Science fiction author and undisputed Queen of Cyberpunk Pat Cadigan joins this episode of the Plutopia podcast. We explore cyberpunk, artificial intelligence, and her recent novelizations of classic sci-fi movies and Japanese anime. Pat tells us she has no plans to write her own movie scripts…

I am probably the wrongest person in the whole world to ever consider writing a screenplay, because apparently, you have to pitch this stuff. And my idea of a pitch is studio executives come to me and explain why I should give them time of day. I don’t make 30-second pitches on elevators to guys who can’t read. I’ve had just enough of Hollywood over the years to know that I’m probably not a good candidate for writing, for a studio. The other thing that they all seem to have is industrial strength ADHD, where they’re all excited about one project. And it’s all they can talk about. And then suddenly, you don’t hear anything about it, and everyone’s on to something else.

Previous Plutopia interviews with Pat:

Photo by Andy Miah. License

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Andy Cohen is a blues musician who, when he’s not on the road touring, resides in Memphis Tennessee. He plays mostly southeastern music that he found on old 78 RPM records. Andy’s performances include blues, gospel, country dance music, fiddle tunes, ballads, classic rags, country songs, and boogies. If there’s one thing Andy loves as much as playing blues, that would be talking about the blues.

I lived in Asheville, North Carolina in the mid 1970s. And I met a man there, his name was Walt Phelps, and he could play a little bit of guitar. And I asked him where he was from, and he said, I’m from Lawrence, South Carolina. And he was born in the same year as [Reverend Gary] Davis. He was in his close to 80 when I met him. I said, when you were a kid, did you know a blind kid that could pick his ass off? And he said, yeah, you’re talking about Gary Davis. I knew him, and I knew his brother, Buddy Pinson. I knew them both. And then he proceeded to take my guitar and he played “Candyman” just exactly like Reverend Davis taught me.

Reverend Gary Davis:

Andy Cohen, “Franklin Blues”:

Ray Fisher, singing Willie’s Lady:

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Plutopia’s own Jon Lebkowsky was an early adopter of digital technology and the internet. On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, Jon presents a personal history of digital tech, life online in the 1990s, the internet, and much more.

Jon Lebkowsky:

So I heard that you could get a pretty decent computer, personal computer, an IBM PC clone from a company that was called PC’s Limited. And PC’s Limited was actually a DBA for a company called Dell Computers. So I bought one of the first Dell computers, which was through PC’s Limited. And carted it home and I had this computer and this amber monitor, no color, just amber, that was it. And a stack of manuals like this [holds hands to suggest size], huge stack of manuals, one for each computer program and one for the computer itself and one for the monitor and all this stuff that I had to read through and learn. And I started kinda banging away on the computer and then it’s like, okay, Marsha, now what I wanna do next is I wanna log in via long distance to this system that’s out in California and it’s gonna be about 10 bucks an hour. And this led to a rather tense discussion. And of course, acknowledging who wears the pants in the family, we squashed that idea.

Currently cohost of Plutopia News Network, Jon was formerly CEO of FringeWare, Inc. and editor/publisher of FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer for Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; and blogger at Worldchanging. A member of the online community The WELL for over 30 years, he cohosts three WELL forums: VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.

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In his 1941 short story, “Runaround,” Isaac Asimov created his three laws of robotics:

In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, Cindy Grimm and Bill Smart feel Asimov’s laws miss the mark when it comes to laws of robotics.

Bill Smart:

Asimov’s three laws, everyone brings them up. They were a plot device by a guy – who had never seen a robot – to drive story. If you were to think about it for five seconds, they are a reasonable three things to come up with. If you think about it for ten seconds, they fall apart of course. We do need structures and we do need a way of thinking about the ethics and morality of a social impact of robots. But I think it’s way more nuanced – way, way, way more nuanced – than you could compile into a paragraph of text.

Cindy Grimm:

I mean something even simple like, a robot should always do what you tell them to do, they should always get out of your way, that might not actually make sense. If the robots are all trying to get out of your way and so on, but there’s a needed delivery or they actually need to get somewhere, then maybe the robot does actually need to take priority over the humans. You can’t really have those conversations when you start from the place of, you know, all robots should kowtow to humans and stuff.

Cindy Grimm is an American computer scientist, roboticist, and mechanical engineer. Bill Smart researches the areas of robotics and machine learning. Both are professors in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University.

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Don Norman has been a professor, industry executive, consultant, keynote speaker, and author. He’s worked in electrical engineering, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and design. He’s the author of several books, among them Design for a Better World, his latest; also including The Design of Everyday Things, Living with Complexity,, Emotional Design and The Design of Future Things. Don believes you should design for people the way they are, not for how you want them to be. He joins the Plutopia Podcast this time as we discuss his journey from 1988’s The Design of Everyday Things to his latest book, Design for a Better World.

Don Norman:

I wanted to do something that actually was much more important for the world – and the world is a mess and I thought, what can I do to make a difference? And I thought about all the problems that exist, but I’ve also said, gee, you know, lots of good people have written about all these problems. I don’t have anything to add. And I looked for the solutions. Well, lots of good people have written about the solutions. I don’t have anything to add. Most of them are technology solutions, however. But then I said, wait a minute, we have all these problems, we have all these solutions but they aren’t being done. Why aren’t they being done? And I realized the real issue was human behavior and that maybe that’s where I could say something. And so what I tried to do was put together the problems that I thought I could say something new on.

Photo by Peter Belanger

Wendy Grossman’s review of Living with Complexity

“Responsible AI: Bridging From Ethics to Practice” by Ben Shneiderman

Heavy Weather, by Bruce Sterling

Charlie Stross’s blog

Viridian Design Movement

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Conceptual media artist, activist and educator Patrick Lichty joined the Plutopia Live show for a wide-ranging discussion of current events and the future. We explored migration and borders, climate change, AI and art, and the techno-tsunami of new ideas.

Patrick Lichty:

When we think of the idea of the future, I think something that’s a relatively new thing I think is really, really interesting called Paleo-Future Studies and the idea of what the future … in other words, like the future isn’t what it used to be. And so what happens, I think part of the questions I was thinking about and asking was the matter of saying what is the future now as opposed to what it was, as opposed to “2001, A Space Odyssey.” We’re now thinking about AI, whether crypto technology, blockchain technology is actually going to take hold. And I think AI is going to transform a lot of things. It reminds me of an event very similar to that, when my father retired over computers coming to his insurance office, and I think this is as big of a shift. It’s as big of a shift as smartphones.

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Cory Doctorow has a problem with corporate bullies. In his latest book, The Internet Con, How to Seize the Means of Computation, Cory details how monopolies have taken control of much of the tech sector and are unlikely to give it back without a fight.

Cory Doctorow:

Corruption arises out of monopoly, so we know what our marching orders should be, and obviously it’s much harder under monopolistic conditions to do something about it. The best time to have prevented monopolies was 40 years ago but the second best time is now and we are living at a historically unprecedented moment in which there is interest in public service provision, good governance, good public administration and returning power over the structure of your daily life from corporate boardrooms into publicly accountable meetings held by publicly accountable agencies.

Cory is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and ball of fire. He’s written quite a few books, including Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitallism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Cory’s been bringing back muckraking big time at Pluralistic.net.

Portrait by Jonathan Worth

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Journalist John Schwartz joins Plutopians to discuss journalism and climate science. After two decades at the New York Times, John has joined the faculty at the University of Texas School of Journalism as a professor of practice concentrating on climate science.

UT has been very good to me and it turns out that I love teaching, and the students are great. And it’s also not a bad thing to be trying to launch people into the world of journalism, and especially – I’m teaching a course in covering climate, covering the environment. And I really feel it’s important to get people into that field especially – the science communication/climate communication field – and have them be good at it and have them come from not necessarily the Ivy Leagues but from every part of the country. And so doing this from Texas is especially satisfying.

John has written extensively about climate science and environmental issues. He is a strong advocate for science communication, and has argued that journalists have a responsibility to report accurately on climate science and to help the public understand the issue. He argues that climate journalists need to be more proactive in telling stories about the impacts of climate change that are already happening. He has also said that journalists need to do a better job of explaining the science of climate change to the public.

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Karen Levy is an author, associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University and associated faculty at Cornell Law School. Her research focuses on the legal, organizational, social and ethical aspects of data-intensive technologies, particularly in contexts that are marked by conditions of inequality.

In her book, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, Levy examines the impact of electronic logging devices (ELDs) on truck drivers. ELDs are devices that are hardwired into truck cabs and track how much time drivers spend driving. The devices were mandated by the US Department of Transportation in 2017 in an effort to reduce truck accidents caused by driver fatigue.

Karen Levy:

Back in 1980, trucking was still a regulated industry. The federal government set rates in the industry. It was much more heavily unionized. And truckers made about $110,000 a year in today’s dollars, so a pretty decent living.

Truckers today make about $47,000 a year. So half, basically, what they made 40 years ago. And so when you create these conditions, you end up in a position where people are going to end up breaking the law to keep the lights on at home. So if we think that that’s a problem – the federal government doesn’t really want people breaking the law as much as they are.

So they suggested a proposed rule in the Department of Transportation, mandating what are called electronic logging devices [ELD]. And what these are are basically devices that are hardwired into the truck cab that keep track of how much truckers are driving. The idea is that it’s a little digital tattletale. It tells the government what the trucker goes through, a wait station or is inspected. It keeps a record of whether or not that trucker has exceeded the allowable hours. And this is now required of all truckers in the United States.

It’s been required for about five years. And what my research has focused on is the evolution of this rule, of this technology, and trying to understand how the life of trucking and the day-to-day work of trucking looks different when truckers are being monitored this way versus before when they were just keeping track of their time using the pencil and paper.

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Technologist, thought leader and podcaster Tom Parish joins the Plutopia Podcast as we explore developments in artificial intelligence, privacy, the Internet of Things, and job security.

Tom Parish:

The difference about AI is there’s so much Hollywood myth associated with gloom and doom and what’s going to come in – the end of the world and all that. And a lot of worry about how it’s going to impact jobs. I began to think, look, it’s going to happen, it’s not going away. And one of the most amazing things about this version of AI is that it’s so reflective of who you are. You know, it can reflect back to so many different aspects of your own personality. It can seem almost like a real entity itself. And so when I thought about that from the perspective of where do we really want to go with this, especially if you were looking for employment, what’s ultimately more important than just knowing something about AI if you are out on the job market again five years from now or ten years from now? It’s knowing about yourself. I use the mantra, be what the machines can’t be. Be more you, be more human.

Tom Parish is a thought leader and facilitator of conversations around technology and the problems of our times. Tom worked with AI researchers at the MIT AI Lab back in the 1980s, and he helped move Motorola’s IT infrastructure to a TCP/IP-based network in the 90s. He worked with Motorola’s first Internet Marketing Group. He has 30-plus years in management in networking, cloud computing, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) and process control, enterprise software, mobile technology, customer relationship management, social media, AI, and multi-media production, as well as a career as a musician and a film colorist. And he’s produced a LOT of podcasts.

Key points:

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