Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50

by John Joseph Adams

  Speaking of the law, there’s a very interesting scene in Lockstep, a scene in a courtroom that essentially seems to suggest that, in the future, A.I.s will make juries, and judges, and lawyers all obsolete. Do you think that’s where we’re headed?

  We’re headed there within about six months in terms of contract law. There’s a project called The Ethereum Project that is using the blockchain technology, again the technology behind bitcoin, not the coin itself, to create smart contracts, and what you can do when you have a smart contract is the contract itself lives in the internet. It’s fully distributed, decentralized, not controllable by any central authority, but you can build things like corporations out of it. You can essentially create the legal, contractual structure of a corporation within the decentralized blockchain, and it is a kind of automaton. It will follow the rules that have been laid down for it to the letter. It will never cheat. You can open-source it so everyone can see the code, and everyone can see exactly what it does on the blockchain. It will never cheat. It will always follow the rules. And it will function as the architecture, if you will, of a company. That is 2014. So, if I’m claiming in Lockstep that at some point legal apparatus might be replaced by computerized systems, I’m only barely avoiding being out of date.

  Another really interesting thing in the book is some of the politics involved. On one world that Toby visits, there’s something called the DeMarsh model, where there’s a woman who, by some statistical process, has been chosen to be a representative.

  There’s a network protocol called Promise Theory where, basically, the nodes of the network do not inherently trust one another. They make promises, and you build up the network according to who actually follows through on their promises. One of the things they found with creating networks in Promise Theory was that these networks tend to develop delegation as an emergent property. Certain nodes would be delegated authority by other nodes because it was simply cheaper in computing cycles, and the reason is—let’s flip this around to human beings—if you as a voter know somebody who always votes the way you vote, why not hand them your vote so you don’t have to bother with the process? This is what delegation of authority actually is, and it’s actually something you can model and build as a network process. So thousands of millions of people vote exactly the same way as this one particular woman in the civilization in Lockstep, so she is actually made into their delegate by the system itself. She’s not voted in. She doesn’t run a campaign. She’s just designated as their representative because she always votes the way they would vote.

  I actually heard you say that, in one of your earlier novels, you came up with something like four different new political systems. Are there any political ideas that you’ve come up with that you particularly want to share with people?

  In my 2005 novel, Lady of Mazes, yes, I was inventing political systems left, right, and center just because of the way I built the world. That’s a novel that explores the idea that technology is legislation, that introducing a technology is functionally equivalent to legislating some change in society, and in Lady of Mazes, people have the legal rights to determine what technologies will be allowed in their vicinity, shall we say, in their little slice of reality. Because if you don’t have that right, if you can’t control the technology that operates around you, then you don’t control part of the legislative landscape that controls your rights, essentially. So in the course of exploring that idea, I did have to, or I naturally came up with a bunch of different ways of governing. It was a lot of fun.

  Back in episode sixty-two, I had my friend Tobias Buckell on the show to talk about ecology in science fiction, and in that episode he said I had to ask you about your idea of Thalience, so I guess this is my chance. I think this is what you were alluding to earlier, when you were talking about the personhood of mountains and streams and things like that, but could you elaborate on what you mean by Thalience?

  Yes, it’s a kind of thorny problem. This came up in my first novel, Ventas. One of the questions I was trying to answer was if you create an artificial intelligence that can think about the world and see problems and try and solve them on its own, is this your own hand in the puppet or is this something independent of you, is this something different? In Ventus, a nanotech-based terraforming system fails to recognize the human colonists when they arrive on the planet and knocks them back into the Stone Age. This system, which is an artificial intelligence, distributed a system that is basically woven through the entire ecosystem and controls the ecosystem. It’s essentially the representative of the trees, and the plants, and the grass, and the animals, and the dirt. And because it has gone its own way, it develops its own perspective, essentially, and that is what I call Thalience. You could call it the awakening of nature.

  If you flip that back to current day and to the world we live in now, you can imagine giving a pod of whales a bitcoin wallet, and giving that same pod of whales a distributed economist corporation, the bitcoin or Ethereum-based corporate structure I was talking about earlier, and having it sell its ecosystem services online. You can do the same with a watershed or a river. Already in several nations in South America, natural systems are recognized as having rights. It’s not going to be too long before this becomes a pretty common way to view natural systems that are worldwide. Rights to nature is not so crazy an idea as you might think, because natural systems are always realizing our participation in the economy anyway. We tend to call them externalities. For instance, the wetlands around Toronto, what we call the Toronto Greenbelt, they purify and clean the water that flows down through Toronto into Lake Ontario. To replace that service with water treatment plants would cost x-number of billion dollars, so you can say that that watershed, the Toronto Greenbelt, is worth, or provides, x-number of billion dollars’ worth of ecosystem services. And if it already does that, why not give it its own corporation? Why not give it its own Thalience, essentially?

  These are all such interesting ideas and can’t really be covered in the time we have for this segment—

  Well, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words, and I haven’t been able to cover them adequately either. [Laughter]

  So people should definitely check out your novels Ventus and Lady of Mazes, and are there other websites or essays or things they should look into?

  You can certainly check out the stuff going on around bitcoin, so it would be projects like Ethereum—that would be ethereum.org. And many of the alt-coins like nextcoin which are using alternative approaches to solve the same problems as bitcoin. But there’s just so much out there and so many interesting things going on around governments and economics, a kind of sudden explosion in this space that I don’t think any of us anticipated. So a lot of fun to be had in following through on it.

  Then another thing I really wanted to ask you about is that you have a story in Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph anthology. Tell us about that story.

  That story covers a lot of the ground that we have just been talking about. The Hieroglyph Project is a brilliant idea from Neal Stephenson. A hieroglyph, in his language, is, well, take the rocket ship, the classic, golden-age space opera rocket ship, that’s a hieroglyph. It encapsulates a whole vision of the future, essentially. And what Neal wants to do is deliberately try and invent the next hieroglyph: The idea, the image, the vision that will direct an entire generation of kids to become scientists and engineers and problem solvers. So he’s brought a bunch of people together to write stories and try and craft hieroglyphs. My story in that anthology is about governments. It’s about, if you will, a government singularity event. I will freely admit there will be no Facebook of governments. Governments and government are wicked problems. They are complex, multi-faceted, and they don’t consist of just one problem and there will never be just one solution. The story admits this and shows how solutions from all kinds of different directions can converge in the very near future, a staggering new vision of how we govern ourselves.

  On Twi
tter you said that, in this story, you talk about a website where the only stance allowed is agreement. You can either agree or remain silent.

  Yes, why would you do that? Well, it’s because right now the internet is an argument machine. Internet forums are basically designed to cause people to have disagreements and fall out from one another, but they don’t have to be. If you study the way that people reach agreement, one of the core issues is that people disagree because they don’t share the same understanding of the meaning of words. In the story, the website is simply the place where you can define a term or define a concept and say, “This is what I think it means,” and other people can either agree with you about that or not. The community that grows up around shared agreements of the meaning of terms and concepts is a community that can solve problems together; even if they don’t agree on their actual politics, the fact that they agree on what they’re talking about in the first place means that they can actually move forward. What happens on the internet all the time is that people get into arguments in these forums because they don’t even know that the other guy is talking about something completely different using the same words. That’s just an example of one of the small problems that amplifies itself into making the world an ungovernable mess. But that’s solvable, and if you did solve it using just a particular architecture of how our online forums work then we might have a very disproportionate effect on how people cooperate.

  Then, in addition to writing science fiction, you also do futurism, essentially strategic foresight. You work for this organization called Idea Couture, maybe could you just talk about what you’ve been doing with them and what’s coming up for you?

  Idea Couture is a full-service consultancy, and our clients are some of the biggest companies in the world. We have offices all over the world, and I’m one of the futurists working at the company. We explore strategic foresight, which is basically solving the problems that people haven’t realized are problems yet. We don’t try and predict the future. Anyone who says they can predict the future is either crazy or lying. What we do is look for the places where uncertainty lies, where there are critical uncertainties that might affect an organization or business, and then we explore those with the client, find strategies and approaches that are resilient because you can imagine them working in a variety of different possible futures, and then help the client to implement those. It’s one of the services of Idea Couture, which also has a unique approach to using anthropology and ethnography to explore business and consumer spaces. And it’s just a very creative environment to work in, so I’m having a lot of fun there.

  Could you give maybe an example of one of the things you came up with that you’re particularly proud of?

  Actually, I’ll give you an example not from me, but from my associate Jayar La Fontaine. We were talking about an idea I called “forward warehousing,” where, if you have drone transport, you can create a value proposition such as “five minutes or it’s free.” You can do that by distributing your warehouse goods throughout a city in small shipping containers, if you’ve got enough of them, and drones transport items very quickly. You can always be less than five minutes away from the customer. I thought this was kind of a cute idea, but Jayar took it one step further and said, “Why don’t you add in the idea of the sharing economy to this?” People are doing car sharing and all these things, why not trunk sharing? How much space is unused in the trunk of your car at any one time? Most people probably have almost nothing in their trunks— well, why not use that as your distributing warehouse? You have this vision of cars in parking lots spontaneously popping their trunks open and drones coming out and delivering anything from scotch, to medicine, to pizzas to people nearby. Five minutes or it’s free. And the people who own the car is getting a tiny cut of that as part of the sharing economy. I have no idea whether it would ever be done, but I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t.

  Finally, do you have any other books coming out or projects you want to mention?

  I just heard a military foresight exercise I did about five years ago, Crisis in Urlia—I wrote a fictionalized scenario of a future military operation—that’s being published now. I’m not sure that that’s actually available to the general public, but that’s quite a lot of fun. It was an interesting blend of science fiction and foresight, so I’m happy that that’s coming out. And I do have a couple of secret projects that I can’t talk about, unfortunately. So there’s more stuff in the offing, but the next major thing coming down the pipeline will be the Hieroglyph Project, which is looking more and more exciting by the day.

  I guess we could just say about that other project that essentially the Canadian military hired you to fictionalize a scenario to make it more digestible to military personnel, right?

  It’s not so much that, but that when you turn a set of conflicts into fiction, you uncover all kinds of hidden assumptions. Simply by telling a story you realize, “Oh, well, that actually wouldn’t work, would it.” So telling a story by itself is an analytical tool. I’ve done this twice now. The first time was a project called Crisis in Zefra, for the same group, the Canadian military. That was excerpted in Harper’s Magazine a few years back, and this is essentially the sequel to that. I’m fascinated by the intersection of literature analysis and sort of loose storytelling, and how you can end up having a kind of rigorous storytelling come out of it. So these projects are sort of dear to me even though they might not be to more than a subset of the rest of the world. For me, they represent the place where science fiction meets reality and the world can actually be changed by it.

  We could keep talking about this stuff all day, but unfortunately I think we should wrap this up now. I’m sure lots of people will want to go check out your books, including your latest book, Lockstep, which I highly recommend.

  That’s going to be out on March the 25th. I’m going to be having a book launch here in Toronto at Bakka Books down on Harbord on the 29th at 3 o’clock, so anyone interested in seeing me just come on down.

  Great, we’re going to wrap things up there, and Karl Schroeder, thanks so much for joining us.

  Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.

  INTERVIEW: RICHARD GARRIOTT

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth, which he programmed in high school, is one of the first computer role-playing games ever published. Garriott went on to create the Ultima series, considered by many the high-water mark of interactive entertainment, as well as Ultima Online, the world’s first MMO. His latest project, the crowd-funded Shroud of the Avatar, is the spiritual successor of Ultima set within a new, engaging world.

  This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the host and guests discuss various geeky topics.

  Your Ultima games are absolutely my all-time favorite video games, and they really had a big effect on me as a kid. In college, I actually studied mostly law and ethics, and I really trace my interest in those subjects back to my years spent playing Ultima. I imagine that you must hear a lot of stories like that. Do any stories stand out in your mind about your games having that sort of big influence on people?

  Actually, it does, and there are a couple of stories, one in particular that I love the occasion to be able to retell, which was shortly after Ultima Four. If you’re an Ultima fan, you must remember t
hat Ultima Four was the first time that—especially in the Ultima series, but frankly, I think in any role-playing games on the computer—they went from just being a slog of fighting monsters and collecting treasure to being a game that both espoused virtuous behavior, and also judged you as you played the game as to whether you were playing in a virtuous manner. And the only way to really win the game was to behave in a reasonably virtuous way according to the rules of the game.

  When I was building that game, my team and my family were fairly skeptical; they thought that trying to make a preachy type of game, as they would say, might actually hurt its possibility of success. But when that game came out, it was actually my first number one best-selling Ultima, and I think really put the series on the map. I received a letter shortly thereafter from a mother of a young girl who she had bought Ultima Four for. She had never played Ultima, but she knew that it was popular based on its sales and marketing, and her kid had heard of Ultima before, but since she was trying to be a good parent, and kind of observe and participate in whatever her young child was playing on the computer, she sat with her young daughter while she played Ultima Four. She was so touched by how this touched her daughter that she wrote me a letter that basically said, “Hey, Mr. Garriott, I felt compelled to reach out to you because I have to tell you that my daughter has had a problem with lying and stealing and other things as might be normal for a parent to face with some children, and I have to say, when she played your game, she of course immediately fell into the same habits of lying and cheating to the characters in the game, but then I noticed how your game brought those behaviors full circle, and my daughter was forced to face the ramifications of that behavior, and she learned to reevaluate her own behavior, not only in the game but in the real world.” So she was extremely thankful and happy that she had bought Ultima Four for her child, because she felt that it really did have that sincere positive impact in her child’s life.