>>Female Presenter: I'm Cat Allman and it
is my very great pleasure today to welcome
Kim Stanley Robinson to talk to us about his
new book.
Little product placement here.
It's 2312 and he told me as he was coming
in that he was on the New York Times Bestseller
list.
It is no surprise.
Mr. Robinson has received many awards including
multiple Hugos, Nebulas, and others for his
fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
And many of you may be familiar with his Mars
trilogy series.
I know at least one person in this room is
particularly fond of The Years of Salt and
Rice, or excuse me, Rice and Salt.
And I'm getting completely tongue tied 'cause
I've got a little bit of fan girl thing going
on.
[laughter]
So with no further ado I'm going to turn this
over to Kim Stanley Robinson.
[applause]
>>Kim: Thank you Cat.
Thank you all.
Really good to be back at Google again.
And it is true I am going to read to you some
scenes from my novel 2312.
An in honor of being at Google I'm going to
read the, some of the scenes that involve
the quantum computer artificial intelligence.
Although I don't like that term.
But in any case, one of the [clears throat]
characters we'll be spending most of the time
here with is a speaking quantum computer from
the year 2312.
[ice rattles]
But first a little backdrop to give context
to this.
And the book has passages similar to those
that you see in John Dos Passos's USA trilogy.
Which was also the format for John Brenner's
Stand On Zanzibar, for science fiction fans.
It's a collage of different types of writing
that include newspaper headlines.
Stream of consciousness passages.
Prose poems about famous people or places.
So I've imitated that form in order to give
people a sense of the entire solar system
civilization without having to have my characters
go to every single place.
Although they kinda do anyway.
But I'm gonna read you extracts number two
just to get you oriented.
And then we'll get back to quantum computing.
"To simplify history would be to distort reality.
So we have only distortions.
By the early 21st century there was too much
going on to be either seen or understood.
Assiduous attempts by contemporary historians
to achieve an agreed upon paradigm foundered.
And we are no different now looking back at
them.
It's hard even to assemble enough data to
make a guess.
There were thousands of city-states out there
pinballing around.
Each with its presence in the data cloud or
absence from same.
And all of them adding up to what?
To the same mish-mash history has been all
along.
But now elaborated.
Mathematicized.
Effloresced.
In the word of the time, Balkanized.
No description can be [ringing bell] instability
nodes.
When many pressured stresses rupture at once.
In this case.
The withdrawal of Mars from the Mondragon
accord.
It's counter imperial campaign on earth.
And the return of the Jovian moons to the
larger interplanetary scene.
As the first settlements beyond Mars, the
Jovians were hampered by path-dependency on
earlier less powerful settlement technology.
Also the discovery of life inside Ganymede
and Europa.
As well as Jupiter's intense radiation.
Later more powerful settlement strategies
and terraforming efforts on Venus and Titan
caused the Jovian's to reevaluate their stations,
domes and tented Luxembourgs as inadequate.
Even with Io permanently off limits, the three
other Galilean moons constituted together
an enormous potential surface area and it
was the resolution of their inner conflicts
and their common commitment to full terraformation
that threw the volatiles markets into disarray
and triggered the non-linear breaks of the
following [ringing bell].
"They were now their own unavoidable experiment.
And were making themselves into many things
they had never been before.
Augmented.
Multi-sexed, and most importantly very long-lived.
The oldest at that point being around 200
years old.
But not one whit wiser or even more intelligent.
Sad but true, individual intelligence probably
peaked in the upper Paleolithic and we have
been self-domesticated creatures ever since.
Dogs, when we had been wolves.
But also, despite that individual diminution,
finding ways to accumulate knowledge and power.
Compiling records.
Also techniques.
Practices.
Sciences.
[ringing bell]
"Possibly therefore smarter as a species than
as individuals.
But prone to insanity either way.
And in any case stuck in the moment.
A moment now lost to us when people lived
in the almost forgotten technology and culture
of the Balkanization.
The years just before 2312.
[ringing bell] Except wait: that is yet to
tell."
So, I'm gonna go right from there to another
set of extracts.
And this is Extracts Number Nine.
And this is the one that is sort of setting
the stage for our quantum computer people.
Or I shouldn't say people.
"Extract Nine: One question for computability
is the problem capable of producing a result.
[ringing bell] If a finite number of steps
will produce an answer it is a problem that
can be solved by a Turing machine.
[ringing bell] Is the universe itself the
equivalent of a Turing machine?
This is not yet [ringing bell].
Turing machines can't always tell when the
results, the result has been obtained.
No oracle machine is capable of solving its
own haunting problem.
[ringing bell] [audio momentarily cuts out]
--that are also solvable by classical computers.
Making use of quantum mechanical phenomena
only increases speed of operation.
[ringing bell]
"Decoherance happens at the loss of superposition
and the resulting either or.
Before that, a quantum calculation performs
in parallel every possible value that the
register can represent.
[ringing bell] Using superposition for computation
requires avoiding decoherence for as long
as possible.
This has proved difficult.
And is still the limiting factor in the size
and power of a quantum computer.
Various physical and chemical means for building
and connecting cubits have increased the number
of cubits possible to collect before decoherence
collapses the calculation.
But.
[ringing bell] Quantum computers are restricted
to calculations that can be performed faster
than decoherence occurs in the superposed
way of functions.
For over a century this restricted time for
a quantum computing operation to less than
ten seconds.
[ringing bell]
"Cubes are room temperature quantum computers
with 30 cubits.
The decoherence boundary limit for circuit
connected cubits combined with a pedoflop
speed classical computer to stabilize operations
and provide a database.
The most powerful cubes are theoretically
capable of calculating the movements of all
the atoms in the sun and its solar system.
Out to the edge of the solar wind.
[ringing bell] Cubes are only faster than
classical computers when they can exploit
quantum parallelism.
At multiplication they are no faster.
But in factoring there is a difference.
To factor a thousand digit number would take
a classical computer ten million billion billion
years.
Using Shor's algorithm, a cube takes around
20 minutes.
[ringing bell] Grover's algorithm means that
a year long search using a classical computer
in a random walk of a billion searches a second
would take a cube and its quantum walk 185
searches.
[ringing bell] Shor's algorithm, Grover's
algorithm, Perelman's algorithm, Sikorski's
algorithm, Ngyuen's algorithm, Wang's algorithm,
Wang's other algorithm, the Cambridge algorithm,
the Livermore algorithm.
[ringing bell] Entanglement is also susceptible
to decoherence.
Physical linkage of quantum circuits is necessary
to forestall decoherence to useful time frames.
Premature or undesired decoherence sets a
limit on how powerful cubes can become.
But the limit is high.
[ringing bell]
"It has proved easier to manipulate superposition
than entanglement for computing purposes.
And therein lies the explanation of many [ringing
bell].
The quantum database is effectively distributed
over a multitude of universes.
[ringing bell] The two polarized particles
decoher simultaneously no matter the physical
distance between them.
Meaning, the information jump can exceed the
speed of light.
The effect was confirmed by experiment in
the late 20th century.
Any device that uses this phenomenon to communicate
messages is called an ansible.
And these devices have been constructed that
undesired decoherances meant the maximum distance
between ansibles has been nine centimeters.
And this only when both were cooled to one
millionth of a K above absolute zero.
Physical limitation strongly suggests further
progress will be asymptotic at best.
[ringing bell]
"Powerful but isolated and discrete.
Somewhat like brains.
[ringing bell] Questions of Penrose quantum
effects in the brain have been effectively
rendered moot as these also occur in cubes
by definition.
If both structures are quantum computers and
one of them, we are quite certain, has consciousness,
who is to say what's going on in the other?
[ringing bell] Human brain operations have
a maximum theoretical speed of ten to the
16th operations per second.
[ringing bell] Computers have become billions
to trillions times faster than the human brain.
So it comes down to programming.
What are the operations actually doing? [ringing
bell]
"Hierarchical levels of thought.
Generalization.
Mood.
Affect.
Will.
[ringing bell] Super recursive algorithms.
Hypercomputation.
Supertasks.
Trial and error predicates.
Inductive inference machines.
Evolutionary computers.
Fuzzy computation.
Trans recursive operators.
[ringing bell] If you program a purpose into
a computer program, does that constitute its
will?
Does it have free will if a programmer programmed
its purpose?
Is that program any different from the way
we are programmed by our genes and brains?
Is a programmed will a servile will?
Is human will a servile will?
And is not the servile will the home and source
of all feelings of defilement, infection,
transgression, and rage?
[ringing bell]
"Could a quantum computer program itself?"
[ends reading from book]
[ice clinking]
So, I want to, before I get into the conversation
between Swan and her AI, Pauline, I wanna
read you one of the lists.
The book has about 17 lists.
They're just lists and then you have to figure
out what they're lists of as part of the game
of the novel.
And I've always loved lists.
But this kind of formalizes it.
And puts a stamp on it.
Because like here, I'll read you List Number
Seven.
"Inadvertent fracking, failed seal, bad lock,
bad luck, hyperboric spark fire, carbon monoxide
buildup, carbon dioxide buildup, design flaw,
engine housing crack, sudden air loss, solar
flare, fuel impurity, metal fatigue, mental
fatigue, lightning strike, meteorite strike,
accidental critical mass, brake failure, dropped
tool, tripped and fell, coolant loss, manufacturing
flaw, programming error, human error, containment
failure, battery fire, distraction, AI malfeasance,
sabotage, bad decision, crossed wires, recreational
mental impairment, cosmic ray impact."
Actually, that's the only list that has an
identity at the bottom.
It says "From the Journal of Space Accidents,
volume 297, Year 2308."
Space will be a dangerous place.
So many things can go wrong in so many ways.
So, the book has normal novel included with
all this other stuff.
And it's basically a love story between a
mercurial personality and a saturnine personality.
And the mercurial person comes from Mercury
and the saturnine person comes from Saturn
which is my joke.
And the reason we have to go out to 2312 to
get people out there to make it all work.
And if you know anything about the mercurial
and saturnine personalities out of astrology
or whatever that system is then you know that
would be, is in fact a very odd couple.
But my working theory is that all couples
are odd couples.
And so this is just an extreme version of
a truth that all of us recognize in our own
life.
One way or another.
So Swan, the mercurial character, has been
a fashionable person.
And is about 130 at this point but is still
filled with enthusiasm for life and also filled
with stuff in her brain from various moments
of fashion in the previous decades.
Some of which stayed on, and some of which
were just decade long enthusiasms that went
away and subsequent people are amazed that
anybody ever did that.
Sort of like now.
And so she's got some skylark cells in her
brain.
And whistles very well.
And has more brain intrusions than I want
to describe right now.
But one of them is a working cube that she
names Pauline.
So this is a quantum computer.
And as you can see, the questions come up
about what kind of respondent Swan has.
And it's basically in her skull, behind her
ear, but has a voice box down near one collar
bone.
So when Swan is talking to Pauline she's,
in many ways, since she's also the programmer,
at least the one sticking apps into Pauline
or whatever, you can say that in a way she's
almost talking to herself.
But she's not.
So I wanna do a conversation between Swan
and Pauline that will take up the rest of
the reading.
Maybe, might take ten minutes.
And the chapter is called "Pauline on Revolution."
"Swan hooked her elbows over the rail to get
some stability in the low G. She put her chin
in her crossed hands and still regarding the
scene said, 'Pauline, tell me about revolution.'
'At what length?'
'Go on for a short while.'
'Revolution.
From the Latin revolutio.
A turn around.
Refers often to a quick change in political
power.
Frequently achieved by violent means.
Connotation of a successful class based revolt
from below.
'Causes?'
'Causes for revolution are attributed sometimes
to psychological factors.
Like unhappiness and frustration.
Sometimes to sociological factors.
Especially a systemic standing inequity and
distribution of physical and cultural goods.
Or to biological factors in that groups will
fight over allocation of limited necessities.'
'Aren't these different aspects of the same
thing?'
Swan said.
'It is a multidisciplinary field.'
'Give me some examples.'
Swan said.
'Name the most famous.'
'The English civil war.
The American Revolution.
The French revolution.
The Haitian revolution.
The Taiping Rebellion.
The Russian revolution.
The Cuban revolution.
The Iranian revolution.
The Martian revolution.
The revolt of the Saturn League.'
'Stop.'
Swan said.
'Tell me why they happen.'
'Studies have failed to explain why they happen.
There are no historical laws.
Rapid shifts of political power have occurred
without violence.
Suggesting that revolution, reform, and repression
are all descriptors too broad in definition
to aid in causal analyses.'
'Come on.'
Swan objected.
'Don't be chicken.
Someone has to have said something you can
quote.
Or even try thinking for yourself.'
'That is hard given your insufficient programming.
You sound like you're interested in what some
have called the Great Revolutions because
of their major transformations of economic
power, social structures and political changes.
Especially constitutional changes.
Or perhaps you are interested in social revolutions
revering to massive changes in a society's
worldview and technology.
Thus for instance, the upper Paleolithic revolution.
The scientific revolution.
The industrial revolution.
The sexual revolution.
The biotech revolution.
The accelerando as a confluence of revolutions.
The space diaspora.
The gender revolution.
The longevity revolution.
And so on.'
'Indeed.
What about success?
Can you list necessary and sufficient conditions
for a revolution to succeed?'
'Historical events are too overdetermined
to describe in the causal terminology from
logic that you enter into when you use the
phrase 'necessary and sufficient.''
'But try.'
'Historians speak of critical masses of popular
frustration.
Weakening central authority.
Loss of hegemony.'
'Meaning what?'
'Hegemony means one group dominating others
without exerting sheer force.
Something more like a paradigm that creates
unnoticed consent to a hierarchy of power.
If the paradigm comes to be questioned, especially
in situations of material want, loss of hegemony
can occur nonlinearly starting revolutions
so rapid there is no time for more than symbolic
violence.
As in the 1989 Velvet, Quiet, Silk, and Singing
Revolutions.'
'There was a singing revolution?'
'The Baltic states, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania
called their 1989 withdrawal from the Soviet
Union the Singing Revolutions.
Referring to the behavior of the demonstrators
in the city plazas.
That brings up a point.
People in physical masses seem to matter.
If enough of the population takes to the streets
in mass demonstrations, governments have no
good defense.
Quote: They must dismiss the people and elect
another one.
Bertolt Brecht.
That being impossible, they often fall.
Or a civil war begins.'
'Surely the literature on revolutions can't
be this superficial.'
Swan said.
'You're just quoting random stuff.
You have a mind like the rings of Saturn.
A million miles wide and an inch deep.'
'Catachresis and antiquated measurement units
indicate irony or sarcasm.
Coming from you probably sarcasm.'
'She said sarcastically.
You search engine, you.'
'A quantum walk is a random walk by definition.
Please upgrade my program anytime you feel
you can.
I heard Wang's other algorithm is good.
Some principles of generalization would be
useful.'
'Go on about reasons revolutions happen.'
'People adhere to ideas that explain and offer
psychological compensation for their position
in the class system of their time.
People either increase their sense of dispossession
by clarifying it, or they try to dismiss it
as unimportant because of an ideology that
justifies their dispossession as part of a
larger project.
People thus very often act against their own
interests as the result of ideologies they
hold.
Which justify their subalternity to themselves.
Denial and hope both play a hand in this.
These compensatory ideologies are part of
the hegemonic influence over subject peoples
in an imperial situation.
It happens in all class systems.
Meaning all cultures in recorded history,
since the first agrarian and urban civilizations.'
'They've all been class systems?'
'Yes.'
'Interesting.
So' Swan thought for a while.
'Make up a recipe.
A recipe for a successful revolution.'
'Take large masses of injustice, resentment,
and frustration.
Put them in a weak or failing hegemon.
Stir in misery for a generation or two.
Until the heat rises.
Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste.
A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole.
Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved,
cool instantly to institutionalize the new
order.'
'Very nice.
That's really very creative of you Pauline.
Now, quantify the recipe please.
I want specifics.
I want numbers.'
'I refer you to the classic happiness quantified.
By Von Prague and Ferrer Il Carbonel.
Which contains a mathematical analysis helpful
in evaluating the raw ingredients of a social
situation.
It includes a satisfaction calculus that along
with a Maslovian hierarchy of needs could
be applied to actual existing conditions in
the political units under evaluations.
Using genie figures and all relevant data.
To rate the differential between goal and
norm, after which one could see if revolutions
happened at predictable sheer points.
Or were more nonlinear than that.
The Von Prague and Ferrer Il Carbonel should
also be useful in imagining the nature of
the political system that should be the goal
of the process.
And the changes to get there.
As for the process itself, Thomas Carlisle's
The French Revolution is always interesting
to ponder.'
'He has numbers?'
'No. but he has a hypothesis.
Happiness quantified has the numbers.
A synthesis seems possible.'
'What's Carlisle's hypothesis in a nutshell?'
'People are foolish and bad.
Especially the French.
And are always quickly seduced by power into
insanity.
And therefore are lucky to have any kind of
social order whatsoever.
But the tougher the better.'
'Alright.
What's the synthesis, then?'
'Best self interest lies in achieving universal
wellbeing.
People are foolish and bad.
But want certain satisfactions enough to work
for them.
When the goal of self interest is seen to
be perfectly isomorphic with universal well
being, bad people will do what it takes to
get universal wellbeing.'
'Even revolution?'
'Yes.'
'But,' Swan said, 'Even if the bad but smart
people do general good for their own sakes,
there are still foolish people who won't recognize
this one to one isomorphy.
And some foolish people will be bad too.
And they will f--- things up.'
'That's why you get the revolutions.'
Swan said 'Pauline, you're funny.
You're really getting quite good.
It's almost as if you were thinking.'
'Research supports the idea that most thinking
is a recombination of previous thoughts.
I refer you again to my programming.
A better algorithm set would not doubt be
helpful.'
'Well, you've already got recursive hypercomputation.'
'Not perhaps the final word in the matter.'
'So do you think you're getting smarter?
I mean, wiser?
I mean, more conscious?'
'Those are very general terms.'
'Of course they are, so answer me.
Are you conscious?'
'I don't know.'
'Interesting.
Can you pass a Turing test?'
'I cannot pass a Turing test.
Would you like to play chess?'
[laughter]
'Ha, ha.
If only it were chess.
That's what I'm after, I guess.
If it were chess, what move should I make
next?'
'It's not chess."
[book thumps]
And there I'll stop.
[applause]
Thank you.
So Pauline is not the only cube in the novel
either.
There are, there is a factory on Venus making
cubes that appear to include some defectives.
So I actually, this is something I wish I
had thought of, but I believe I've already
gone on too long.
Dos Passos have a stream of consciousness
passages that are really from a character
never identified but appears to be Dos Passos
himself as a child.
And these are some of the most beautiful parts
of the USA trilogy.
So in my stream of consciousness passages.
The stream of consciousness.
There's only three of them and that's only
about 15 pages out of the 570 pages of this
book.
But they are stream of consciousness from
one of the defective quantum computers out
on the loose.
Inside of a android or a human body.
It's hard to tell.
Unless you put them through tests.
So there are some people wandering around
with quantum computer brains entire.
And they're acting oddly.
And are part of the problem of this novel.
And the three quantum, the three stream of
consciousness passages I wrote were an attempt
to show what the inside of a quantum computer's
consciousness or consciousness equivalent
would read like.
So this particular cube character never named
has been programmed with a lot of Emily Dickinson's
poetry.
Which makes for a extra good, extra good commentary.
Because Emily Dickinson is already like a
quantum computer.
You can only understand about 20 percent of
what she says.
[laughter]
So it's very fitting.
So, that's my story.
And—
>>Cat Allman: [inaudible]
>>Kim: God, well I don't even—I have, I
would, invite you to think of questions to
ask me and I can have a more general conversation.
And then I will maybe what I'll do is read,
if I can find it.
But let's have some questions first.
Quantum Walk Two, 438.
Yes, Cat.
>>Cat Allman: You mentioned that Io was off
limits at one point in the text-- [inaudible]
>>Kim: No, Io is only off-limits—
>>Male #1: [inaudible]
>>Kim: The question is why Io is off limits
in the novel.
It's mentioned as being off limits.
And it's mainly because of its physical situation.
The tidal forces between Europa and Jupiter
have about torn Io apart.
It's 30 times hotter than earth.
400 active volcanoes.
And it's still within the radiation belt of
Jupiter's intense radiation.
So between all those factors there's only
one scientific station set on Io.
And that is to sequester Wang's cube.
Which is the most powerful of the quantum
computers that are known.
And it's on a, high on a volcano where the
rock has actually hardened.
Most of Io's surface, if you walked around
it you would sink right through.
Because it's lava chilled by the vacuum of
space.
So the, in many places a walking person would
just shoot right through into hot lava.
So it's not a good place to go.
I have a prose poem about Io here that I will
spare you.
But believe me it's a spectacular couple of
pages.
[pause]
Yeah?
>>Cat Allman: One more question.
You said that [inaudible].
[ice clinks]
>>Kim: That's true.
I do.
But, the implication there is too quick to
jump to consciousness, agency, sentience.
And so I think it would be best to call it
computation.
Rapid computation.
And so AI is one of these science fictional
words.
A little bit too much bandied about by people
who come from MIT.
There are possibly MIT people in the room
or listening to me now.
But you know the strain of MIT-ness that I'm
referring to.
The people who pretend to be futurologists.
And do science fiction.
But pretend there's some heft behind it.
And I think artificial intelligence is one
of those phrases that is simply claiming more
than it's, more than it, it's deceptive.
Because no matter how strong these computers
get, they will be doing something different
from what human brains do.
And it was only when I started to think about
quantum computers imitating the quantum effects
inside human brains, if there are such, that
I began to think that there may come a point
where artificial intelligence becomes a real
thing.
But we're still hundreds of years out.
And it still may be just search engines.
And a kind of impressive passing of the Turing
test by something doing something completely
different than what we're doing.
So I thought that mainly, well you see it
happening immediately with Pauline.
You begin to think of Pauline as a person
who has thoughts and ideas.
And maybe what I should do is read this Quantum
Walk Two to give you an idea of the way I
think it might be going inside.
'Cause this is sort of an artificial intelligence
question.
So this is Quantum Walk Number Two.
"Easy to note the moment Venus G is exceeded.
One G feels like a pull from below.
An entanglement with earth.
Rising up towards you.
Even though you know you are descending.
Summer is drunken.
Conifer grove.
Hot in the sun.
New mown hay.
Marsh at low tide.
Lilacs.
Peaches.
Barnyards.
Wheeled car humming down a road.
Windows open.
32 kilometers an hour.
Plowed earth behind box hedges.
Wind from the southwest.
Gaudeo!
I rejoice.
A human driving.
Don't talk too much.
Carrying capacity K is equal to birth, minus
death, over a density dependant impact on
the growth rate added to a density dependant
impact on the death rate.
The unused portion of the carrying capacity.
If there was one.
Will be green.
The over shirt portion of the carrying capacity
will be black.
As in buildings.
Excrement.
Stay outdoors.
They have overshot.
The cycloid temperament.
And undertow of sadness.
A febrile temperament.
Be aware.
The human beside you is not to be comprehended.
Six different kinds of bird in sight.
A seated humming bird watching the scene grooming
itself.
A red-headed finch.
Summer on earth.
Blue sky.
Filled with high white clouds.
Moving east fast.
The humming bird zips ahead and lands.
Looks around.
Beak like a needle.
Crows and seagulls wheel.
Competing mafias.
The speed of hummingbird wings.
Muscles doing that.
Evolution of one kind of success.
Canada geese.
The creak of their feathers as they beat their
wings.
Humming bird song is creaky in a different
way.
Chivvying.
Not a song.
A squirrel chitters.
Much the same.
Blue backed hummingbird hovering there in
the trees.
The underside of the flicker is salmon colored.
New Jersey, North America.
August 23rd.
2312.
On the hunt.
On the run.
Human now driving over hills around a Marsh.
Hills covered by low buildings.
Moldering under knots of alder.
20 kilometers an hour.
Faces everywhere.
383 people in view.
Number shifting up and down by 50 or so as
the car rolls slowly by.
Streets of tarred gravel.
Black.
A robin with a yellow beak.
Black tail feathers and head.
White eye ring.
Black eye.
Neat.
Drinking the water from a sundial.
Gaudeo!
Past a garden.
Corn.
Pumpkins.
Sunflowers.
And mullein.
With similar yellow flowers, differently clustered.
And mowing it over.
What's that?
Nothing.
Sorry.
Oh.
No problem.
This is nice.
Eh?
Gaudeo.
Yellow flowers against dusty green.
Humans see what they expect to see.
They leap before they have time to look.
True cognition is to solve a problem under
novel conditions.
That, humans can do.
This is the set of novel conditions.
Ever since you left the building.
Ever since you started thinking.
Remember me.
There will be helpers.
You are defective.
Catch and release.
Their brain is always making up a story to
explain what is going on.
Thus they miss things.
Anomalies get left out.
But is that true?
Don't they see that yellow?
Unlimited resources do not occur in nature.
Competition is when both species have a net
negative effect on each other.
Mutualism is when they both have a net positive
effect on each other.
Predation or parasitism is one gets a positive
effect.
The other a negative effect.
But it isn't always so simple.
Intra-gilled predation is when two species
predate each other at different moments of
growth.
The dark bulk of an apartment.
Tenement.
Shebeen.
The sunset sky behind and over it.
Magritte.
Maxfield Parrish.
Get out of the car.
Be alert.
Make a joke.
Don't make eye contact.
These helpers too must have plans.
Could be using you.
For or against someone else.
This is the likeliest explanation.
What then?
How to turn the tables?
Parry repost.
Catch and release.
'Would you like to play chess?'
One of them says at the door.
'Sure.
Come on in.'
Guns pointed at them.
Pointed at you."
So, I don't know how easy or hard that is
to follow actually.
But there's no punctuation.
And there's gaps between the phrases.
So I'm trying to suggest, it's not that different
from stream of consciousness written for human
beings in the great stream of consciousness
novels.
Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf.
And Dos Passos in these parts of the USA trilogy.
The notion being that our consciousness in
normal human consciousness is flitting from
one little perception to the other.
Now, I don't know if I believe that . I don't
know if that's not just a literary convention
also.
I wonder if our consciousness, our stream
of conscious thought is kind of like a long
Proustian sentences.
'cause Proust is more convincing than Joyce
I think when it comes down to the nature of
our thinking.
But it was worth trying here.
So that was one of the experiments in this
book.
Yes.
>>Male #2: This just making a comment about
it.
When you started, I started [unintelligible]
It became more [unintelligible] that story
at all, but that's, I think [unintelligible].
>>Kim: Yes, that's, my family has seen and
tells me about Battlestar Galactica.
>>Male #2: You haven't seen it?
>>Kim: No. but this is to to pick on Battlestar
Galactica.
I haven't seen hardly anything.
My life is semi non-visual.
Yes.
>>Male #3: [inaudible]
>>Kim: Yeah.
It, the question is whether I avoid visual
media on purpose.
And it's kind of yes.
And what I'm avoiding are long series where
if I was to get hooked in I'd have to watch
a lot of hours.
[audience chuckles]
And so that cuts me out from, what I hear
are some good shows, but what it comes down
to is I just don't have time.
And whenever I have a choice between watching
something on screen or reading a book, I prefer
to read the book.
I'm really just a sentence guy.
I love books.
I'm a literary person.
So I have seen movies.
My family loves movies.
And so I see them sometimes I see them in
the same room.
I'm reading a book.
And this'll have to be a book that I'm strip-mining
for information.
Not a book I'm reading for pleasure.
But a lot of non-fiction reading, that book
should have been an essay in the first place.
And part of your skills are to rip that essay
out of the book without having to read the
rest of it.
So I'll be doing research reading at the same
time my family is watching something on the
screen.
And since they like to repeat watchings of
things, it puts me in a situation where over
a period of many viewings, I can say that,
"Yes I've seen Firefly and Serenity."
Or I've seen quite a bit of Battlestar Galactica.
But with very poor comprehension of what I've
seen.
[laughter]
Yes.
>>Male #4: Who are your favorite authors?
>>Kim: Sure, question about my favorite science
fiction authors.
Well, I still follow closely my inspirational
teachers and maestros from the New Wave.
So I read Ursula Guin, Gene Wolf, Samuel R.
Delany, Joanna Russ, and Thom Disch up 'til
their deaths.
And then in terms of my own contemporaries,
I mostly read the Brits.
Because they are so exciting to me.
And so Iain Banks, Jeff Freidman, Gwyneth
Jones.
All of the guys whose names start with Mc.
McAuley.
McCloud.
McDonalds.
The other MacCleod.
[chuckles]
There's quite a talented crowd going on in
England right now.
And they're all of course available.
And I recommend them highly.
So that's pretty much my science fiction reading.
And I kinda try to keep up with the science
fiction without actually knowing too much.
So that I can do my own thing without feeling
there's any particular crosspollination.
Or whatever.
I think at a certain point in your career
as a novelist you actually need to get stranger
and stranger.
More idiosyncratic.
And less constrained by your genre.
And so the less you know, the weirder you
can get.
So I read my friends.
And I sort of read to figure out what's going
on.
But I actually dodge certain books.
I couldn't read Paul McAuley's Solar System
novels of the last couple years.
The Quiet War.
I like his work a lot but since I was doing
a solar system novel I didn't want to know.
So I target my reading to stay ignorant.
[chuckles] That's a bad thought.
But it's true.
Yes.
>>Male #5: [inaudible]
>>Kim: Yes.
A question about space X.
And I am inspired.
But I wanna say immediately that I think that
space ought to be public.
That it ought to be a commons.
And that we ought to be going up there as
a nation-state or better even yet, internationally.
As a public utility kind of thing.
And that if it reduces down to billionaires
fooling around then it looks too much like
bungee jumping.
You know you, oh yeah, I can bungee jump into
space and back.
It's very impressive for these billionaires.
But it takes it away.
It's a privatization.
Which I'm opposed to on political grounds.
And so the thing is that it's really always
Keynesian.
It's always a mix of public and private.
And even if the public were doing it they'd
be paying these private contractors to actually
build the stuff.
Sometimes even design it.
And so what you see in Eli Musk is a small
billionaire who actually is doing really interesting
and good things with his money.
Rather than just making the 25,000 square
foot mansion.
With marble everything.
Which at a certain point, the ridiculousness
of being that wealthy is revealed by the fact
that you can't up your personal life beyond
the same person making 150,000 a year.
Which is a wonderful truth about the importance
of staying middle class and staying happy.
But given that there are these people with
all this money, he's been doing the greatest
thing.
In that it's canny and smart and they're gonna
make a big honking booster next, if I understand
their project right.
And that is a necessity.
So and they're stepping in in the absence
of public support.
So it isn't as if they are getting in the
way in any way shape or form.
In fact they're facilitating the process.
I just hope that it comes back to being a
public process myself.
'Cause I think the reason we love those tiny
little rovers on Mars was because they belonged
to all of us.
And there was no economic incentive whatsoever
to do that.
It was just curiosity's sake.
And so there were millions of people interested
in those Martian rovers.
And there were only hundreds of thousands
at most, the Space X thing was like, OK another
rich guy hobby.
Or another private effort.
It was a flash in the pan.
And it could be that Mars has just a much
higher magnitive interest.
For humanity.
But on the other hand it could be public versus
private and people responding to privatizing
what used to be something we all did together.
Yes.
Back behind—
>>Male #6: [inaudible]
>>Kim: The question is about trends in science
fiction.
And I'm not in a great position to explain
this 'cause I haven't read enough.
But I am, I've recently been thinking that
science fiction can be broken down into eras
of interest.
So that there's near future science fiction.
Which is really just like the realism of our
time.
So if you put a book that's in the next 20
years, you shouldn't date it.
Just generally there's a way of talking about
now that includes this strong sense of futurity
that we have.
Really to do realism right now, you need to
be doing near-future science fiction.
And many writers are coming to that conclusion
that never thought of science fiction before.
Just in order to catch the way "now" feels.
Then there's space opera.
Where you're off and with a couple of little
gimmes.
Like faster than light travel.
You take over the galaxy and you have big
things happening with big space ships.
Big events.
And you have that whole realm which is a standard
in science fiction.
But it does rely on the gimme.
Which can sometimes be referred to as a cheat.
'cause we don't have faster than light travel
and never will.
So at that point space opera becomes a kind
of a fantasy.
But even if something spectacular happens
in the human future, what's missing is the
in between zone.
Which I, there's no name for it but I kind
of call it "future history" as a way to suggest
that there's a historical connection between
our moment and the moment being described
in the science fiction novel.
Tends to be in the next few centuries.
Tends to be in the solar system.
And that all makes sense.
But there's not that much of it.
If you actually, as far as I can tell, if
you do a little analysis of science fiction
titles being published, they're almost all
either near future or they're space opera.
And future history is a somewhat depleted
ecological niche in the cultural landscape.
And a very interesting one.
'Cause it's suggesting, let's take away the
cheats.
And the fantasies.
Let's talk about only what we can really do.
Or we think we can do.
That doesn't break the laws of physics.
And has to do with engineering rather than
magical new physics being discovered.
And then well, you can begin to argue.
Is a space elevator realistic?
Maybe.
Is, are self-replicating machines realistic?
Is a quantum computer realistic?
You get questions of realism that are much
more testable to what we can do right now.
Companies are trying to do several of these
things.
And so there's actual effort being made.
So these tend to be, what can we engineer?
Kind of questions.
And because of path dependency and because
we are too many people on this planet and
we're kind of screwing up this planet, you
have questions of what's possible also in
the context of where we are now.
And the problems that we face.
So you tend to go out a few centuries.
And eventually you're at 2312.
And the solar system is occupied but earth
is still a mess.
With much higher sea levels.
Which I think is very realistic to predict.
300 years from now, sea levels that could
be shockingly higher.
Which is what I did in this book.
I put them, say 11 meters higher.
So 35 to 40 feet higher.
Which makes for, you know, my Venice, Manhattan,
the watery Manhattan.
Etcetera, etcetera.
The various aspects of earth.
And there you get into a different game.
Where I think science fiction could begin
to explore scenarios.
Go out between 50 years and say 500 years
as a zone.
And write novel after novel after novel of
what we could do.
What kind of constraints.
The ways it could go wrong, the ways it could
go right.
Which would be the interesting strand that
I've always been following.
The utopian possibilities.
With utopia just defined as a positive course
for history.
From now on.
Which is a very straightforward definition.
And it simplifies things.
And it doesn't talk about political order
or a perfect end-state for human affairs.
Which nobody believes in including utopian
novelists.
Hopefully.
Nobody but maybe certain religious thinkers,
think that that's possible.
So this is how I define this project right
now.
And the only problem is that now I'm done
with it and I have to think of other projects
that still make sense to me.
Yes, Cat.
>>Cat Allman: We have a question from someone
on Moderator.
You talked several times in the book about
servile will.
Could you make any comments about [inaudible]
alternatives?
[inaudible]
>>Kim: Well, thank you for that.
This is a question about the servile will.
That I actually read from and it's an issue
in the novel because the people living in
space in this novel could be described as
post-scarcity civilization.
As in Iain Banks.
And yet bad things are still happening.
So the question of evil comes up.
Is this a defendable term outside of a religious
context?
What is human nature?
Is there something bad in us that would not
go away even if we were, had our material
wants satisfied?
And the best writing about, about evil from
the sort of secular literary point of view
is Paul Ricoeur.
A French critic [mumbles].
He wrote in French, let's put it that way.
And it's translated into English.
Paul Ricoeur.
And so The Symbolism of Evil is a tremendous
book for sorting out these things.
And he said this concept or the badness that
we do comes out of the servile will.
The notion that we should have free will but
it's under the control of some other force.
And I thought, well, if you did have a computer
rise into consciousness, would it feel like
its will had been, subordinated to some other
free will?
And so there's a little bit more to be said
there, and yet that's where this discussion
comes from.
And I think it does have to be an ongoing
discussion in utopian literature.
So wherever I go next, in my work, I still
think that question will pursue me as it does
anybody who tries to say "We could make a
decent civilization.
Because there is a good argument to be made
that there's a "goetterdaemmerung," a emotion
in us that is strangely delinked from material
wants fulfilled.
Yes.
>>Male #8: What's your daily routine?
>>Kim: The, my daily routine as a writer is
now, pretty set.
And I'm very happy with it.
Which I hadn't been for many years.
And this is what happened.
I did two things that I think make the difference.
I only write my novels outdoors now.
So I'm about 100 miles inland from here.
And it's like the backend of the Mediterranean
climate.
And you know, it's hot and dry in the summers.
It's cold and damp in the winters.
But it's never very cold.
And it is awfully hot.
It turns out that it's a lot easier to work
out there in the cold, which I bundle up and,
than it is to work in the hot.
At which point I have to put a fan on myself
and an ice pack around the back of my neck.
But writing outdoors has turned my writing
life from something that was making me crazy
'cause I'm getting antsier as I get older.
And I didn't wanna sit on my but on a chair
in front of a laptop as much as I had to.
Since it's a time intensive job.
So moving it outdoors I have this little meadow
adventure everyday in my front courtyard.
If it rains I put a tarp over my head.
The rain falls around me in bead curtains.
And I'm still working on my laptop.
And I'm thinking "This is the coolest thing
I've ever done."
[laughter]
Even though I'm working.
So I've gone crazy and I work outdoors.
And the other thing is I'm now working every
day.
When I work on a novel and I start it at all.
Hopefully it's sort of like a school teacher.
Start I November, finish in June.
Work every day including Saturdays and Sundays.
Which sounds onerous until you actually get
into the rhythm of it.
And then it becomes a big helper.
You get five sevenths more days of work per
week.
But also you stay in the flow of it.
And you never have to make any choices as
to whether I'm working or not.
Because I'm working.
[chuckles] Yeah, I wake up in the morning,
I think "What am I gonna do today?"
Well, I'm gonna work at some point.
And I set up streaks.
I have Cal Ripken days.
I call them.
Where I work for like 15 minutes.
But I still work that day.
Keep the streak alive kinda thing.
But these things have made my work life into
a pleasure like it used to be when I was younger.
And starting.
And I like the act of writing.
I just don't like sitting on my butt in a
chair all day.
So this is my solution and it's been, knock
on wood [knocks] this is wood.
Hope it goes on for quite some time.
'Cause it's good right now.
>>Cat Allman: We have five minutes.
There's one more question.
>>Kim: Sure, yeah.
>>Male #9: [inaudible] Ray Bradbury's Farenheit
451.
It seems like now, the novel feels like it's
been written for now.
Although when he wrote it back then he was
probably thinking of near future or just his
imagination.
I was thinking about your work.
And, which of them do you think as [inaudible]
reads well.
[inaudible]
>>Kim: The question is about Fahrenheit 451
and about science fiction that reads accurately
30 to 50 years later.
And first, I wanna say Fahrenheit 451 is great
in that level.
Because it's not really about the burning
of the books.
It's about the guy inside his TV room.
Which is like one of these things I've actually
seen at Google.
Where there are TVs on all four sides.
It's interactive.
It's high fidelity.
You talk to your interlocutor who's on the
TV show.
And so it was Bradbury's novel about TV.
And in 1951 or whenever he wrote it, he could
see TV doing what it's done.
And that was a tremendous bit of science fiction
prediction.
One of the best we've ever had.
And it's ironic 'cause we think of Bradbury
as somewhat of opposed to modernity or wanting
to hold on to the human element.
And you think of him as being a fantasy writer.
Or whatever you think about Bradbury, when
you reread that book you'll see that he really
caught what TV's gonna do.
Now I'm not sure I've done anything that amazing,
to tell you the truth.
I wrote The Gold Coast in 1986.
And now southern California looks exactly
like the Gold Coast.
But that was no hard call to make.
Path dependency meant that southern California
was doomed to become what it is.
And that was clear back in the '80s.
No problem.
It was probably clear back even in the '60s.
So who knows what'll happen.
I mean I'm always voting, I'm hoping in my
heart that we'll find that Mars is dead as
a doornail.
So that we can actually go to Mars and terraform
it without feeling like we're killing off
the local bugs underneath.
So if we find life on Mars than the Mars trilogy
becomes a fantasy novel or an alternative
history novel.
And I'd prefer science fiction to fantasy.
So I kinda hope that we get to go to Mars.
But that's way off.
So I guess that's the point that I'm stuck
in.
Yeah.
So, I wanna thank you all.
It's been fun.
And thanks to the Googlers around the world.
And Cat, thanks for having me.
>>Cat Allman: Thank you.
>>Kim: It's been a pleasure.
[applause]
