as we dive into the world Brenda Cooper has envisioned, drawing lessons and inspiration for our own.

Thank you very much for joining my podcast, Brenda. It's great to have you here.

Thank you. Nice to be here.

So let's dive straight into sort of your background. If you can share a little bit more about your background and the one or two books that you wrote that you're most proud of.

Okay, well my background, three in three ways relates to this podcast, I think. One, I'm a technologist. I've been doing technology ever since we were actually doing using cards and putting little holes in cards and sorting them. So I've been through all of the phases of that. I'm still still running a technology show. I do talk about the future as a futurist, although I'm not as much of a professional futurist as you are. So I'm really pleased to be talking with you. And I've been writing science fiction for about 25 years and publishing it. And two of the books that I think are probably most proud of and relate to the future is one is called Edge of Dark and that's an award winning book that explores a far future technology or a far future space where I'm playing With both the speed of change and how did humans relate to a significantly advanced technology. We can talk a little bit more about that a little later. I see some of your questions relate to that book. Another one is called Wilders and it's a more near future technology book talking about perhaps robotics and AI and climate change and how cities might look in a future change oriented society.

So is there sort of a common theme across your books also in terms of technologies? I believe environment. It plays an important role. Can you share a bit about that?

I'm fascinated with our relationship to environment, both including how important it is to our health and to who we are and yet how we're feeling and what we're doing as we're also destroying it. So, you know, there's really a lot to play with there and try to understand and unpack. It's fascinating to me and I've been fascinated with robotics and AI for a long time. I went to like Extra5, one of the early Xtopian conferences. I met a lot of really interesting people talking about what it might be to be transhuman there and been a little fascinated with those ideas. I've met Werner Vinge who unfortunately we just lost, but he helped sort of come up with the idea of the singularity. So I've just been interested in these things for a long time and I was lucky enough that some of my early writing was actually a collaboration with Larry Niven. And we explored together some of the very early ideas about uploading. And some of our first stories that came out in things like Asimov and Asimov's were our analog were early stories about uploading.

Yeah. Nice. And so when you start writing a science fiction fiction book and you start to explore the future, you mentioned your artificial intelligence, you mentioned robotics. Which of the technologies that you do envision, do you think that will become a reality before this end of this decade or maybe before the end of the next decade?

Depends on what you mean by reality. Because I mean in my day job I work with a construction company and we're already using some AI, pretty basic AI, large language models and things like that. We're already using robotics, still pretty basic robotics. They do very controlled things that we tell them to do, but they do them better than humans and you know, like drawing lines on the floor of buildings. I mean really, you know, pretty basic but super important to us and they help us do better. And I think all of these things are going to continue to grow and it's just like other future technologies. It feels kind of slow. You sort of feel like maybe more should be happening, but really when we look back, it's going to seem really fast. When I look back at coding on cards and punching in the places you were going to put your code on, cards and Fortran and stuff like that compared to what we can do now, you know, that's all in my lifetime. So I really think we're going to be impacted quite a bit by both AI and robotics in the next 10 to 20 years.

Well, I think when we look at disruption, it always happens in two ways. First slowly and then suddenly. And I think that's sort of what we see happening at the moment. AI obviously became sort of mainstream with the launch of ChatGPT, although it has been 50, 60, 70 years in the making. And slowly now with, you know, we're now sort of hitting exponential times, in the coming years, it will go a lot faster. And I, I even saw an article yesterday where Elon Musk predicted that we will have AGI next year and super AI before, before the end of this decade, for whatever that's worth, you know, but it's, it's, it's fascinating to see that that technology is indeed moving a lot faster and continues to speed up as well.

The more interesting thing is how many technologies are speeding up at once. Robotics, AI, new materials, new ways to get energy. There's so many things happening at once. And I think that change is kind of blowing us away as a society and we're not reacting very well to it, but because it's hard to deal with this much change. And I mean, megatrends talked about it and told us this was going to happen. So we futurists have known it for a while and we're just living it now. You know, you talk about that singularity curve, you know, we're climbing the steep part.

Yeah. And yeah, I think, you know, when it comes to technology, technology will just move forward. But it's what, it's humans that are slow to adopt and to adapt to that, to that technology. So in your book Edge of Dark, you explore a scenario where society actually banishes, you know, its advanced AI creation to the edge of the solar system. And then these AI entities evolve and, and, and thrive independently, developing completely different from the human creators. So how can organizations prepare for a future where, you know, the unintended consequences of advanced technologies evolve beyond the initial purpose or control of what we. Yeah, what we intended with the technology.

I think most technologies evolve beyond what we originally intended, both in unintended consequences and Sometimes those are good. I mean, the weight loss drugs we're getting now were developed for other things and suddenly they're solving other problems. I mean, just to give you a real simple example, that's having impact on a lot of humans that I know. I think it really behooves corporations to pay attention to new technologies and to try to really support the change management required for that, which is really about how do you lead people, how do you talk to people about change, how do you support change and innovation in an organization, all of which is actually quite hard. And it takes leadership that is willing to be facile and flexible and try things that they know they might throw away. But I think it's really important. For example, in my company, we're working quite hard to understand and try to see how we can implement some of the LLMs like Copilot for Office 365 and stuff already. But most of the phone calls I'm on with other IT people where we're talking about the same thing. I find we're ahead, even though I feel like we're behind. But, you know, I think it's important to try to stay up on the things that are happening and to try them out.

Yeah, well, I think, I mean, that makes sense, but. But at the same time, you know, if we have these unintended consequences of technology, whether it's good or bad, it might evolve in a completely different way. And the book also delves into the interaction between humans and AI entities that do not necessarily share a human moral compass. So, yeah, there's a lot of talk at the moment on AI, you know, moving in the wrong direction. We have, you know, deep fakes, we have misinformation. We also had the conference in November, the Bletchley conference, where people talked about the existential threat of AI that would have not human moral compass. So it makes a lot of sense that you wrote it in the book because it's playing out in real life at the moment. But what lessons can organizations learn from this about the importance of instilling these ethical considerations and human values in the development and deployment of, of AI technologies?

Here I'm going to rephrase or answer a slightly different question. And that is, how do we best take advantage of what this technology might do? Maybe we don't want to give it human values. For example, if we were going to apply AI to understanding how animals talk, that's one thing that there are a lot of people working on understanding. Dolphins, whales, there's Project seti, there's just a lot of work going, saying, hey, you know, we've been living on this planet with these other beings for all this time, and we don't really know what they're saying to each other or what they would say to us if they could talk to us. You know, and I'm not talking about, you know, teaching out, teaching dogs how to talk with buttons. I'm talking about really understanding the natural language of animals and the idea that we may be able to do that with the, even the current AI that we have, and certainly within your future AI. But do we want. You know, there's not one way that humans look at animals. I mean, some of us look at them as food, some of them look at as things we shouldn't eat. Some of the, you know, and I don't know that we're going to come up with that. We have to look more at maybe some higher principles and say, hey, we want to figure out how to not disturb them, but yet understand them. You know, we may need to look at some simple principles that are maybe simpler than, than humans actually are.

So. So we should go to a sort of a different base level almost.

Right? I mean, if you think about ethics, you know, my ethics might be different than your ethics, certainly if you live in the United States. We have two political parties who have completely different ethics, or at least say they do. I'm not sure they really do, but where they say they do. Okay, because we're busy doing this for no particularly good reason. That's a whole nother podcast. But, you know, I think maybe if we simplified things and got down to golden rules stuff and don't do harm stuff and basic science learning stuff, and we coded this into the AIs that we're working on and said this was our ethical background that we're trying to work on. You know, don't harm humans, don't harm whales, don't harm, whatever, but figure out what you can learn that we can maybe make things better. I think AI could see a lot of things we can't see now because we don't have as much compute power as the AI do.

Now, what comes to mind is a bit of like the astro laws for robots, but, you know, obviously a robot, whether it's a physical or digital, is the same thing.

I think that's right. And I mean, Ellie Edgar Yudkowski, who is a computer scientist who's been working on ethical AI for a long time, or how do you at least make AI not want to kill us? Has had A lot of really good ideas along these, these areas that I touched base with maybe five years ago. I haven't followed Eliezer lately. I'm pretty sure he's still out there. But I think there are a lot of people in the AI community that have been spending a lot of time thinking about this. And in fact, I believe that's part of the conversation that the OpenAI just had internally where they almost made a big change and then ended up not making that big change. And I think that was part of that same conversation. What is ethical AI? You know, I mean, the LLMs we've released right now, I sure wouldn't use them for life and death situations.

No, I was delivering a talk yesterday and one of the things that we talked about was that we need to think more deeply about the, the object function objective function of, of an, of an AI. You know, what's the ultimate objection objective of, of an AI? And if we do that wrong, then we'll build the AI wrong. You know, and at the moment I think they are sort of their sole objective function is to increase shareholder value and not necessarily stakeholder holder value. And that's a major difference. But if we, we humans are very short term focused, you know, of course comes from, goes back from, from when we were still in the savannah where we didn't have to think long term. So I don't think that will change anytime soon. But, but I do think we need to have a long term perspective on AI. And so how do you envision that we can can install, instill this long term perspective when developing AI so that we can prepare our society and also organizations much better for this, you know, AI driven future.

Let me riff off your comment about shareholder value. The company I work for, we are the shareholders. It's an esop, so it's employee and there's a lot of reasons to have an employee owned company and it's not all quite as altruistic as it sounds, but it's a very good idea for a number of reasons. And one of the good reasons is we don't have to make short term decisions. Okay. We don't have to choose to make a shareholder happy because we are the shareholders. So we can try to build value together in the company in such a way that that helps us. But we can think about, well, if I do these three investments and it takes two years to pay off, but it's still going to pay off in the time that I'm with the company, I can feel good about making those decisions. I'M not making someone external to the company happy. Okay. And I think we need to figure out, and I don't know how to do this, but I think we need to figure out how do we shift more of our capitalist mindset away from short term shareholder value and into something else. If you look at the split in income that we have right now, where you have so much money going to a very, very small set of people, that's largely because of that. That' those we've been focused on short term and the right people who got in the right seats to benefit from that benefited greatly. And we're not looking for human value, we're not looking for how do we make sure everyone has a roof over their head. And I'm not saying we should be socialists and everybody should make the same amount of money. That is a whole different set of problems. But you know, I think we could do better than we're doing now by thinking about our corporate structures and also in alignment with that, how we structure the AIs that we're building or how we choose to use them.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think, you know, the whole capitalist society that we have globally is sort of, that results in these wrong objective functions for the AI. And I think that, that, you know, at the moment what we see happening, a lot of these AIs are focusing solely on keeping you attached to the screen, you know, keeping you to click on the ads. And it doesn't bring much value to society. And I think, but changing that system is, I think, really, really hard because, you know, as you rightly say, so most these technologies are built by the big tech who have the money to spend the vast amounts of money required to build this technology. So the money will only come into a smaller group of people who will build. Yeah, potentially solely for themselves and not necessarily for society as a whole. I think that's. How do we change that?

I don't know. I do know that I have been privileged enough to be near a number of people really in my futurist role who have way more money than I do. They're not Elon Musk level rich, but they have enough money to put money into making things happen. I've done some work with xprize. I've met some people there. I've done some work with the, with a conference called Future and Review out here. So I've met some of these people there. So these are serial entrepreneurs, people who do have millions of dollars to put into things, perhaps not billions. And many of them see the same problems and are trained to work on solving them. And I think to the extent that we can support and encourage that behavior, that will help. I believe we've created a fairly dumbed down, ill educated, not very well equipped bottom level of our societies in many places. And we've got to stop it. It's a horrible decision to be making, you know, and it's not sustainable over the long run. And I think even the rich have got to realize how unsustainable it is to create a class that's not as capable of thinking for itself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we're very much aligned here and I think there's a, you know, a really big challenge for society as a whole to try to resolve that, especially as these technologies become more advanced, more capable and will have a bigger impact on our society. If we didn't look at these advanced technologies that you depict in your book, such as Edge of Dark, how do you envision that these technologies will impact human society as well as our natural world, of course, in the coming decades?

Well, it depends. All technologies are somewhat neutral all on their own. It's about how do we choose to utilize them. I don't care if it was better living through chemicals where we managed to poison ourselves but didn't have to, you know, to what we may or may not do with AI. And I would think that by now we would understand these cycles a little better because we've seen a number of technologies, oil and seeing the damage that we're doing by, by choosing to, to deploy technologies before we really understand them. And I think if we focus on the good of the commons rather than the good just of corporations, as far as things like how we Deploy large scale AIs to look at climate solutions, to look at social solutions, to look at food supply solutions, to look at pollution solutions, et cetera, that will help I think more and more corporations, there's a little bit of a backlash, but there's more and more corporations that understand that actually being green, not greenwashing, you know, actually being more sustainable matters, you know, so getting corporate boards and corporate executives to understand and funding things through universities are some of the ways I know of many of the organizations that are working on using AI in ways that I think of as AI for good are non profits, many of them funded by the same people I was talking about earlier as well as, you know, casual people like me who might give them $20, but that certainly won't be significant, you know, but a lot of us can matter, you know, so I really think it matters who, who owns and who is using the AI and then what are we asking it to solve for? You know, and there's nothing wrong with solving for efficiency in corporations. That's fine. If we oversolve for efficiency then maybe we're going to have to implement basic income or something. But I've been hearing that since I started technology, okay? I mean technology was going to replace jobs forever. What's the unemployment rate right now?

Have you explored, you know, basic income in your books and then which direction?

I do, I've supported basic income a few times because I do think eventually we may get there, especially if we stop having people. Just. I mean a lot of our economy is built on things we don't need to be doing. Building fast fashion, buying things we don't need, wearing stuff. You know, a lot of our economy is just basically sustainable, unsustainable or doing things that's not necessarily doing good. So if we took away some of those jobs, then we might want people to do jobs that were better for us over the long run. Do a better job of elder care, of child care, caring for the planet, of picking up after our pollution, of doing things like that. You're going to need something like basic income to make that doable, okay? Because a corporation is not going to make a whole lot of money, you know, doing that kind of thing. In general, some people are figuring out ways to do it. But, and I believe in the idea of basic income, I don't think it's a good idea in general to give people income who are perfectly healthy and then give them nothing to do in return. I think they could be writers, artists, poets, cleaners up of, of roadsides. They could work on pollution, they could work on elder care. So they could work on a number of things. But I do think that in general if we're going to have a large population on basic income, we a need to treat it more humanely than we do welfare. I mean, I know I have some poor people in my family and the way the way the welfare system works is extremely difficult and silly and demeaning and not helpful and spends a whole lot of money giving people very little resources, you know, but, but if we made it simpler, a little bit more like the give directly model, but required something simple like you pick what you're going to do but do 20 hours of something or other, I think that would help.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. People still need to have a purpose because if you don't have a purpose, what are you going to do in life? And that game will cause significant problems in society.

Yeah, I think that's right. But we may have to go to some form of basic income at some point. We certainly don't now. I would have thought we might have by now if you'd asked me. My Future is tattooed 20 years ago. But we're having trouble hiring, so, I mean, seem to be too few jobs.

But I guess that again, moves to the point that we made earlier. Disruption first moves slowly and then suddenly. So personally, I think that AI will impact at least a billion jobs in the coming decades. Taking away a billion jobs because it's just from a capitalistic perspective, it just makes sense to do so. Whether it's from a society perspective, that's obviously a different story. If we look at the. In your books, you also discussed the clash between technology and nature. And what can we learn from that as organizations, as society, and how can we ensure a future where that clash doesn't exist?

Basically, I firmly believe that we need nature in order to. To be spiritually healthy. I live in the country on purpose. I mean, I. I work in Seattle and drive an hour in so that I can have an acre and a half so that I can go walk the dogs and I can hear the owls in the morning and I can do other things. I worked for cities for a long time, and some of the things we did that I think were really important was work on having walkable parks 10 minutes away from everybody's house, making sure there was green space people could go to. And I studied biophilic design, which is how do we integrate nature more into the way we design buildings and cities? I think it's just super important that we do that. I think in order to survive the damage we have done, we're going to have to create more wild spaces, create more wildlife corridors in our cities, do more to support that. Unless we want to live someplace where we as humans are having to manage everything. And I don't think we're capable of that. I don't think we can. I don't think we can manage the whole ecosystem, not right now and not even with 20 years from now, as AI maybe with 2000 years from now AI, we can have a completely, you know, synthetic planet, but I don't think I want that. But I'm certainly sure we can't pull it off right now. We'd probably just kill ourselves. So I. I think we're better off working on how do we support nature and stay somehow connected to it. Maybe that's old fashioned, but I think it's true.

Well, I think staying and being connected to nature is, is really important. You know, if I go to nature, you, you really calm down and you get new ideas and you, you can, you can reset yourself from, from, you know, instead of being always in the rat race and always running, it's good to take a breather and, and, and, and, and, and calm down.

Yeah, and I think we're probably going to get better and better at designing and redesigning cities. It remains to be seen there are a number of people working on creating cities out of thin air right now and just making things like the line and other stuff like that. I don't know if they're going to succeed or not.

Well, it's a good attempt at least.

Yeah, but I like the idea of saying, how do we create a city that's really usable for people, that's reasonably green, that's reasonably useful, that supports a healthy economy? I mean, I'm all for jobs and economy, economies and companies and stuff like that.

So I want to shift gears slightly. So, you know, the objective of the podcast is to help organizations understand, you know, and navigate the future a little bit better. Because I think that, you know, I think, yeah, organizations would benefit from that. And, you know, as a science fiction writer, you sort of live in the future. You could almost say. So how can, you know, what should individuals and organizations do to navigate this uncertainty that's ahead of us?

Well, I think storytelling is important to everything. When, for example, I work on strategic planning with a department or a whole company, which I've done a couple of times, telling stories about where you want to go can be very important for communicating where you want to go. Perhaps the executives may or may not need stories to help them decide where they want to go. Although I'd highly recommend reading some of our better science fiction writers as a way to figure that out, or at least to figure out what might be possible. But I think telling stories is a great way for people to feel emotionally connected to a future that you're trying to create. Because, see, we create the future. You know, we can lay around and ignore the future and just let it happen to us, but that's not going to get us anywhere we want to go. So if we want to create a future where we want to go, then telling stories about that future will help people see that it's possible. One of the things that I find the most disturbing is how many people right now seem to feel as if we can't Tackle climate change, we can't tackle our social problems that we just don't have the tools. I would say we do and we can. And the stories we tell ourselves have a lot to do with how people will be able to envision that that's possible.

Should, you know, reading science fiction books become a required part of any business degree?

Yeah, I would. I would say yes. Not only because it's good for people to interact with fiction. I mean, there's a number of studies that say, hey, it's going to help make you sharper, but I also think that getting you to really think outside the box can be super important. And there are people writing, I think, really good science fiction that can make people think quite a bit. And, you know, I don't know, I don't know if there's one book. I would say this is the book every business should read because it might vary a little bit depending on the business, but there's some really fascinating work out there that I think it's worth people reading and talking about.

Unfortunately, most executives are very, very, very busy, those who actually should read this. So they probably don't have the time to read this. Are there other ways then to help business leaders to navigate and anticipate this future and to benefit from your work and the work of your colleagues in ways that could help them in the long term incorporate better, more future thinking? Are there ways we can do that?

Well, surely they can listen to your podcast. But I would say, first of all, there are ways to consume fiction if you want to. I'm also an executive, I'm a director, so I'm not a CEO that would be worse on my time, but I don't have a 40 hour a week job and I manage to write books and read a lot of fiction, but a lot of it, I consume driving or gardening or walking the dog or something using Audible. There are a lot of short stories and frankly, science fiction. Short stories can be just as interesting. Go buy the year's best science fiction every couple of years and work your way through those stories over a year. That's a half an hour to an hour a piece and read them. Read one or two a month. I mean, you know, this doesn't have to be a huge part of your consumption as an executive, but I think it's important to get ideas that are far enough out of the box that you're not going to get them from your consultants or your staff. And I would in most media, you know, like TV is a little too dystopian So I think stories is a better place to go when you develop.

These stories, you know, when you develop the future scenarios for your books. How do you do that and what can organizations learn from that?

Well, I usually start with some new thing that is interesting, so I'll talk through one. I sent you a few links to some stories that people can read for free online if they want to. So if you get a chance to post those, somehow I will add them.

To the speaker notes.

So I'll talk about Solastalgia meets the Alps. So that's a story that Anthropocene magazine asked me to write. And they wanted specifically to explore a technology where people in Switzerland, where in Switzerland, they're using basically a mountain to take water up and down in order to help deal with the variations in timing of available renewable energy. Okay. It's pretty fascinating technology. So I read up on the technology a lot. I mean, I try to understand the technology at least well enough to not get it drastically wrong before I write a story. And then I tried to come up with a person who might interact with that technology and a problem that they might have. And in this case, I have another issue that has been close to my heart, which is I referenced it a little bit earlier, but it's sort of that climate grief that people feel as we're saying, oh, maybe not only can we not get out of this, but maybe we've already, like, you know, done everything that's living around us in with our oil and the other things that we've done. So Solastalgia really is talking about that sort of climate Greek. So I created a character who would interact with someone who is feeling that and would also interact with this new and interesting technology that could be a piece of solving our problems. And so usually when I'm coming up with a story, I look at a technology and then I look for characters that I think will tell about that technology in a way that will engage readers. Emotional response to a story, you know, because you see people. I often see futurists writing what. I don't remember what they're calling them, but there's a term. But they're just basically writing it up as a story. But it doesn't necessarily have that emotional hook. And I think it's important to get the emotional hook into stories that you tell people because you're trying to get them out of their head.

Yeah, well, absolutely. And you try to connect with it. And once you connect and you're more willing to take in whatever, whatever you're whatever you're reading. And I think therefore, you know, science fiction writers, I think are, you know, would be a great resource for organizations to tap into that emotional perspective to learn the future and understand the future a little bit better. But I also think, you know, believe that, you know, thinking about the future is about having the capabilities to imagine the impossible. And that's, you know, especially in our short term world, that's very difficult because we are linear thinkers, we're not exponential thinkers. So truly envisioning something out of this world is really, really difficult. So it sort of requires a transformation in how we think. What is your trick about that? How do you do that and what can organizations learn from that?

I don't know how to suggest what organizations can learn from that other than exposing themselves to as many ideas as they might be able to and exposing them to fiction writers. And I don't know if I can even describe what the trick is. I mean, when you spend enough time in science fiction, both reading it and writing it, I think you think about things like Dyson spheres or starships or. One of the things I play with a lot, and I think this affects corporations, is the fact that the speed of change in different areas can be drastically different. In Edge of Dark, I have it. In different areas of a solar system, the speed of change can be different, but I think it's different for us as well. If I go to the Midwest, I feel like the speed at which the Midwest has adopted new technologies and the speed at which it continues to do so is slower than on the coast because of the network effects of having all these tech companies and tech workers and international people together, which you don't see as much in the interstate. So even here we have speed of change challenges. We have it intergenerationally. I'm working on integrating LLMs into our company right now. And we have new people who just started with us who've been working with LLMs for years in college, a year or two maybe, which means they're way ahead of us, you know, and so those of us who are, you know, in our 50s and 60s are like, oh, what's this? Or what does it do? And they're like, let me show you. You know, so some of it is being open to the multi generational ideas and realizing that the speed of change is not the same for every person, every place or every company. And that, you know, you need to think about that a little bit.

Even within your company. If you're like a multinational.

Right, sure. Or even if you're not a multinational or regional. But my example of, you know, I have some executives who are very comfortable with change in technology, but some that are maybe less so, you know, and, and there's nothing wrong with that. It just. It is how it is. But I think it's important for those who struggle with it a little more to be willing to be open to new ideas and to be willing to listen to the younger people coming up in the company. I think that's true in our company, but I hear stories of cases where it's not always true.

If you want to understand the speed of change, you have to look at a whole wide of scenarios. Understand what's going on, I think. And as part of that, I think you should look at the good and the bad scenarios so you can prevent the bad scenarios from happening. That's one of the reasons that I consider myself an optimistic dystopian, which is a bit of an oxymoron, but it sort of helps me to take two perspectives in my head and then juggle with that and give that back to organization. How do you tackle the ethical implications of the technologies that you envision within your stories? And what's the trick there to make the stories interesting?

You almost have to look at the dystopian part. So I think I get what you're saying when you talk about being an optimistic dystopian and some of our most famous science fiction, like 1984 by George Orwell. I mean, you know, Orwellian is even a, you know, a word you can find in the dictionary. Okay. You know, so sometimes dystopian futures really can help inform us. And in fact, Dune is a. Which is, you know, right now we're just in, you know, two out of three that Villanova is going to make. Dune is a very dystopian future where they have, in fact, because of the something called the Butlerian Jihad, basically done what I did in Edge of Dark and say, hey, a bunch of people are going to just reject certain technologies and this might have a cost.

When you write your story. Future thinking is crucial. How can organizations adapt a similar mindset in this fast changing world? Apart from reading science fiction work, which I think should be required to work, but what else can they do in their day to day work and their day to day jobs to instill that future thinking in whatever they do?

Be supportive of innovation, be supportive of failure, because if you're going to support innovation, you're going to support failure because failure is going to happen. An innovative company will Fail fairly regularly, but hopefully there'll be small failures and each small failure can be a big lesson. Okay? So I'm not suggesting spending millions of dollars on an innovation. You know, I firmly believe in agile technologies and you know, incremental technologies and delivering value along the way because that's. You also get your lessons and go, oh, that didn't work. Bump my nose. I guess I'll try something else, you know, which you, you want to do, but you want to know what doesn't work as well as you want to know what does work. But you, you know, you have to try it sometimes to tell. The other thing I think is stepping out of the corporation for a little while. Meeting with people from other juris. Other jurisdictions isn't the right word. Other industries. Talking to people that are not, you know, don't stay inside your silo. Get out. Bring in board members that come in from other industries. Go to conferences that aren't just inside of your industries. Read futurist books as well as science fiction books.

Okay, so non fiction and fiction.

Yes, non fiction and fiction are both important. Okay. And think about where you want to be as if you're telling the story backwards. I've often used that. I'm sure you have. Hey, just, you know, close your eyes and pretend it's 10 years from now and you have been successful as a company. What does that look and feel like to you? You know, are you twice as big? Are you the same size and doing as well? Are you. Have you branched out into something else? Just getting people into a, a space where they can be in flow state and not always in that constant, you know, because, because the day to day in the business, you really don't have time for that. So I think you have to step out sometimes to really envision where you want to go so that you can focus on that.

I agree. And I think it sort of should apply not only to organizations, it should also apply to governments and it should, well, it should maybe especially apply to governments, but it should also apply to individuals, you know, to think about your own life. Because if you, if you take that, if you close your eyes for you and you envision yourself 10, 15, 20 years down the line, that will impact the decisions you make today. And you know, I think it would make very much sense to, for all of us to do that from time to time and step out of this rat race and look beyond what's right in front of me.

Yeah, I just went to the beach for four days with the dog and nobody else just Me, the dog at the beach. And it was like I needed to think, you know, So I did a little bit of writing, but mostly it was just like time when nobody wanted something from me because particularly for an executive, being an executive is like being nitpicked to death all day long, honest.

You know, in Dutch we have a, we have a word for this and it's called Nixon and which basically means, literally means doing nothing. You know, just maybe the city chair and do nothing or just, you know, go for a walk. You are doing something, you're walking, but you still in your head you're doing, you sort of do nothing. And that is really helpful. You know, where do we get the best ideas? When we are in the shower. So, you know, so why we should do that more often, you know. And so, you know, I think more countries around the world could benefit from this Dutch concept called Nixon, where you literally just do nothing and give your brain a rest, give your brain a bit of time to think. So looking beyond your current books, what are some of the new themes, new technologies that you're exploring for your future work?

Well, I'm currently doing a lot of work back to governments, which you were just talking about. I think we have a social tendency to believe that government is inherently evil. And that's particularly true in the United States, but I'm guessing it's true in Europe as well. And I don't think government is inherently evil, particularly not that the day to day working of cities, towns, even states. Perhaps our elected governor. Government is a bit evil or a bit bought. You know, I mean, sorry, but it just probably is. But the people doing the day to day work, the people who are getting vilified is the deep state. That's a bunch of hooey. These are people that really want, I think to try to make the world. People don't go into government to get rich. Not on a day to day worker level. There's no money there, okay? Honest, I was there. I spent 29 years in the government. I got out and immediately started making way more money. Okay. You know, I mean, it's kind of a hysterical difference. So the people working in the government are there largely because they want to help the community, they want to do better. The people at the local government running for, you know, town council are there because they want to do better. So some of what I'm writing about right now, and you'll see it in one of the stories I mentioned here, out of Ash, which talks about how a governor moved a city that was about to drown to someplace else. And then how did they figure out how to get people happy with the city? Just to give you the short version of it, but really exploring how we maybe need a different relationship with government and how perhaps some of our government leaders could be either unsung or sung heroes in ways that they aren't. I know that sounds a little weird because it's not in line very much with the way most people are thinking, but I don't really care. To me, I think it's kind of a point. And if we're going to survive the next 50 years, then we're going to need the people who keep the clean water, who keep the parks, who keep the peace, who deal with the homeless guy who's taken too much fentanyl, all of that. And these people are not the tech wizards, they're not the multimillionaires, they're not the elected at the high level. These are day to day folks. And I'm working a little bit on that, frankly, in my current. I have a book I just finished that I haven't sold yet, but I'm sure it will sell and come out. And some of my short fiction is, is looking at that a little bit.

Nice. Nice. Well, we're coming to the end of this podcast. So one final question. What recommendations do you have for organizations to, you know, make sure that within the next 5, 10, 20 years the combination, the convergence of technology and the environment, something that you cover, is done in the right way? What can they do to ensure that we end up with a thriving digital future in a society where even we're also, you know, we don't only thrive digitally, but we also thrive physically in our natural world.

It's a hard question to answer for all companies because for different companies I think that answer is going to be different. But I think it does go back to some of the things I'm seeing as big trends, that is employee owned companies, that is being more literally green, that is purpose being purpose built and really looking at your purpose. And as you grow your companies or make other choices, trying to be in alignment with that purpose, it's foundations that companies are created, it's messaging. When your executives give you messaging about DEI or green or fairness or whatever it is, that's sort of on the light side of the world. I think people want to hear that and listen to that. You know, our people and our corporations are super important and the corporation is like the second place. I don't remember where I got this. Someone else did this thinking it's just me, you know, doing on it. But you know, our first place is maybe our home and our family and maybe our third place is our for some people it's church, for some people it's writing, for some people it's racing cars, whatever. But you know, whatever is their hobby space or their social non family space. But we spend a lot of time at work and I think people want work to feel like it's aligned with their purpose and their morality and what they want to do. And I see that even more true in younger generations. They will move around in order to find that. And so I think really that's what corporations can do is focus on what can they do that help support a positive can do innovative, purposeful life for their people.

I think that's a great end of this podcast and a great tip for organizations. Thank you very much, Brenda, for joining me on this podcast.

Thank you, I really appreciate it. Great questions and nice to meet you.

Thank you for joining us on this enlightening journey through the landscapes of tomorrow, where the visions of science fiction meet the innovation and realities of our world. As we close today's episode with Brenda Cooper, we've traversed discussions from AI's ethical boundaries to the indispensable connection between technology and our environment. Reflecting on Brenda's insights, it's clear that the stories we craft today can shape the world of tomorrow. They challenge us to envision a future where technology and nature coexist harmoniously, guiding us towards sustainable innovation and ethical advancement. As we part ways, remember that the stories of science fiction are not just tales of distant planets and future societies. They are mirrors reflecting our present choices, urging us to ponder, act and innovate with foresight and responsibility. We invite you to carry forward the ideas sparked today into your own lives and organizations. Let's mold a future where technology amplifies our humanity, nurtures our planet, and crafts legacies of positive impact. Join us next time on Synthetic Minds as we continue to unravel the threads of imagination and reality, forging paths to futures we aspire to inhabit. Don't forget to subscribe, share your reflections, and become an active participant in shaping tomorrow. Thank you for your curiosity and engagement. Until next time, keep exploring, dreaming and creating.