 So, it's almost the weekend for all of you. Yes, working day is done. Weekend is here. Which basically means more of just sitting at home itself. This can't go anywhere, I can't do anything so. It's just sitting at home without the work to do. More Netflix and chill, right? I'm hoping to finish up on Castlevania tonight. Oh, cool. I'm waiting for my child to be a little older. She's 11 going on 12. I'm like a couple more years that we can watch. Yeah. Castlevania and Evangelion and all of that. We're watching the less intense ones now. We watched Naruto and we're currently watching a full metal alchemist. Oh, which one? The first one or Brotherhood? We watched the first one a couple of months ago and now we're starting to go through Brotherhood. Ah, okay. We'll do both. Yeah, I guess we can start. I think people will slowly join in. Super, yes. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Until Inside Science Fiction Book Club. And today we are entering the machine hood with SP Divya. A few things before we begin. Please keep your mics on mute. If you have any questions, please type them into the chat box and we'll take them at the end of the session. My co-modulator today is T.G. Shanoi. T.G. Shanoi is an SFF enthusiast, columnist and critic. He is the writer of India's longest running weekly SF column, New World's Weekly for Factor Daily, and the Speckfix column for Bangalore Mirror. He also curates the SF track for Bangalore Lipsist. He has featured in podcasts such as the Thale Harite Kannada podcast and even such as Sri Lanka Comic Con to talk about SFF in general and Indian SF in particular. He hosts to boldly go a fun SFF quiz every Saturday. He is also an advertising and marketing professional and is currently creative director at Publix's Lyobanet. Today we are talking to the marvelous SB Divya. SB Divya is the love of science, math, fiction and the Oxford comma. She is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of machinehood, runtime and the short story collection, contingency plans for the apocalypse and other possible situations. Divya is a co-editor of the weekly SF podcast, Escape Pod with Myrla Fati. She holds degrees in computational neuroscience and signal processing and worked for 20 years as an electrical engineer before becoming an author. Find her on Twitter at Divya's tweets or at SBDivya.com. Welcome Divya. Hi, thanks for having me. Shenu, would you like to get us started? Yeah, so as I was just saying before we went live, we are here to talk about this book right here and I was just waiting to wave it in everyone's faces and say please read it, this is machinehood, that's the book and whose ideas we are here to discuss. And for those of you who haven't read it, a brief intro. So the book is set in 2095. It's about 70 audios from now. And it's a world in which bots and Ys or meek AIs are commonplace and there's a bot for everything. There's a care bot, there's a nanny bot, there's a medic bot, whatever you think of, of course there are factory bots, they're there to do all the work. And where does this leave people of that world, for the people of that world, you have pills to help them keep up with these machines. So you have pills which are known as flows, which help you focus better. You have the zips which make you more active and run faster. There are buffs which help give you temporary enhanced strength and there's jewels which help regenerate you. And it's a world in which you can make vaccines in your kitchen. So this is another thing, another feature about that world is the ubiquity of what we would call surveillance. You are on camera all the time. If not yours, then there's micro drones all over, so anybody can just peep into your life with you doing anything at any time, which I mean anything that you do is on camera and there's really no privacy, but the people there seem to be happy with it probably because they've sort of grown into that world and which is for me the best part about machine hood is that the world sort of feels very lived in. And the novel centers around two key protagonists, Velga, who's an ex marine army person who's now a bodyguard for these rich pill funders and her sister-in-law, Nitya Balachandra, who lives in Chennai. And there's a terrorist attack in which one of the person who is the bodyguard, and that sets her on a path to figure out who it is, parallely she's feeling these little tremors and she asks Nitya to figure out what's wrong with her medically and that follows the second strain or the second plot of the book and they all sort of converge. And in the middle of all this what Divya has managed to do is also bring in the whole point of how we look at intelligence and what we think of as intelligence and what the dividing line is between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. And as much as I love science fiction, I also love action thrillers, I also like mysteries. So machine hood ticked all those boxes for me. There were the ideas without the boring infodumps. There was action and there was mystery trying to figure out who's behind these terrorist attacks and the machine hood claims to be behind it all. So who is the machine hood? That's what Velga is out to discover. So let me just stop talking about the book now and ask you Divya. So thank you for, I mean, for me, machine hood like I was saying came like a breath of fresh air. It isn't completely dystopian. It isn't all gloomy and doomy. It's not a post-apocalyptic hellscape. It's very human. And there's so many ideas that you just sort of packed into it and somewhere there you've managed to update Asimov's three laws as well. There's AI, there's gig economy, there's the whole labor rights thing. How did you manage to pack in so much and did you start with, okay, I want to take all of this and pack this all. I mean, how did machine come about? How did you manage to find balance? So I did come up with most of the world upfront. I spent about three weeks researching in depth what people think are going to develop in terms of science and technology, ideas and innovations over the next 50 years and kind of extrapolated that a little bit further forward. And I really upfront wanted to kind of examine this existential question that we're dealing with today and have been dealing with, I would say, for the past decade, which is with increasing automation with the digital world, what is going to happen to our current labor force? Where are things going to go? What kind of work will people be doing in the future? Because that's a big looming question, especially in the tech sector, which is where I've been working for most of my life. And I kind of put that all together. Actually, as part of my notes when I was developing the world for this book, decided to go kind of decade by decade and just have like a few sentence summary for how we get to the world of machinehood from where we are today. Assuming, like I said, nothing catastrophic, nothing apocalyptic happens, no asteroids are crashing, no aliens are showing up. I mean, these are really, really fun things to explore as well, right? The disruption of current society. But for this book, I really wanted like a continuum. Where could we be headed? What is a realistic world we could live in? Definitely did not want to write either a very idealistic future nor a very terrible future. A lot of people think, you know, we're living in a dystopia today, right? Especially in certain parts of the world, there's this feeling, this sort of lack of hope for the future between climate change, between conservative politics, resurging. And so that kind of got my mental gears turning. And I was like, well, what is a vision of the future that seems, you know, perfectly ordinary to the people of that future? They've accepted it. They live in it. That's just what they have to deal with. That might seem a little bit terrible to us today, but not too terrible, you know, just like today, we have things that are very, very good. And we have things that we struggle against. And so all of that kind of came together. And like I said, I ended up developing most of these ideas, including the micro drones, the pills, the, you know, the level of artificial intelligence and robotics that is available in 2095. The degree of settlement in space, because science fiction, we all love space travel. And, you know, we can see with the commercialization of space where that could possibly be headed. So even there, I kind of wanted to keep it to what I think is possible in 75 years. So given what's happened in the last 75 years with space travel, I would say that's probably my most optimistic vision in this book is that, you know, we'll have about a dozen or so space stations, you know, with populations of several hundred residing on them full time. That's probably the least likely to happen of everything in this book. But I think it could happen, you know, if humanity really decides that that's what we want, I think we can make it happen. So yes, all of that kind of came together upfront. The stuff that I struggled with was the thriller and mystery and plot aspect, because I've never written a thriller before. And I don't recommend choosing that as your first novel. It's a really, really hard subgenre to write in. But, yeah, but with enough iterations, you know, all of that eventually came together as well. And came together wonderfully, if I may say so. The thriller bits, but like I said, you know, it's the mystery bits like who is the mission hood and what's going on. This is sort of the way it drives it. And, you know, and those little things at the beginning of each chapter, which, you know, sort of gives us a glimpse into what's really going on, that really helped a lot. Vijay, you're on mute. Thank you. And yes, I mean, the thriller bits really did come together really well, because the pacing is perfect. And, you know, it really does hold that all the ideas together. And one of the ideas in the book, which you mentioned, is, you know, the future of work. And I was especially intrigued by how machine hood blends this current social media driven influencer economy with the gig economy and comes up with this world where, you know, one's job, daily life, interest, everything are constantly being monetized and spied on. And this in turn leads to work itself becoming a performance. Like Belga says at one point that we are performing a service and the key word being perform. And which means that she has to get hurt on the job because that's what her audience wants to see. So I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about how you visualize this economy, which is both intimate yet strangely impersonal and kind of dehumanizing at some point. Yeah. As you said, 100% inspired by, you know, current events. I drafted machine hood in 2017. So things are changing very rapidly, but I think, you know, we can still see the impact that social media has had on the way many of us live, especially, you know, upcoming generations, their assumptions about the type of work they can do and their earning power on the internet. And again, kind of weaving in with this idea of how are people going to earn a living, right? One of the things we've seen over the past century is or even half century is the growth in entertainment industries, right? Look at the video game industry, which didn't even exist 100 years ago. And today is just a huge part of that particular sphere, right? The number of people being employed in terms of digital arts in terms of creation, self-publishing for books, we can see that everybody is becoming a creator and they're finding more and more ways to micromanetize. So rather than having, you know, 100 regularly published authors or, you know, 10 movie stars, we have YouTube stars, TikTok stars, Twitch stars, right? So many different ways, but everybody is getting a little bit less of a share. And so that integrated with kind of where I was seeing the gig economy develop, especially four or five years ago. And I was like, well, this could be a way for people to kind of piece together a living, right? You know, you have all these different income streams and they aggregate into something where you have enough earning power to go through and pay your rent and buy your food. And so thinking about that and thinking about the erosions of data privacy and the amount of content that people put on social media with very little concern for how that's being used. You know, the fact that they're exposing very deeply personal things and how it's become expected almost, right? You're supposed to be authentic on social media. You are supposed to kind of bury your heart. So why not just be on camera all the time if it's available, right? Rather than having to pick up your phone and record yourself, just have cameras everywhere. And the flip side of that is what it does in terms of transparency and kind of an almost libertarian view of information sharing, right? In that rather than the government having a one way ability to surveil the population, it's a two-way system where we can surveil what's happening in public on the streets. We can surveil what's happening with our government officials. There's no more secret, you know, city council meetings, right? How does that then change the dynamics of society and does the benefits gained from that kind of transparency become sufficient that it's worth trading off, you know, potentially having a camera in your bathroom, right? And you're not even knowing who's watching. So, yeah, so I really kind of wanted to show that and I had fun with the idea of wanting to shock people because if you look at morality and what's considered, you know, good moral behavior and how that's evolved over time, what is acceptable in society to show of your body, of your actions, I wanted to kind of pause it, okay, let's create this future that we would find shocking, that we would find very uncomfortable to live in. But those people are totally fine with it, right? I mean, imagine 200 years ago the idea of two people, two gay people openly living together, unmarried and raising children, right? Today, very few people are going to bat an eyelash and there's always going to be some people who are scolding. But generally speaking, it's acceptable not to big of a deal. That kind of thing, but, you know, 75 years from now, what are the behaviors that are completely socially acceptable and normative that, you know, today would be uncomfortable. And so I had fun kind of coming up with ways to challenge the reader's assumptions and, you know, put yourself in the headspace of these people that are living this way and think how it might be okay, actually. No, I mean, that was one of those things like you really have like zero, zero privacy, right? Anybody can switch on and what you do anything and it's like, yeah, so probably maybe it'll make people be better and like you mentioned, because of all this crime, et cetera and all that sort of come down in that world because you never know who's watching you doing what. And since which I mentioned about the dehumanizing of that whole thing, I want to talk about the whole non-human part of it and, you know, in design, for example, there's this concept of the negative space, right? And the negative space in machinehood is provided by the caliphate which is on the side of the pills and the biogenetic augmentation rather than this one and just sort of like a black hole in the book which sort of acts as a stand-in for many of us, of many of the people today who worry about a Skynet happening, right? As of, I think like two days ago was the anniversary of Skynet going live, right? Yes. Yes, that. Yeah. And even after the machinehood starts with this manifesto, you know, people are still afraid of Psi or sent in, you know, artificial intelligence as you call it. So I don't know whether that makes it a cyberpunk novel, but anyway, so I just want to say, so even with that kind of thing, the people are afraid of non-human intelligence, right? For somebody who's in that world of, that you created in machinehood, who's grown up with VKAs, with bots being so ubiquitous and doing everything for you and you're keeping up with the bots and you can't do without your own personal assistant. I mean, you can't function without your own personal assistant. Even for a person at that, to feel the fear that, I mean, this is where probably good SS speaks to the fears of its age, which is now, even though it's 2095, it's, you know, how does that work? I was just wondering, you know. I think people are always afraid of the ways in which technology can be exploited. Even automobiles, right? People were very afraid of them and driving them early on. There were accidents, they were terrible. And yet we continued to produce cars and more and more people learned how to drive. We increased the number of safety measures to where, you know, everyone's comfortable driving a car, but it's still one of the statistically highest ways of dying is in an automobile accident. And yet every day, you know, lots and lots of us get into a car or on a moped and we get out on those streets and put our lives at risk. And so I kind of think of it in that sense, you know, of artificial intelligence, technology, robots, you know, are smarter every day, right? We're putting more and more technology into them. But it's that sort of frog in a pot of boiling water analogy, right? Where it happens so incrementally that the things that are every day in our lives become ordinary and non-threatening. But those same things can still have a sort of id level, you know, fear in terms of what can be done with them. So when we when we think about car accidents, it's still a terrifying thing, right? Nobody, nobody likes the idea that we try to push it back, but it's always there. When we think of our refrigerator suddenly becoming sentient in a horror movie doing something terrible, you know, that's still there, right? Most of us will dismiss it. We're still going to use our refrigerators. But there's always that, you know, that hint in the imagination of like, what if this tool that is under our control suddenly becomes out of control? And so that's kind of where I've set this particular future. And that's where I think no matter how comfortable we get with robots in our lives and how non-threatening we make them when we manufacture them, how many safety features we put in, there's always going to be that small bit of doubt that, you know, what if all of those things fail and something happens and it's terrible? And, you know, people like scary stories, right? So I think that particular boogeyman will always be in our general consciousness, just like nuclear warfare, although it is not as forward as it was in the 1980s, for example, in terms of pop culture consciousness, it's still there, you know? Many, many post-apocalyptic stories are still after some sort of nuclear holocaust. Nowadays, it's equally likely maybe to be a climate holocaust as a nuclear holocaust, but that hasn't gone away. We still have the bombs. They're still sitting there. Someone can still push the button, right? So I guess that's kind of how I see why people of our future are still going to be afraid of some super intelligent self-aware AI and in some ways, maybe even more so because at that point, it's so integrated into their lives, you know, the lives of the characters in machine hood. They don't know how to live without these forms of technology such that if that did happen, it would be even worse, right, for them. Thank you, Divya. That was really interesting answer and I really appreciate having the acknowledgments of the book. You've kind of thanked all the beings that support our world biological in machine, mindless and mindful. And given that in pop culture we see a lot of this, you know, we should be afraid of the machines kind of approach. This is really refreshing and very hopeful. Like you said, one of the reasons why people are still afraid is because they can't predict how this thing is going to evolve but then it's like you have spoken before it's also our responsibility to raise them right, so to speak. I mean, I'm quoting from a recent tweet of yours where you were tweeting a critique of the Boston Dynamics bots and you said that even if and when they gain self-awareness, it is our responsibility to raise them right, so to speak. Your sentient dog isn't allowed to bite people. Your sentient child isn't allowed to hit other children. You have to teach your robots socially acceptable behavior. Now, given that AI ethics is a big part of machine hood and we've been talking about that. I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about this, how do we raise them right exactly? What do we do? Yeah, so I guess, you know to go back to what you were saying at the start of this, I have hope with these devices in part because I work on them, not so much the robots but you know the software side of machine intelligence studied computation and neuroscience back in the 90s you know it's always been one of my core interests is machine learning and how do we make devices more intelligent and maybe because I have that intimate knowledge I'm very aware of two things. One everything that comes out of the box is driven by what we put into the box a lot of people talk about artificial neural networks as black boxes but we don't really know what's happening inside and what they mean is we don't have like a closed form equation to describe how the inputs map to the outputs that said we are training them they are just adaptive mathematics and we're training the parameters in them with what data we feed into them and what outputs we would like them to produce for a given input and so that is an ethical responsibility that people are talking about today in the tech world all the failures we've seen with facial recognition systems down to simple things like the sensors in your hand washing sink all of these things have to be calibrated in certain ways and so what data you feed in what parameters you choose for those calibrations will affect then how human beings interact with that system and the other part of it is this idea that either spontaneously or through our own invention these machines will become conscious and self-aware the way that life forms are and then they'll be very upset because of how we've treated them and so they will rise up in some sort of violent slave type of rebellion and that is I would say the neuroscience side right in terms of what we know today about the brain about consciousness about self-awareness is very very limited we still don't have a very good understanding of it we still have only very rough models of it and so the idea that we're going to be able to produce that in a machine is still a fairly nebulous one I would say in a lot of ways it's like flying cars in science fiction yes, we can build a car that flies but not in the easy-peasy anti-gravity way that we see typically in most science fiction the same thing is true of robots at this moment and I think even for the foreseeable near future next century or possibly even to spontaneous emergent consciousness highly unlikely and so I was trying to kind of keep everything very very grounded and realistic with this particular book can I answer your question I think I kind of went off track of it speaking of being grounded brings me to this idea I mean just to switch track a bit from the AI to the what can I say the literal industrialization of the human experience if I can call it that or human labor the utopian ideal or an utopian sci-fi or when people talk about automation they're like don't worry robots and the bots and automation will take care of all the drudge work all the human beings will be free to follow their passion and their interest and do what they really love you know but I like how you keep it grounded that instead of doing all of these things that indulging in our passions and doing poetry or you know sitting chai in the Himalayas people are actually in 2095 just sort of augmenting themselves more and more with these pills with the zips and the buffs and the flows just so that they can compete with the bots or that too in a sort of a gig economy where there's really no contract and it's very tenuous in nature and all of that and there's no government support in terms of a contract so you still have to work and you still have to compete and in the whole so why you kept it so grounded and your approach to general labour rights because that to me was a large part of the book as well as the value of human labour and of human skill you know and of people I was one of the things that I was doing as part of my research and reading was looking at you know 100 years ago the labour rights revolution of the 20s 30s and 40s and what was happening to work and the human workforce at that time because we went through a big upheaval about a century ago with factories and automation but also the rise of office work and it's funny because I think I want to say like in the 19 teens or maybe the early 20s there were economists and philosophers saying very similar things they're saying oh we don't have to toil in the fields anymore you know the tractors and the machines will be automating all our farm labour and then we have these other factories that are going to be much more efficient at producing the goods we want and so people can sit around and they're only going to have to work 15 hours a week and we will finally bring the leisure class to everyone they can do art they can produce literature they said the exact same thing 100 years ago and when I read that it was like the switch went off in my head where I was like oh my god this is what's going to happen again we're going through the same thing right now with automation and AI is going to take over our jobs and what are people going to do and so the less skilled labour force is in a panic somewhat rightfully so just like the 75% of the world that was in the agrarian world 100 years ago and the academics and you know welfare people are sitting there going no you all get to finally join us and you know kick back and I'm thinking well because of being what it is we have an uneven distribution of wealth which means the people holding the money are going to want to increase their wealth and so they're going to find ways to employ people somehow and this labour force is not going to get liberated we're going to find other ways for them to work with the AI or around the AI and there will be entirely new economies so that's where actually a lot of the pills and the biotech idea came in is much like what computers and technology did for the 20th century coming into now I think biotechnology, genetic engineering will become somewhat more commoditized at least in the future of machine hood and I think it's quite plausible and likely that that's going to be you know the revolutionary technology of this coming century it's either biotech or it's going to be climate tech I don't know which one will become more pressing possibly both but when you have those kinds of emergent new technologies they tend to create their own economic ecosystem of producers and consumers and so that kind of becomes a large part of where I see the labour force ending up and as part of it we're going to need to change the educational system much like we did 100 years ago with increases in availability of basic schooling everybody had to become literate everybody had to learn basic mathematics these were things that people didn't necessarily have or require a couple hundred years ago you don't need to know how to read and write to tend the cows or plow the fields but you do to go sit in an office and write memos and so people will need more literacy in certain types of science we see it already with more and more people learning how to code and making the tools to make that easier for the average person to pick up and so this idea that everyone's going to be scrambling for income that they're still going to be working possibly working harder than they are today that they're going to have to take these pills that have maybe not the best health consequences that was just me kind of looking at how history repeats itself you know every time we've had a revolution every time we've had social upheaval whether it was communism whether it was going from monarchy to democracy we still end up with unfortunately concentrations of power and largely exploited labor forces and so yeah that was it sounds very depressing I can say it like that the more things change the more they remain the same the same yeah and so it's a different flavor of capitalistic economics you know I don't know who was it it's easier to sort of imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism okay right one last comment before we go to the reading one thing is this those of you who have questions in the chat we'll take them after the reading for those of you who are watching on youtube please type your questions in the chat on youtube and we'll take them on here so one last thing before we move on to the reading is I love the way you didn't sort of exoticize Indian culture and or even italicize words like gopuram or sambar or murkan didn't explain what it was I loved it best can go figure it out otherwise usually it's sambar is italicized and even if it isn't it's like the next sentence will have an explanation of what sambar is you know spicy lentil curry you know spicy Indian lentil curry that wasn't there so thank you for that so I mean something like this wouldn't probably have been non italicized gopurams and murkus probably wouldn't have happened 20 years ago and I'm sure things have changed was it easier was it a conscious decision you know things have changed especially in the last decade there has been a shift in US publishing away from italicizing non-English words because as long as it's written in the English alphabet it's fair game as a word and so many of our words I mean pretty much the whole English language is kind of a mishmash of other languages to begin with right and so I think there's enough whatever multiculturalism diversity etc in terms of both the writers but also the readership at this point that's become very global but it's kind of superfluous like we don't need to italicize a word let it just become part of the lexicon of English as it is in the entire global internet economy right so magazines most I think probably at this point many many book publishers as well have stopped that practice of you know it's a foreign word it needs to be italicized is gone the explanation part is a little trickier and I think that's getting easier but I think it also depends on how critical it is to understand the meaning of those words to being able to move through the story you know in the case of machine hood things like goprom and chapels it's not like integral to the plot you know if you don't really know what they're talking about you can just kind of read on and you'll be fine it's there to add flavor but you know yeah to the world building like authenticity right and there's always going to be details that some people don't know and there's always cultural context and references and anything that you write that some part of your audience is going to be unfamiliar with whether it's because of their age whether it's because of their family dynamics you know and so so I didn't have to most of the editors for this were fine with most of what was going on there were a couple of things raised kind of at the like copy edit proof reading stage where they were like it's not entirely clear from context what this word is referred to this non you know American word is referring to do you want to provide some clarity and I was kind of like I looked at it I was like no I'm not going to explain what it is I will just make it have enough scaffolding so that you know at least whether I'm talking about food or clothing or a mode of transportation and then after that you know I like you said tonight it's up to the reader to go and look it up if they're curious I had it in the early on I was still when I was still looking at Goodreads comments because there weren't that many of them and I wanted to read the good ones somebody had written that she was really intrigued by all these foods and so she had gone to look it up she's like there's so many foods listed in this book that I've never heard of and so so I thought that was fun you know it's that kind of thing it's like if you're you know go go and read up on it none of these are me inventing whole new things they're all in existence so for the people who know they know and for the people who don't maybe they get to discover you know and make their first part of awesome why not it's always good to discover in Indian cuisine but while on the question I'm not a fan of capsicum sambar for the record for the record yeah I had somebody else reach out to me and talk about the little bit in there about coconut chutney and when they only have frozen let's wait until we have fresh coconut before we make chutney lovely details lovely details all I can see is they wanted that chutney they wanted that chutney everybody wants the kitchen of the future for sure and I think a lot of people want the smart makeup and the smart clothing as well that you know reconfigures itself or you spray on and the makeup just does its thing perfectly to your face that would be nice conveniences you know Divya can you go on to the reading now please yeah words we have a very engaged audience is a lot of questions so we'll take that the audience will take the questions after the reading okay so I'm gonna read from the first part of chapter four the first three chapters kind of draw you into this main thriller plot and introduce the main character of Welga Ramirez but it's kind of a very fast tightly woven three chapters so a lot of times from my readings I skip ahead to chapter four where we meet Nitya for the first time and I think we have enough context from what we've talked about so far that things should be pretty clear so chapter four Nitya we built software that passed the basic test nearly a hundred years ago we have wise that speak of themselves in the first person bots that can navigate from a charging station to their place of work and yet nobody thinks wise or bots are sentient we're still waiting for an AI to stand up for itself to say I think therefore I am give me liberty or give me death we look for a desire for self-determination and the first proof of sentience no one has successfully programmed an AI to behave this way in a convincing fashion but I believe we're very close within a decade at most to saying this Min Woo PhD computational philosophy lectures on the artificial mind expert rating 97.8 out of 100 UC Berkeley Press October 2007. Nitya's fingertips moved through the virtual desktop of her office space opening research results from Asia Pacific's international medical journal adjusting the metabolic parameters in her simulation pulling in an updated code block from her current contract holder Synaxal Technologies they funded designs for pills the tiny biomechanical machines that could affect everything from intracellular transport to DNA and RNA editing she'd worked on multiple projects for them primarily with juvers for muscle recovery and repair a triple dose of flow kept Nitya's mind from losing the multiple threads of thought her agent Sita worked on the background tasks that Nitya assigned her Sita wasn't the most expensive but she could handle the information sorting Nitya usually had her agent sift through a steady stream of simulation data from other corporations and freelancers only bringing items of interest to her attention at the moment she'd set Sita to troll for reports that might relate to her sister-in-law's data while those records made little sense to her the tremors implied a neuromuscular problem and that pointed to zips as the likely culprit but why now what had built up after a decade of use or was her sister-in-law's condition something genetic and aged the trigger neurology lay outside Nitya's expertise but she could model through the high level research if she made enough headway she might even earn some tips for the work God knew they needed the extra income Luis used to earn the bulk of his money from context tagging gigs marking up visual media with labels that made sense to AIs but those opportunities had dropped in recent years as wise became better at interpreting human body language he took any other work he could find and he still got decent tips from rocket launches especially after Aiko Yi Station declared independence from India and China's joint governance with five sovereign space stations and half a dozen others the population in space had grown to several thousand they needed supplies trash removal and passenger transports private rocketry clubs like Luisa's could provide those but the tips didn't amount to much certainly not enough to save up for karma's gear what a world they lived in were good schooling required network to drools for children on top of all that Nithya's period was two days late probably due to stress but it fed her anxiety they couldn't afford for her to be pill free and out of work for a year not now there are multiple reports of attacks by a new protest group Sita announced casualties include flagged family member Olga Ramirez it took Nithya a second to recall that Olga was Olga Luis had mispronounced his elder sister's name as a toddler and the ridiculous nickname had stuck Nithya shifted her focus from her visual to her husband who sat by the balcony a disassembled bot at his side his jaw had gone slack his gaze blanked to his visual no doubt his agent had alerted him already she stood and peered around the sound proof wall that separated her work alcove from her daughters an assortment of colorful blocks sat on karma's desk next to something that looked like a pyramid built by gaudy karma pointed her haptic feedback gloves at the structure as her lips formed silent words virtuality goggles covered half her face Nithya used parental controls to check karma's feeds all school related thank god they hadn't interrupted the children with the news she expanded some live feeds from the site of Olga's injury and watched a medical team break through the floor of a hotel room are you seeing this Luis sent via silent text yes Nithya replied they usually avoided speaking to each other or karma during the school day except for breaks but Nithya felt extra grateful for the discretion now she couldn't suppress her gasp as new micro drone feed showed the extent of the explosion and Olga's burned body experts weighed in before the medical team made an official report Olga ought to live the same with her partner Connor and a third team member someone new a minute later the alerts roared to life again with the confirmation of Briella Jackson's death and Jason Kwanze Alexander Ortega too three of the world's wealthiest people brutally murdered by a silence who then explosively killed themselves Nithya sent Luis another message they killed the funders what kind of madness is this horrible her husband replied but I'm sure they'll be caught no one gets away with murder on camera rumors flew of a sentient artificial intelligence and the world's first life-like androids the machine hoods wide cast threat glared from the lower right of Nithya's visual blessings from the machine hood sees all pill and drug production by March 19 or we will make it happen a new era awaits mankind she expanded the smaller text below it the time has come to end the distinction between organic and inorganic intelligence all of us are intelligent machines all of us deserve the rights of personhood we appeal to the rest of humankind to follow these principles and while we prefer a peaceful transfer of power history proves that human beings will not relinquish their ownership of other intelligences we believe that the rights of machine hood can only be taken by force we hereby declare our intention to ensure our rights by any and all means necessary humans of this universe you have a choice stand with the machine hood or render yourselves extinct wonderful now guys you see why you have to have to read this book just go on to the questions the first one Vishwajit asks who apologizes in advance for having read only a small small part of the book and in case you already answered his question in the book which I think you should have but his question is where would you draw the line between human conscious intelligence and artificial intelligence not just the current state which is narrow but what it could be a hundred years from now do you ever believe the line would completely disappear in the future yeah yes the book definitely addresses this particular question and I think the latter third of it really explores it in depth but you know there's there's a distinction being made in the neuroscience community between intelligence and consciousness so it's interesting that you know in the question it's human conscious intelligence right so human like intelligence because we're already seeing that machines and machine intelligences can be very sophisticated can do things that human brains do very well and can do it better than us sometimes and then there are other tasks that you know are very intuitive for us and more challenging but in terms of just intelligence as in being able to move through and interact with the world and react to it definitely I think artificial intelligence will catch up and might even surpass even in a general intelligence sense the conscious part is the one that's more tricky and that's where I'm less certain that we will ever have conscious machines of our own construction because until we can figure out what consciousness is I'm not sure how we're going to be able to recreate it and some people think that if you have a sufficiently complex model of the brain it's equivalent but there are other people who think that a model will never be equivalent to the reality that it's that there are things with a physical neuronal system that can never be reproduced by a model so that is a very open question I think Thank you Divya for that our next question is from Suchitra who says hey Divya great book how you juxtapose the Luddite fear with the myth of Frankenstein could you talk us through how you came up with the plot and she also has another question where she says can you talk to us a bit about how you imagine sentience as a spectrum how do you visualize the degrees of sentience Okay so how I came up with the plot as I mentioned in the beginning the plot was somewhat highly iterated I knew I knew how the book was going to start I knew how I wanted it to end and I knew who the primary protagonists and antagonists were but the intricacies and the twists and turns kind of got worked out over time but ultimately I knew in terms of the conflicts that I really wanted to show that central labor conflict and then this more sort of existential question of machine intelligence versus human beings both in terms of work but also just in terms of pure existence and so and so that's where that fear factor came in and you know as Shana was saying there's so many stories in which AI or the robot is the sort of terrible scary thing out to get us and I really wanted to take that trope start the book with it and kind of hook people with that but then you know really turn it on its head and examine both why we have these fears and what a more realistic AI story could be in terms of science fiction and for the second question degrees of sentience is something that we can absolutely observe today down from bacteria and paramecium that move through the world all the way up to human beings, dolphins elephants, the higher order chimpanzees, intelligences and self-aware life forms that we have today and so that's really kind of where I see that we already have a spectrum both of level of consciousness in terms of awareness of the world and sophistication in terms of how we model the world in our own brains to capability you know we have high intelligences we have individual intelligences we have ant-like, insect-like forms of intelligence and then we have you know tool-making animals versus non-tool-making animals so we can see just on Earth that there's quite a great diversity both of sentience or consciousness and just intelligence in terms of capability and so that was a lot of the parallels that I like to draw philosophically in this book you know there's a spectrum in our living world there can certainly become a spectrum in the artificially intelligent or machine intelligent world as well and then the search for intelligence and the way we look at it it sort of also reminds me of Ted Chiang's The Great Silence we're looking for intelligence out there in the stars and the parakeets like we're right here we're also intelligent why aren't you looking at us why aren't you trying to communicate with us and instead of always looking you know always at the stars anyway the next question comes from TCV asks do you see a deep chasm between wealthy and middle low income countries in the adoption of robotics and AI will an international charter that creates a structure to soften the blow of job losses and social upheavals to be helpful mostly through intervention and not leave everything to the quote-unquote market forces yeah that's a very interesting question we could probably spend an hour an entire conference talking about that but you know the chasm is I think forming somewhat already in part because robots especially need a lot of material resources right it's a physical object that has to be constructed and therefore it's costly and you can also see that you know the need for robot labor is different depending on the population so in the US or Japan compared to a place like India or Mexico you know there are places where you have high density of human labor force that ultimately will be cheaper than building a really sophisticated robot to do that same thing at least for the next few decades and so yeah I think the chasm will definitely be there from that standpoint that said software pure software machine intelligence I think less so because that can pretty much run on your phone at this point which almost everybody has a smart phone now and you know you know there's a lot of there's a lot of I think having AI in your in terms of software integrated with your life that actually might not have so much of a gap between wealthier nations and less wealthy nations state intervention could get very interesting right from other types of assistance I think there's another way that state intervention can go which is to for example forbid the use of robotic labor in certain sectors in order to protect the human workers in those sectors where that ends up going and whether we let capitalism and market forces just kind of run their course or whether we take more action is going to depend on you know the political will of this next century and I'm honestly I don't know if I want to predict where that's going because it's been very unpredictable in recent times and whether we're going to have another sort of socialist revolution and whether those forces will really push back on free market economics TBD I think there's a lot more social and political will behind greater safety nets but whether that's going to be enough to hit globally and whether there's going to be cooperation there or whether the competitions international competition will again kind of drive us to a crappy local minimum that I think is very hard to foretell true I mean and I'm glad you said you know you can't talk so much about the next century or whatever and I don't know if you've all noticed like even in the early part of the 20th century and through this thing everyone kept referring to the 21st century the age to come and the 21st century and it's nobody talks that much about the 22nd century nobody really brings it up at all it's not part of the mainstream consciousness as the 21st century was in the 20th just an observation I think that's because at least for some of us growing up in that the end stages of the 20th century we're looking forward I think 50 years from now people are going to be talking more about the 22nd century right now is too far away right I mean it's as hard enough to predict what's going to happen 20 or 30 years from now looking 100 years from now is basically an exercise in science fiction right like you can you can make up all kinds of stuff but the branches are so so wide and there's so many different places that we can end up and there are so many disruptive events that can come along we still have all of climate change to deal with and who knows you know there's there's ways we can envision how that can go but there's many ways that it can go so some of those could have a huge impact on things like economic forces and political forces so yeah it's I think it's it's too far away to talk about the 22nd century right now and so it's not present in our in our conversations and then you and machine it is like just five years before very clever I was originally actually set in in 2115 and then I rolled it back because I was like oh too many of these things that I have in machine hood are going to happen way sooner and I was actually wanting to roll it back even closer to like 2050 or 2060 but then my character generational stuff didn't work out so I was like fine sometimes things take longer than we want anyway so 2095 was a good compromise so muted Shanna yeah okay we have quite a few questions from Siddharth I think some of them have already been answered but I'm going to take a couple of his interesting ones he says that he loved everything about the novel except maybe the Jitties characterization what he did love is the neo-Buddhism stand of the novel and he's asking how much of Buddhism did you have to grok to get that right and he also loves the poster behind you and what is that he'd like to know yeah I'll also answer his second question real quick which is a homo deus by Yuval Nohari which I really loved that book but I actually read it after I wrote machine hood so it did not influence but I was really excited when I was reading because I was like yes this guy gets it I was hoping to get him a copy of the book to review but couldn't find any way to reach him through my network for the neo-Buddhism stuff I I think I've always had an interest both in Hindu philosophy and then the way Buddhist philosophy kind of derived from that and expands those in its own directions and then I spent a decent amount of time researching a little bit more in depth especially into the Dakini which are I think a much bigger role is played in Buddhism than in Hinduism so I spent a decent amount of time in there did I get neo-Buddhism right? I had at least one Buddhist read the book who thought it was decent but I'm sure there's going to be people out there who might find nits to pick because I didn't have a wide variety of Buddhist readers so hopefully I got it mostly right and I was trying to be respectful I didn't want to demonize any religion in this book and there is a lot of religion in this book more than is typical for science fiction and as for the poster I think we talked about it briefly in the oh no maybe we talked about it before we started but I was supposed to go on the Joko cruise last year which is nicknamed the nerd cruise and it's basically like a floating comic con type thing almost and this was before the book was out and before I really had any official materials for it so I worked with a friend to do a logo and I was going to like put out flyers and kind of have like some fun marketing opportunities I'm sorry I'm noticing the sun is coming in my window and so I worked with a graphic designer friend to come up with the logo and the cruise was set to depart on the first weekend of March 2020 so needless to say I did not go on the cruise it didn't get canceled people actually went and they returned it was one of the very last cruises to sail and return but I didn't go for various reasons including all pandemic related ones and luckily they credited those of us who skipped out and so hopefully I will be going next year and maybe I'll still do some griller marketing go by then the book will have been out for an entire year so we'll see I think we have time for just one last question if you're okay Divya yeah so Tarun asks he makes a comment that EM Foster's machine stops articulates their anxiety about dependence on machines in the story the machines just stop they're just so dysfunctional without it presents a more dystopian view than Bellamy's looking backward from 1888 Bellamy's backward of course was a proper dream narrative sleeps and gets up in a socialist utopia and all of that so his question is in today's context can we envisage a more hopeful view of the tech mediated future to come perhaps in a solar punk mode I hope so that's a very interesting question and if you if you read the book not to spoil it too much but there is a moment when something like that like the machine stops happens and people have to deal with it I think I think the anxiety is always going to be there because we are aware acutely aware of how dependent we are on technology and how much that dependence is increasing right I mean it started 150 years ago between steam engines and then later the automobile but now with computers and cell phones and can we have a solar punk mediated future where the technology is there but maybe we're less reliant on it is a really interesting question it's one that I'm exploring a little bit in the next novel I'm working on a little bit but I think the way to get there is going to end up being genetic and biological means so basically using more organic technology so to speak building things that are basically life rather than artificial life and modifying what we already have and so that brings with it its own host of perils and opportunities but I think that would probably be at least my personal solar punk vision of the future is that rather than mining and extracting and building things out of inorganic materials we find ways to harness the power of life that's already there it's a nice, hopeful, optimistic way to end today's session yes thank you so much Divya I was mentioning earlier the machine hood itself is such a hopeful book given everything else so thank you for writing it and thank you for coming and speaking to us today I mean this conversation was fascinating and I really enjoyed it I hope everyone else who's joined in today also enjoyed it thank you Shenoy for being an amazing co-host thank you thank you to the Haskeek team Zainab, David, Jyotsna everyone who's helped us with everything in the background today thank you of course to the audience who's been so engaged and for all your great questions thank you for making this a great conversation thank you so much for having me thank you Divya, thank you for agreeing to come and thank you all for giving us an hour of your Friday evening to listen to us talk about this thing and we'll see you next month on the Haskeek book club as always at 7.30 on the last Friday of August whatever the day it is hope to see you all then again yes long