(Transcript below)
[00:00:00.00] – John Knych
Peter Watts, Canadian Sci-Fi writer, who has also worked as a marine-mammal biologist. His first novel was Starfish in 1999, which was part of the Rifters Trilogy. And then Blindsight, which we’ll be talking about today, was published in 2006. So first, Peter, can you share with us the origin of the story, which has influenced so many Sci-Fi authors? It’s considered pioneering in how we think about aliens. Can you talk with us about the origin of this book?
[00:00:29.10] – Peter Watts
Well, I was doing a post-doc in Guelf, about an hour north of here. I was reading a book of Natural History essays, edited by Richard Dawkins, who I’m sure you guys all know about. I don’t even remember what the name of the volume was. It was kind of like a Robin’s egg blue, and it had a drawing of a wasp on it. I don’t remember any of the actual essays, but in the afterward, Dawkins was itemizing a list of the various mysteries, the great outstanding mysteries of biology. And one of the first things he mentioned was consciousness. He said: There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t imagine a meat robot that does all the things that we do, but is not aware of what it’s doing, because it’s all just computation. And so what is this? How does it work? What is it there for? I mean, I guess I’m pretty sure the philosophical zombie concept predated me reading Richard Dawkins, but it was indeed my introduction to it. And my reaction was: shit, that’s right. I’ve spent my whole life just taking this for granted.
[00:01:53.19] – Peter Watts
I’m supposed to be a scientist. Why haven’t I wondered about this myself? But I was like 30 years and five days old or something at that point. I had maybe two stories published in thick ass little journals that nobody had ever heard of. So I knew it was way out of my league to even address a question like that. But that’s when I first started thinking about it. And it bubbled away in the back of my mind while I wrote other, less consequential, scientific and science fiction works until, oh jeez, yeah, about 15 years later.
[00:02:32.17] – John Knych
Thank you. And also, Peter, the format for this discussion, we’ll just go around the table, and I’ve told people, if they don’t have a question, they can pass, and we’ll do a roundtable. So we’ll start with Brandon, Noémie, Jenn, Sean, Joe, then we’ll just keep going around. So Brandon, do you have a question for Peter?
[00:02:51.24] – Brandon
Yeah. Yeah, thanks for being here, Peter. Really appreciate that. So I did, I just finished reading Echopraxia.
[00:03:01.09] – Peter Watts
Okay.
[00:03:02.06] – Brandon
At the end of this, you have all these notes and references and everything. So I guess my question is, what is your writing process when you add the science to it? Do you do a bunch of research first and then write the book, or do you write the book, add in your scientific articles as you go, or how does that… What’s your process with adding the hard science part of it?
[00:03:27.06] – Peter Watts
Well, back then, I mean, pretty much from the days of Starfish. Starfish was based to some extent on information that already… I was working on my PhD in marine biology. So there was a lot of stuff I just picked up in the course of getting my degree that inspired Starfish. Subsequent to that, I had a subscription to Science [Magazine]. When the Internet became a thing, dating myself there, but I remember the Internet waking up, I just set up an RSS feed to various science outlets, and without necessarily any goal in mind, I just tried to keep abreast of cool stuff that was happening in science. It has since become impossible to do that. But at the time, I could hang on by my finger nails. And every time I read something in science that was cool, I I would put a little sticky note on it or bookmark it if I saw it online, and I would make a note. So I just, over time, regardless of my project, I was accumulating links and articles that, Hey, this is a really cool thing to stick in a story somewhere, or, This would make a really cool theme or a point of a story.
And, of course, 90% of it turns into just world-building ambiance.
[00:04:55.19] – Peter Watts
It’s like, Well, this is something I’m not going to write a story about, but I’m certainly going to mention it in a bit of throw-away dialogue, so that people think that I’m a great world building connoisseur. So that’s the way it started. When I actually developed a theme, that this is what I want to write, there’s basically two ways that goes down. The first is that I read something, as was in the case of that Dawkins thing, that lights a fire under my ass and makes me think, wow, that’s really cool. I should write something on that. Or, and this has become, sadly, increasingly common, I think, I want to write a story about this. Now, I’m going to try and find some science to justify it. And I start looking around and see… And I mean, don’t take this the wrong way. Science is kind of like the Bible, in that there are so many publications and so many variations out there, that you can pretty much find anything to justify, certainly in terms of a science-fiction story that doesn’t have to pass peer review. You can find stuff to back up what you’re going for.
[00:06:11.13] – Peter Watts
And I mean, There’s, I think, close to 100 different theories of how consciousness works. Oh, my God. Excuse me.
Bobo. [Moves towards cat off screen]
[00:06:22.24] – Peter Watts
Bobo is doing his thing with the cicada here. Could you let this guy go?
[00:06:29.07] – Peter Watts
There you go. Sorry.
[00:06:31.24] – Peter Watts
We were promised a swarm of biblical proportions, right? Like, they were supposed to be like the 11 and the 17 years were supposed to all come out at the same time, and we were supposed to be devoured alive by cicadas. And what we’ve got instead is this weird, splotchy cat who is terrified of cicadas, but will not let that fear hold him back. So he will attack every cicada he finds, even though he’s bleeding with fear every time he does it. And we have to rescue these cicadas, which are really benign and innocuous little guys. I mean, they’re huge. They’ve got…their fronts basically look like the grill on a Buick. Anyway, sorry, where was I?
[00:07:23.01] – John Knych
Science.
[00:07:24.00] – Peter Watts
Science, yeah. If you want to write a consciousness-based novel, you can go with the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of all matter, like the charge of an electron. You could go with the idea that consciousness is an arena to mediate conflicting commands to the to the skeletal muscles. You can go with the idea that The United States, as a geopolitical entity, is literally conscious. And you will find… You can even go with the model that not all matter is conscious, but that all matter is consciousness, that consciousness is all there is, and that what we perceive as matter is basically the universe’s mother of all multiple personality disorder cases, that bounded metabolisms and so on are, in fact, manifestations of a consciousness that’s walling itself off from itself. You can come up with all these ideas, and you will find peer-reviewed papers that back you up. And that’s okay, because the point of the exercise is not to say this is the truth. The point of the exercise is to say, suppose this was the truth. Where do you go with that? What are the consequences of that? So you can start from any starting point.
[00:08:59.18] – Peter Watts
And in that sense, the 140 references that I stick, the peer-reviewed references I stick at the back of my books, is more like something to cover my ass against nitpickers, than it is… than it is proof against…than it is actual evidence of great insight, because you can find pretty much anything you want, you can work your story around it, and you can find something in a decent peer-reviewed journal that will back you up, and the ironic thing here is that I’m covering my ass against nitpickers because my formal background is in science. So I’m used to going to seminars where the grad students sitting in the back row are always trying to ask questions of the guy who’s giving the Wednesday afternoon seminar, not because they’re curious, but because they want to make that guy look like an idiot. And hopefully this will bring them to the attention of other supervisors and deans who will give them lots of scholarship money.
[00:10:02.09] – Peter Watts
And of course, the ironic thing is that people like that wouldn’t be caught dead reading science fiction anyway, because it’s like one step up from child porn. But yes that is a very long way…that’s almost as long as one of my bibliographies…that is the explanation for why I have a bibliography.
[00:10:22.17] – Brandon
Thank you. I think that’s interesting what you say about conscience. I think we talked with Joan Slonczewski.
[00:10:32.02] – Peter Watts
Oh, yeah.
[00:10:32.22] – Brandon
And she said… You have a cat!
[00:10:35.11] – Peter Watts
You have a cat, too! Lean to one side!
[00:10:38.05] – Brandon
It’s a dog.
[00:10:39.11] – Peter Watts
Oh, never mind. Okay.
[00:10:42.17] – Brandon
Joan Slonczewski was saying that perhaps stones have consciousness.
[00:10:48.01] – Peter Watts
It’s not a… I mean, you’d be kinda amazed at how not batshit that is, both in terms of some of the other theories out there, but also in terms of… There really is nothing in physics that has any room for consciousness. Thank you, Buck. Thank you so much, ahh. There’s like, and I would argue, and I’ve read a few…there’s a bunch of theories of consciousness out there that I haven’t gotten around to yet, they’re playing a shell game on us, they describe computation, they describe that, you know you’ve got, the global work space model, essentially, you’ve got this stage, and you’ve got a bunch of different voices in the brain, some processes, that are all yelling, the one that yells the loudest gets to be on the stage and be conscious. And I mean, computationally, that makes sense. Intelligence is easy to understand in terms of natural selection. You can understand how flexible problem solving and so on is a good thing and how natural selection would promote it. But there’s never a mechanism. Ok, so you’ve got all these different sub-processes competing for attention, and one of them gets to be center stage. You’re still just talking about electricity trickling through meat. So where does that meat wake up? How does electricity… you know hooking, one of my favorite analogies, you basically take a pair of jumper cables and hook it up to a steak, and the steak starts asking questions about consciousness. Physics does not handle that. Physics can handle all the neurocorrelates, but we do not have any physical explanation, as far as I know.
[00:12:39.23] – Peter Watts
And I’m reading an essay right now, or not an essay, a thesis, from a guy called Michael Bennet. I’m going to be going out for drinks with him in a couple of weeks because he’s passing through town. He’s a real up-and-comer in the whole consciousness idea. His background is in A.I., computer science, but he’s basically talking about building conscious machines. And he claims to have solved the hard problem of consciousness. And so far I don’t see how he’s done it. It’s basically, you know another variation of the…you know
If you could model, for a social species, you have to model what the other person is thinking, what the other mind thinking. And then you have to model back, recursively, what your reaction to their reaction is going to be.
[00:13:18.11] – Peter Watts
And having done some simulation coding in my time, it’s trivial to get any computer program that does that. I mean, for fuck’s sake, a thermostat, you can say, is something that’s interacting with its environment and responding to feedback. So all of these theories basically have this step, and then a miracle occurs in the middle of it. And then, coming out the other end, it’s conscious, but there’s still no reason for it to be… There’s no explanation for how that happens.
And so, one of the… It’s reasonable to suggest: Okay, we can’t really explain it…
[00:14:04.17] – Peter Watts
So maybe it’s just a fundamental property of all matter. And there’s a few… It’s called physical panpsychism. And there’s a few theories out there that kinda riff off of that. And when I first heard it, I thought, What a cop-out. It’s just a… You’re basically brushing it under the… You might as well say, magical elves are doing it. But at the same time, when somebody talks to me about the flavor of a quark as a fundamental property, I don’t say: that’s bullshit. I mean, we accept all sorts of things counterintuitively as fundamental properties of reality. So Slonczewski is not entirely… She’s not out in left field when she suggests that rocks might be conscious in a rudimentary sense. If consciousness is, in fact, a fundamental property of matter, and we have a greater level of consciousness than a rock because our matter happens to be arranged in a more complex and emergent way. I’m not going to call bullshit on that because I don’t have a better solution. I hope that’s not the case because I don’t like the idea that every time I kick a rock, I’m causing it pain or whatever. But really, who knows ?
[00:15:25.10] – Peter Watts
I mean, that’s what makes it such a cool thing to write about. Nobody can really say you’re wrong.
[00:15:32.14] – BrandoN
That’s very interesting. Thank you.
[00:15:34.15] – John Knych
Fascinating. Thank you, Peter. All right, moving on to Noémie.
[00:15:40.18] – Noémie
Yes. In both Blindsight and Echopraxia, so you have a range of different characters. Very different mindsets and origins. I just wanted to know, is the story influencing the characters? Or do you, when you start writing, have always like, this character is going to be in this book? What is your process of writing the characters and how they integrate into the story?
[00:16:03.07] – Peter Watts
Ok, well, there’s a couple of ways of doing that. First, you are very kind to not point out that character development is not one of my strongest suits. So thank you for that.
[00:16:16.08] – Noémie
It is. It absolutely is. It is what is so interesting in the story.
[00:16:20.08] – Peter Watts
But my character, I tend to come at these things in a puzzle-solving sense. I want to write a book about the dynamics of a civilization based on its outcast. I want to write a book about the possibility that consciousness is maladaptive. I want to write a book about the logistics of building the star gates, that we always conveniently go out and just discover that the ancients built them for us, so we don’t have to discover how to do it ourselves. And so, left to my own devices, I build characters essentially like chess pieces. They have to illustrate various aspects of the problem that I’m solving. And this was especially the case in Blindsight, because every character in Blindsight actually illustrates, embodies a different type of consciousness. But how I actually do it is: I’m writing a story about a linguist, or I’m writing a linguist as a character, and I realize I don’t know the first thing about linguistics. So I find a friend who happens to have a post-graduate degree in linguistics, and I sit her down and I buy her beers, and I get her drunk, and I poke to her about…
[00:17:50.14] – Peter Watts
It’s okay, so if you were confronted with an alien, what would you do? What would be your… Or how would you analyze the transmissions and so on? And I write everything down. Then, in exchange, I put her into the book as the linguist. I give her the same name, and I kill her horribly. In a lot of cases, What happens is… I mean, people tend to say that… People tend to knock me because I don’t have a great ethnic diversity of characters, although I try to get around that by giving people different surnames, and so on. But a lot of it is because many of my characters are actually friends of mine, whom I kill horribly in my books, because that’s just what happens to any character in any of my books. I tried to write a story once, where there was a happy ending, and the parents had their arms around each other, and they were looking at their sleeping child, and I just about vomited.
I was like, I developed diabetes from all the sugary-sweetness.
[00:18:56.18] – Peter Watts
I just can’t do that. It didn’t strike me. So, yeah, they all die. But if there is personality there, as opposed to a simple chess piece moving in a strategic way to illustrate a thematic point, it’s not because I’m any good at developing characters, it’s because I have interesting friends, and I just shamelessly steal personality traits from people that I know. And so if you do like my characters, you’d get along great with my buddies. Isaac Spindell, from Blindsight, he’s an actual dude. I haven’t actually heard from him in years. But yeah, we called him Buckeroo Bonsai because he was a practicing neurosurgeon. He was a martial arts expert, and he was a writer. He was a cool guy. I wish I knew what happened to him. There was a serious illness in the family last I heard, and he kind of dropped off the grid. But yeah, you can… You know, Rob Cunningham is an actual guy from a video game company. I actually think he’s a bit of a sociopath, but the physical characteristics, the emotional attributes, these are things that I just observe in other people and port into my books as though I am capable of character development.
[00:20:24.02] – Peter Watts
Of course, the problem now is that I no longer do science. I work at home. I’m running out of friends. And so basically, I’m at the point now where I’ve run out of people whose personalities I can steal. And I expect that my character development is going to asymptotically decline over time as more people that I know just die of old age. Hopefully, society will collapse before that happens, and so I can escape that particular fate. We’ve got till, what, 2040, 2050, before the studies say that we’re going to have a global societal collapse. So if I can just hang in there for another couple of decades, I should be okay.
[00:21:15.20] – John Knych
Thank you, Peter. I’ll make sure before I share this with the readers who couldn’t make it today, that there’s a spoiler alert, all your characters die.
[00:21:25.07] – Noémie
Don’t get too attached to anyone.
[00:21:28.08] – Peter Watts
They don’t all… I mean, In fairness, they don’t all die. Some of them spend the rest of their lives in perpetual misery and emotional torture.
[00:21:40.14] – John Knych
Excellent. Moving on to Jenn. Jen, do you have a question, or do you want to pass ?
[00:21:46.03] – Jenn
Yes, I do.
[00:21:47.14] – jenn
I thought it was interesting that you included vampire. I thought their origin was interesting. What made you include a vampire in a science fiction story ? How did that come about ?
[00:22:02.00] – Peter Watts
The answer to that is something that… Everybody out there in thumbnail land, put up your hands if you have heard this story before, how I got the vampire. Nobody else seems to. Brandon, you can go get a coffee. Everybody else. I was a guest at a Con in Edmonton. This was way to help back around the turn of the millennium, maybe just like 2001, 2002, thereabouts. And I had one novel out and one collection of short stories. I had Starfish was out. So I was like, and I was… And Starfish, it had… It was a New York Times Notable Book, and it had a collection of references at the end. Nothing like the bloated bibliographies I went for later, but it had a few pages of reference at the end. I was like, Mr. Hard SF. I had a PhD in science, and I was really cool. They stuck me on a panel about vampires. I didn’t know the first thing about vampires. When did Buffy come out ? There were people talking about Buffy, so this had to happen while Buffy was still on the air, so maybe it wasn’t 2001. Anyway, sorry ?
[00:23:30.15] – John Knych
Late ’90s was Buffy ?
[00:23:33.08] – Peter Watts
Ok, maybe it was. I’m sitting there, and everybody’s talking about various vampires. There was a cheap-ass Canadian vampire police procedural called Night Something or Something Night. They also have the word night in there. Maybe it was Night Night, with the second night being Kniget/Knight, like the thing in the armor. Anyway, I’m just sitting. And I have absolutely nothing to say about vampires, but I start to think, okay, vampires are really dumb. They make no sense biologically. What if I can come up ? Can I maybe cobble together some sort of a half-ass biological reason for some of the things that characterize vampires ?
[00:24:23.19] – Peter Watts
And I’d been reading a book at the time called The Cerebral Symphony by William Calvin, out of Woodshole. And I had learned from that about various aspects of the mammalian visual processing system, Mexican hat waves. It turns out that there are receptor arrays in our visual system that respond only to certain geometrical primitives. They’re a set of neurons that will only fire when they see horizontal lines, or vertical lines, or lines of particular angles, right? And we integrate these arrays that only fire when they see various little things, right? And we take all those various little pieces, and we integrate them further up the visual system into an actual image. But it starts off with us only responding to very, very basic shapes. And this light went on in my head. Supposing that vampire suffer from this mutation, where, when the receptors that respond to vertical lines, and the receptors respond to horizontal lines, when they fire at the same time, this causes some kind of a neurological overload and results in a grand-mal seizure. I guess they call them chronic seizures these days. That would explain the aversion to crosses. It’s not a religious thing at all.
[00:25:45.21] – Peter Watts
It’s a geometric glitch in their visual system. And I blurt this out. And I talk about Mexican hat waves, and I cite William Calvin. And I guess I go on maybe a little too long. It’s maybe 90 seconds for me to lay the whole thing out and explain it. And there’s crickets for about 30 seconds. And then the person next to me says, Yeah, well, I think that Spike would be a better boyfriend for Buffy than Angel because at least Spike’s honest about who he is. And so they never invited me back, and just as fucking well. Oh, look at this. I’ve just got a pop-up reminding me that I have a virtual book club meeting from 10:00 to 11:00. Wait a minute. I even got that wrong. I even set my alarm for the wrong time. Anyway. So, yeah, at that point, it was like, okay, this is kind of challenge, right ? There’s so many dumb things about vampires. But if I can come up with a neurological explanation that’s even semi-plausible for the crucifix glitch, another dog, doesn’t anybody here have cats? Then what else can I explain? My ultimate goal was to… I wanted to…
[00:27:15.20] – Peter Watts
Does anybody remember, back in the ’80s, there was this big coffee table book on gnomes? It was like a natural history of gnomes. It was like you had little line, drawings, and diagrams, and it talked about gnome life cycles and stuff. I thought, I can do this for vampires. I could do the proceedings of the second Biennial conference on the evolution and biology of vampires.
[00:27:39.05] – Orateur 7
And we can make a big coffee table book. And it can be… And my agent hated it. My publisher hated it. Everybody thought it was the worst idea ever. Nobody was going to buy a coffee table book on the biology of vampires. So I just kinda sat there. And then I was writing Blindsight.
[00:27:56.10] – Peter Watts
And as I may have mentioned, characters in Blindsight each illustrate a different aspect of consciousness. And… One thing I was playing around with was the idea how when you… When you are asleep and dreaming, you could say that you’re conscious. Because you’re aware of the dream. But also, when you’re dreaming, you don’t have your critical faculties. So if you see your girlfriend in a dream, and she’s just got one giant hair sticking out of the side of her head, as thick as a tree branch. That doesn’t strike you as at all odd. You’re living this weird… And also, you don’t have a lot of volition. You tend to watch yourself doing things, or you experience yourself doing things, but more as an observer than as a proactive participant. You’re not making these decisions. It’s essentially you’re watching a movie from the first-person perspective. And I thought, OK, that’s an interesting idea, because if consciousness really is a spandrel, if it doesn’t serve any useful function, if it’s just a side effect, then, effectively, dreaming is an illustration of that. You can be conscious of something, but the rest of your brain, the non-conscious part of your brain, is doing the heavy lifting.
[00:29:25.17] – Orateur 7
So you’re sitting there like a parasite, watching yourself behave. It’s a lot like a dream. And I didn’t have anybody in the book that did that. And I thought, you know, a vampire might fit there. You can talk about vampires with parallel processes. They’re essentially like meaty [?] parallel processes. So they can run multiple cognitive thread simultaneously. I mean, in a sense, you could say that every vampire brain contains multitudes because you’d have a different perspective for each. But at the same time, they don’t have any conscious control over any. You have these multiple consciousnesses that are in a constant dream state. Apparently, it’s a little similar to the Indigenous Australians talk of a dream walking.
[00:30:15.18] – Peter Watts
So I thought, OK, nobody wants my vampires. I’m going to stuff my vampires down their throats, whether they like it or not. And so I decided to… And it was… I mean, it was also a joke. I mean, remarkably, there are people out there who think I believe this stuff. I did a PowerPoint presentation from the point of view of a sociopathic pharmaceutical scientist for Big Pharma, who had accidentally stumbled on how to reactivate the genes for vamporism while they were trying to cure certain types of autism. And they were now trying to market vamporism as a product. And I got a I got an email from somebody actually working in the pharmaceutical industry saying: What company do you work for? You are obviously deeply embedded in the pharmaceutical industry because you absolutely nailed their attitude. But yeah, it was like… I had the pre-existing biological template for how vampires might work biologically. I had a vacant niche in the book into which vampires could fit. And there was also just something wonderfully absurd about… I’m going to write a hard science-fiction novel that’s crammed up to the wazoo with hard SF, like with peer-reviewed scientific references, and I’m going to stick a fucking vampire in it.
[00:31:45.19] – Peter Watts
What are people are going to make of that. And in that sense it was just a joke. There were readers who said: ‘Yeah I really liked Blindsight, but boy the vampires just ruined it for me. I could really do without the vampires.’ And then there were others who jumped to my defense: ‘No, no, the vampire is an integral part. Thematically, the book doesn’t work without them.’ Then, of course, there’s other people who say, Blindsight is just crap from one page to the next. But that was it. It was like there were about three or four different reasons for sticking them in. One was just a big middle finger to people who took hard science fiction too seriously.
[00:32:22.21] – Jenn
It’s really interesting. Thanks.
[00:32:25.11] – Peter Watts
Sorry, Brandon. I know you’ve heard it before.
[00:32:30.20] – John Knych
Thank you, Peter. Moving on to Sean.
[00:32:35.20] – Sean
Yeah, thanks. So full disclosure, I’m still a little bit away from the finish of Blindsight, so I can’t ask about endings or any spoilers, but I’ll probably hear a few anyways. I got enough of the way through to have some thoughts, but the main thing that’s coming to mind for me, and this might be a boring question, but you essentially, it seems like, wrote a book where one of the primary characters, plot elements, is essentially like an LLM in some ways. And now, there’s… I mean, obviously, LLMs were out for quite a long time, but now, they’re very much in the public. They’re the zeitgeist, I guess you could say. So I’m curious about how closely have you been following and reading and learning about the latest version of LLM, GPT, and these others ? How much have you, like, reflected on what you wrote in 2006, and like the research that I went into it at the time? And, I’m just curious if you have any… If it’s been top of mind for you, or are you sort of….you’re not interested in that connection or what?
[00:33:48.07] – Peter Watts
Well, the… The research that I’ve done has basically consisted of sitting back and everyday ego surfing on Reddit, And rubbing my hands with glee as people say, Peter Watts was writing about LLMs back like 20 years ago. I’m thinking, yeah, I nailed it. But in fact, the first LLM thing I wrote was in Starfish, which came out in 1999. In Starfish, I had these things called headcheeses, which are basically cultured neurones on a slab. And the rationale for headcheeses in the Riftors Trilogy was that the Internet had become so infested with self-evolving bots and malware, that it was virtually unusable. And so people were sticking these headcheeses as gatekeeper nodes into the Internet at large, because the thing about a neuron culture is it’s constantly rewiring itself. So it’s very difficult for malware that is programmed to hack certain security protocols. It’s difficult for that malware to get a target lock on a headcheese because it’s constantly in motion. And I had…And of course, these headcheeses, because they are basically like human brains, their internal logic is opaque. They learn by operant conditioning. And this turned out to be an absolutely major…
[00:35:26.12] – Peter Watts
A lynchpin of the book, the fact that you’re conditioned headcheeses to do certain things, but that they had internalized the wrong… They had internalized the wrong lesson. Because you thought you were teaching them one thing, but as it turned out, something else always happened in conjunction with this thing you were trying to teach them. And it focused on the wrong thing. The example I used was, there was a headcheese that was running the London underground. And it had basically learned to turn up the ventilators whenever a train pulled into the station and people got out so the people would not suffocate. But what it had actually been keying on was not the sight of people coming out of the tube, but it had been keying on a digital clock on the wall, which happened to coincide with the arrival of the trains. When vandals smashed the clock, it no longer had that triggering stimulus, so it stopped turning on the ventilators and a bunch of people suffocated. That was just one off-hand example that I used. That wasn’t the main thrust of the story. But you had somebody actually talking to this headcheese, and it responded, in hindsight, it responded very much like an LLM would today, right down to the point that it would make certain hallucinations.
[00:36:53.00] – Orateur 7
It would make cute little turns of phrase that didn’t make a lot of sense, but did, if you didn’t think about it too hard. I put a fair bit of thought into that. And that actually seems to have worn, seems to have aged really well, to the point where you actually have headcheeses now, there’s actually a company called Cortical Labs, which has created a mishmash of human and rat neurons in a box, which they are leasing out. They’re actually selling them for commercial applications now. I’m actually in touch with them. I’ve got them on my roller deck because they were actually inspired. They read a paper I did recently in The Atlantic. That’s super cool. I feel super vindicated about that. But yeah, we didn’t… I mean, as you pointed out, we’ve had the large language model template since the ’80s. Nothing’s really changed since then since then, except Moore’s law has allowed us to invest so much more massively, orders of magnitude, more compute in the same old model, so that it just becomes brute force, more powerful, as opposed to a more elegant process…
[00:38:17.14] – Sean
Has anything, a quick follow-up on that. Has anything about this surprised you? Or is there anything about current GPT that you, having done a ton of research and written about it and studied it, is there something new to this that you wouldn’t have expected?
[00:38:33.24] – Orateur 7
I mean, not really. Again, it’s not a… I wasn’t thinking in terms of large language models when I wrote Roarshock [?]. I was thinking about the Chinese room, which was pretty explicitly. It turns out that those are very convergent models. The stuff that’s happened, I mean, it’s weird. I gave a keynote address at a weird AI symposium in Madrid a couple of years ago. And I don’t know anything in A.I.. My formal background is in marine-biology. My PHD thesis was on the biophysical-ecology of harbor seals. the But…you know… One of Geoffrey Hinton’s colleagues gives me drugs. Apparently, I’m quite popular in A.I. circles. This Michael Bennett character I mentioned earlier says that one of his colleagues describes me as his favorite science fiction author who he hopes is wrong. I seem to have… I seem to have thrown a dart over my shoulder and hit a bullseye, or at least hit the board, with no formal expertise whatsoever.
[00:39:57.15] – Peter Watts
I did coding back in the day, because it was just that you had to write your own programs for your doctorate. But I never knew anything about computer science. I was like, the whole…
[00:40:13.01] – Peter Watts
Even my whole AI consciousness thing didn’t even occur to me until I was out of university. It’s weird that I write a series of books set in the deep sea, and while you have people saying, Oh, yeah, You can really tell he’s a marine biologist. He really knows the marine biology. Nobody has been actually inspired, as far as I know, to go into marine biology as a result of reading Starfish. But there’s shitloads of people who have gone into computer science because of the digital ecosystems I described in Maelstrom. There’s people who’ve gone into AI because of what they’ve read in Blindsight. It’s amazing how… It’s almost like the more ignorant I am about something, the more influential I become? I’ve got this theory that, when you are an expert in a specific field of science, you become encrusted with the state-of-the-art dogma of that particular field. Somebody pointed out that Isaac Asimov very rarely wrote stories in which biochemistry played a major role, because his background was in biochemistry, and every time he would come up with a cool idea about biochemistry, his formal training would kick in with all the reasons why it wouldn’t work.
[00:41:41.02] – Peter Watts
And so I think that to some extent, when you actually write a story based on your field of expertise, your imagination becomes strait-jacqueted because your own expertise keeps you from looking beyond the state of the art today and recognizing that there will be a different state of the art tomorrow.
[00:42:01.19] – Peter Watts
But if you have formal training in science, generally, you respect the scientific process.
[00:42:08.04] – Peter Watts
You are capable of more rigorously interrogating assumptions and tropes and things, then you would be if you had no scientific background. So I’m thinking maybe what happens is, by moving from one field of science in which I had expertise, into another field of science in which I had no expertise, but which still respected the same principles of scientific methodology, I could look at things that were more batshit in a particular field, while at the same time, being relatively rigorous in my interpretation of it, making sure that things didn’t actually turn into magic. And so I think there might be an interdisciplinary flexibility in that, maybe, that has allowed me to be more inspirational in neuroscience and AI. I mean, hell, it’s weird. I came out with a story in Lightspeed. It came up just a couple of months ago, but I’d written it years ago. It’s a long story. Et it got some real back stream buzz years before it came out. The co-founder of Neuralink loved it, wanted to take me out for coffee. The founder of Midjourney loved it. And what they didn’t seem to realize was that I was actually writing about all the things I thought were going to go wrong with Neuralink, catastrophically wrong with Neuralink, if it behaved exactly as advertised.
[00:43:45.00] – Peter Watts
The sense I got is that Elon Musk doesn’t have the first idea about how brains work. When he talks about removing the I/O constraints so that brains can talk to each other instantaneously, I think that’s going to result in a catastrophic implosion of identity. And so I’ve written these stories. And so I wrote this story, The 21 Second God, and it was basically about a hive mind gone wrong. And Shivon Zilis, wants to have coffee with me… Because she learned so much about the brain from my science fiction story, again, by a guy who studied harbour seals when he actually did science, which is disturbing in its own right. Haven’t really heard from her much since because I had to say, you do realize I’m writing about your company, right ? Holtzer ? Holz ? David Holz, the Midjourney guy, right ? Also loved 21 Second God, and his aspiration is to build a hive mind. It’s like the classic meme from 2021, where the tech company says, At long last, we have created the torment nexus from the classic sci-fi novel, Do not build the torment nexus. These are torment nexus-adjacent experiences I’m having. On the one hand, it’s super cool to be recognized and appreciated by people who are experts in fields that I have no expertise in, and who I’m just noodling around with my science fiction stories.
[00:45:24.09] – Peter Watts
But on the other hand, it’s a bit disturbing that they seem to be taking the wrong message from my… I’m writing cautionnary tales, and they seem to be taking them as aspirational. I try to keep up with what’s going on with LLMs, and neuromorphic models, and the various hybrids, and so on, I’m certainly no expert. But at this point, I know experts, so I can ask them, and I can make sure I don’t make any egregious boners in my subsequent stories because I just have this vast stable now of actual experts I can ask. But the thing that… Other than the sheer glee of vindication I get from the fact that I do seem to have hit a bullseye with some of my completely speculative and uninformed predictions, the thing that really sticks with me now is how people seem to be taking the wrong take home message from it.
[00:46:26.11] – John Knych
Fascinating. Thank you, Peter. Yeah, Yeah Sean asked the same question I had because…on page 117, you write, But pattern matching doesn’t equal comprehension. And you read all these articles now like, Oh, large language models, are they conscious? And you were way ahead of the game.
[00:46:44.24] – Peter Watts
Yeah, but again, I mean, maybe pattern matching does equal comprehension, because we don’t know what comprehension is, right ?
[00:46:50.09] – Orateur 7
Pattern matching certainly equals computation of a sort. And babies, young mammals, neonates of all species, learn by experience, by pattern matching, at some point, maybe past some critical threshold and something clicks.
[00:47:08.05] – Peter Watts
I mean, the general consensus, Geoffrey Hinton is basically saying at this point, that it’s possible that current LLMs are, to some extent, already conscious. And the consensus, apparently, amongst his colleagues is Hinton is a very smart guy, but he may have jumped the shark with that. But on the other hand, he makes the point that transformer models are essentially neural nets. Neural nets are based, at least loosely, on how brains work. And we don’t know how consciousness arises. So I’m not willing… I mean, the dude won a Nobel Prize for his work on artificial intelligence, so I would not write him off just from that, or just on that basis. But beyond that, people saying, This is not comprehension, this cannot be conscious, this isn’t like us, strikes me as awfully defensive and awfully ill-informed. And it’s not the thing you can say until you can describe what makes us us, why we are conscious, how consciousness works in us. Until you figure out how consciousness works, you can’t, as has been said in this very conversation, for all we know, rocks are conscious to a rudimentary extent.
[00:48:33.23] – Peter Watts
So who fucking knows ? I can’t write anything off. And it’s true that pattern matching does not equal compréhension, but we don’t know what comprehension equals. So, yeah. I just don’t see what good, from an evolutionary point of view, what good comprehension, conscious comprehension, is when non-conscious computation can do all the same heavy lifting. I mean, we had a case here in Toronto, where somebody basically drove across town, stabbed his mother-in-law to death, cleaned up the mess, went back, got caught. He was asleep the whole time. Jury let him off because he was asleep. He did not do those things. Something else in him did those things. It’s called homicidal somnibalisme. There are a few cases of it now. There are people who go out, pick up sex partners, take them home. wake up and say: who the fuck is this strange person in my bed? Because they were asleep the whole time they did it. There’s a guy in Europe who can draw incredibly detailed pencil drawings of entire cityscapes, right down to individual windows, like almost photographic, except they’re done in pencils. But he can only do that when he’s asleep.
[00:50:02.03] – Peter Watts
He can barely scratch his name in the dirt when he’s awake. We tend to cite these things as weird Ripley’s believe it or not stuff. But when you realize that you do the same stuff yourself every day. That most people driving home from work aren’t driving consciously, they are thinking of other things. They are not thinking about the stop signs and the turn signals and stuff, that they’re doing all of this automatically. And when you factor in the fact that neurologically, the computation that makes the decision seems to precede the conscious decision being made. It just seems a lot more parsimonious to say, OK, the decision is made non-consciously, and then somebody sends a memo upstairs to the conscious self, which then reads that memo and thinks that it made the decision, as opposed to simply being informed of the decision. We’ve got pretty compelling neurological evidence that decision making happens anywhere from 7 to 10 seconds before the self becomes aware of making the decision. And so, given that, nobody denies that consciousness is a thing, whether consciousness actually has a function? As far as I’m concerned, the jury is out on it.
[00:51:37.24] – Peter Watts
I think I’m in the minority on this. A lot of other people have reasons for consciousness, but every time I look at possible reasons for consciousness, the question I ask is, OK, maybe, but can you imagine a non-conscious system performing the same operations? And so far, for me, the answer has always been: yes. So even if we do use consciousness for something, consciousness does not seem to be necessary for any operation I’ve encountered so far, other than aesthetic appreciation. And you could make a really strong argument that aesthetic appreciation is maladaptive because we think with our dicks, we get swamped on the glory of the Universe, and a tiger eats us because we’re distracted. Again, I know it’s long-winded and I’m going on and probably not being very focused in my response, but yes, pattern matching is not comprehension, but in response, what good is comprehension ? Do we know?
[00:52:40.16] – John Knych
Thank you. Before moving on to Joe’s question, for the sake of my sanity, I have to believe that aesthetics has some value that’s…
[00:52:48.15] – Peter Watts
This is one of the things that people think that I’m being so grim and so on and nihilistic. But to me, the people who think… I guess I would put you in that category. The people who think that this is an unpleasant interpretation or something that you find unpalatable, you’re not thinking of yourself in the right sense, right ? You think that I am this thing for which consciousness is a waste of time. But you’re not the system. You’re the tape worm living inside the system, okay ? If consciousness is, in fact, some parasitical spandrel, and that doesn’t serve any purpose, then, by definition, it’s a parasite. It’s true that most hosts would be better off without the tape worm in their gut. But at the same time, no tape worm in the long, venerable histories of tape worms has looked around said: You know, I think I’m going to flush myself out the anus because I think my host would be better off without me. I like being a tapeworm. I’m probably too pathological about it now, but at least once an hour, I look around and say, “Wow, it’s amazing to be conscious.”
[00:54:09.09] – Peter Watts
I am perceiving that plant. I am perceiving this cat, shredding my arm because it’s 8:01, and I was supposed to feed them at 8: 0. I am constantly gobsmacked by how amazing it is to just consciously perceive things. And I’m the tape worm. Fine. I’m not going to flush out of the system, even though that probably would make the system itself more survivable. In fact, I’ve started giving talks. I’m going to be giving one next month, arguing that, in fact, the best way to ensure our survival is to stop caring about whether we do survive, because all the things that are responsible for a destruction of the environment are a result of cognitive biases, the inability to internalize future consequences. Cognitive biases, like hyperbolic discounting, kin-selection, cascade effects, all these things that allow us to destroy the environment and realize cognitively, yeah, we should probably stop destroying the environment because it’s what keeps us alive, but we don’t internalize that in the gut.
[00:55:13.22] – Peter Watts
We think about it in the same way that we think about sapient raccoons with gun fetishes in Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. It’s a cool thing to think about, but we don’t believe it down in the gut, the way you would believe you were in danger if a grizzly bear started charging at you from across the field. That is something you would react to, right ? We don’t respond to actual threats because we’re not wired for that. And we’re not wired for that because our brains are designed for survival in a world in which there are short term local problems. And if you don’t solve the local short term problems, you don’t live to the long term. So we have very, very short perspectives. And so, everything we perceive is biased. The line I like to use is that you can either see the world as it is or you can care whether you live or die. You cannot optimize along both axes simultaneously because caring whether you live or die results in all these cognitive biases which result in environmenal destruction.
[00:56:19.10] – Peter Watts
Honestly, if you want to stop destroying the environment, if you want to maintain a healthy environment, you have to do away with all these survival biases that kept us alive back on the Pleistocene, but which are now threatening the planet. You have to stop caring about whether you live or die, and then maybe you will live. I mean, it’s counterintuitive, and I’m probably the only person in the world who believes it, but it also makes for an interesting bomb to drop into conversations like this. I bet you never thought of that before.
[00:56:55.23] – John Knych
Thank you. I’d love to hear a politician say that.
You can see the world how it is or care if you live or die!
[00:57:02.24] – Peter Watts
Yeah, I mean, really, you can do it. There are some indications of how we can do this. There are certain types of brain damage and things that we consider pathologies, which are actually just things that eliminate one or another bias. But what you basically got to do is say, OK, we’re going to save humanity by rewiring human nature into something else. Now, give me a research grant.
[00:57:30.00] – John Knych
Thank you. All right. I keep interrupting. I’m sorry, Joe, if you have a question. Joe, last question let’s hear it..
[00:57:37.07] – JP
No, no, no. Thank you. No, thank you, Peter, for being here. You’re talking a little bit about the flow state, where the climber exits the flow state and thinks about what they’re doing, and then they fall, because they’re no longer back in that fluid system, where everything comes naturally. Their objectivity gets in the way of success, and they fall and die. It’s really interesting. Just think about it. I’m a huge fan. I’ve read your Rifter series. I’ve read your short story, Malak, Malak. Malak, yeah. Yeah, it was a really good read. I wonder if you’re dive certified, is actually my first question. The Rifter series has me wondering if with your biology degree, if you’re dive certified.
[00:58:47.08] – Peter Watts
Yeah, I actually got my C card. I got my Naui card when I was grade 10, I think.
[00:58:53.03] – JP
Okay.
[00:58:53.24] – Peter Watts
And I did some diving in nuclear discharges for a local power utility back when they pretended to care about the environment, and they didn’t. There were some pretty hairy experiences there. These were like the gales of November. You would jump off the boat. You would have to swim for the bottom as fast as you possibly could because the boat was rolling so much that the trim tabs would give you a concussion. You grab a rock on the bottom, and even when you grab the rock on the bottom, the surge is so great that you get picked up and bounced along the bottom.
[00:59:30.20] – Peter Watts
But I have not dived…Shit, I probably haven’t dived since 2000, 2001, and that was just a recreational stuff. In Hawaii. Yeah, I’m way out of practice.
[00:59:51.24] – Peter Watts
Do I even still have my card?
[00:59:53.15] – OJP
I just got to say…
[00:59:58.02] – Peter Watts
There it is! Here’s my Naui card.
[01:00:01.19] – Orateur 2
You’ve got it. Okay. That’s pretty cool.
[01:00:06.15] – Peter Watts
Yeah.
I mean, there were scenes, I don’t know if you remember the scene in Starfish, where they’re just swimming on the bottom, and all of a sudden, this row of teeth just resolves out of the murk directly in front of them. That’s… When you’re diving, especially up in temperate waters. I don’t know where you’re located, but the water is hardly… Off the coast of BC, the water tends to be murky, right ? And there’s killer whales out there, and there are sharks out there, and you’re swimming along, and all of a sudden, everything just goes dark, like something is blocking out the sun from overhead. And it is scary as shit. I have an imagination, and I know the kind of things that are in the water, and you’re swimming along, and all of a sudden, this giant shadow from overhead drops on you. And of course, what it is, it’s a cloud blocking the sun. But there’s that brain stem. Holy shit, there’s like a killer whale coming down. And because the water is so murky, you just have this vision that this is going to be the last thing you see. You’re going to see a shadow in front of you, and then you’ll see these teeth, and they’ll come out almost like a grainy starlight amplification, tactical goggles, that resolution.
[01:01:51.03] – Peter Watts
It’s just a recurring… I won’t call it a nightmare, because I don’t know if I’ve ever dreamed of it. It’s like a waking. And yeah, that’s what I based that particular scene on.
[01:02:03.11] – Orateur 2
No, I’ve never dived. I live in Oregon. The ocean here is scary, but it was very visceral. I’ve taken to watching diving posts and underwater stuff a lot more since reading that series, and I’m just like, wow, that must have got to be on some level. The weird concept that the bottom is the safest. We just don’t have that in 3D non-aquatic life. We don’t think of the bottom as safe. We don’t think of the above as dangerous. It was really interesting to me. But, yeah, that was fascinating. And a tiny little thing about the headcheese – I wanted to go back to was, in Star Trek – Voyager – You’re right. Yes, Voyager, there are neural packs that gets infected by cheese. It was very real. It was very real because if you’re using neural substrate, infection is literally possible.
[01:03:21.22] – Peter Watts
Yup, I stopped watching. Voyager was the first Star Trek series I stopped watching after maybe the first half season because it was just… I mean, give me a fucking break. I thought, okay, hey, they’re basically on the other side of the galaxy now, right ? Finally, we can get away from aliens with wrinkly foreheads. Finally, we can get away with: We can actually deal with something that’s actually alien because it’s way the hell over there, the progenitors or whatever it is that explains why everybody’s humanoid in this part of the galaxy doesn’t necessarily have to matter in the Delta Quadrant or wherever it is. But yeah, it was the same old shit. And the very first episode, you have the weird guy with the funny sideburns and the creepy affection for Kess, and asking if they have water to barter. It’s like, Are you fucking kidding me ? I mean, you’re in space. There are comets, right ? There is more water in an Oort cloud than there is on any given planet. Don’t you guys know anything about science? And I just gave up on it at that point. It lasted seven years, though. I do remember the infected, literally, head cheese.
[01:04:40.24] – JP
I guess in that vein. Okay, so my question is, given that you’re talking about how you’re that far away, it shouldn’t really apply anymore. This is a bit abstract, super abstract, maybe not. But what do you think would happen to the entire field of science fiction? Let’s say a microbe is discovered, let’s say a life-form is discovered, what’s the survivability of the franchise of science fiction if some extraterrestrial facet is provable, is discovered. I mean, how much does it cut the weeds back on what we consider the field of sci-fi? Or do you think there’s, like we’ve been discussing, some underlying undiscoverability that informs this topic that supersede that? Or do you think it would get overwhelmed, I guess? That’s a complex question.
[01:05:42.15] – JP
That’s a really interesting question. I don’t think anyone has asked me that before. And as a result, anything I say now comes with a disclaimer that I’m just pulling it out of my ass on the spur of the moment. So I could be completely wrong. My sense is that there’d be a sweet spot. I think if we discover microbes on Mars, or pond scum on Europa, I think that would boost interest in science fiction. Because, holy shit, there is life out there. It’s pond scum, it’s a microbe, but we now know there’s life out there. What else could there be? It provides an indication that science fiction is not… I mean, it’s a cliché. We got past the science fiction of spaceships and ray guns shit. That’s like the ’60s, ’70s stuff. But you still find it in English departments, I guess. But it’s a vindication of… It’s a vindication of the genre without being a usurper of the genre. There’s an ecosystem under the ice in Europa. That is so cool. What else could be out there ? Now, basically, everything’s back on the table because now we know that extraterrestrial life is a thing.
[01:07:10.05] – Peter Watts
What forms might extraterrestrial life take? On the other hand, if a bunch of intelligent elephants land on the lawn of the White House and vaporize Trump in his cabinet, after the cheering dies down, and after Marjorie Taylor-Green finishes blaming the Jews for it, at that point, I think maybe science fiction would wither away. Because all of a sudden, it’s not a question of, wow, we know there’s life out there, what else could there be? Now, all of a sudden, it’s, oh, We know what’s out there, and it’s mean, and it looks like a giant 20-foot elephant, and it can kick our asses. And at that point, reality becomes a standard science fiction trope. There’s no need to have to speculate about things. Nobody cares anymore, because you now have aliens walking up and down our streets. So I think we’re looking at a narrow curve with a peak. And it’s great as soon as you find some evidence of life. But the more science-fiction reality becomes, the less relevant science-fiction will have. Although, if that was the case, you’d think that we wouldn’t be paying much attention to science fiction now because… We are certainly in an era now where people are now arguing about whether or not our software is conscious.
[01:08:49.01] – Peter Watts
The whole idea of AI has traditionally been a purely science-fictional thing, and now we’re talking about… People can actually talk about personality uploading without being laughed out of the room. So as I say, maybe I’m completely wrong, but that’s my first cut at an answer, and I will probably think about it a little more. Maybe we’ll come into a talk somewhere down the road.
[01:09:12.18] – JP
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I’ve got to leave this conversation, but I appreciate you so much for joining us today. You didn’t miss a minute. You weren’t even late. So thank you. I appreciate you being here. Jack, thank you, guys.
[01:09:25.23] – Peter Watts
I was kind of late. It was my pleasure.
[01:09:29.19] – John Knych
Thank Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I got to wrap things up, too, because I have a wife and kid who are running around. But I loved, I really enjoy this conversation. Are there are any final, burning questions, I guess someone can throw them out? But it’s been fascinating. I can’t wait to read over the transcript, to be honest.
[01:09:52.12] – Peter Watts
Ok, awesome. I’m glad. I’m glad that I made up for my initial tardiness.
[01:09:57.22] – Brandon
What are you working on next?
[01:10:30.00] – John Knych
Yes. Thank you, Brandon. Two minor things. What are you working on next? Also, do you have any recommendations of living Sci-Fi authors? Because we’ll quick, I need to shout out Adrian Tchaikovsky because he shouted you out.
[01:10:31.08] – Peter Watts
I would shoutout Adrian Tchaikovsky. I would also shoutout Hiron Ennes. I would shout out, it’s kind of like an Edgar Allen Poe-y David Kronengbourg-ian. He wrote a really interesting novel called Leech, which is basically, it’s about a parasitic hive mind, told from the point of view of the parasitic hive mind, infesting people and encounters another parasitic hive mind, also infesting people.
[01:10:46.12] – Peter Watts
It’s like, Shit, I have competition. It’s a really interesting idea. [Who is it?] Hiron. H-i-r-o-n, space, E-N-N-E-S or I-S ? I don’t remember. But the book is called Leech. Seth Dickinson, Xordia, is really good. It’s a big fucking doorstop of a book. It’s been out for a couple of years now. It has passages that viscerally turn to my stomach, but also, really, really interesting conceptually. I think, like the first two chapters, he came up with an argument for free will that I had never encountered before. And my current favorite is Rachel Rosen, who you will never heard of. It’s not science fiction, it’s more like an urban fantasy with biting political overtones about rising authoritarianism in Canada after environmental collapse has presaged the emergence of a magical environment. So you basically have civil servants plotting each other’s… It’s almost like a Charlie Strauss thing, where you have magic being used for the most mundane, grubby political ends. But it’s produced by a micro publisher in Ottawa called Humble Puppy Press, which you can be forgiven for never having heard of before. It’s probably very difficult to get because it’s a small press, it’s a small book.
[01:12:17.14] – Peter Watts
But yeah, she’s written two books in a trilogy called The Sleep of Reason, which I would strongly recommend. But the ones that you will be able to get really easily are the ones by Hiron Ennis and Seth Dickenson, and, of course, Adrian Tchiakovsky. I’ve only read a couple of Adrian Tchaikovsky books, and I thought that Children of Ruin was good. I thought the ideas were really good. I thought that some of the spider cognition was a little too human. But his latest book, Shroud, it’s probably not his latest book. He comes up with a book every two months. But the latest book of his that I read was Shroud, which a hell of a first contact story and has a really, really inventive alien ecosystem. [I love Shroud.] Alien biology, I’ve never seen anything like it.
[01:13:09.04] – Brandon
Shroud is good.
[01:13:10.07] – John Knych
Yeah, he mentioned your influence in his writing of that book.
[01:13:13.06] – Peter Watts
Yeah, well, he hasn’t been sending me any royalty or commission checks, so talk is cheap, Adrian.
[01:13:21.13] – John Knych
Thank you. Then, as Brandon said, what are you working on now ?
[01:13:24.10] – Peter Watts
Oh, right.
[01:13:25.15] – Peter Watts
Okay, well, I’m a bunch of things.
[01:13:28.06] – Peter Watts
I’m doing some video game work I’m doing some stuff I can’t actually talk about because of NDAs.
[01:13:37.18] – Peter Watts
I’m writing another novella in the Sunflower sequence, a sequel to the Free Stream Revolution. I’m working on a screenplay with this hotshot Black cinematographer installation artist called Arthur Jaffe [?], who is basically a science fiction allegory about the Black experience in America involving an AI who identifies as Black and who presents itself as Mickey Mouse. He writes very different stuff than I do. He’s worked with all sorts of people. He’s worked with Stanley Kubrick and Kanye West and Spike Lee. The Kanye West thing hasn’t aged well I guess. I’m working on that. Neil Blomkamp has optioned the Blindsight-Echopraxia stuff. He’s presumably going to be working on something that takes my vampire biology but sticks it into a different context. He’s basically describing it as secaria [?] with vampires. He’s presumably going to be working on that. He’s going to be filming that after he finishes the Starship Troopers Reboot, so that’ll be next year. I’ve just finished a series treatment for Blindsight, which he has also optioned. I don’t know if anything’s going to come à that, but if it does, I will be working on that. And yeah, there’s always omniscience being pushed ever further into the distance because all this other stuff has deadlines and pays better.
[01:15:22.06] – Peter Watts
But yeah, I’m doing a lot, and I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed. Honestly, I’m afraid that I’m going to produce a lot of crap because it all has to be done by Tuesday. It has to be handed in by Tuesday, not when it’s actually ready to hand in. So we’ll see how it goes. Remember me if… My subsequent work is crap. Remember me as I am now, not as I am about to become.
[01:15:47.18] – John Knych
Well, despite all the projects, we’re grateful for your time and for talking with us. Yeah.
[01:15:54.01] – Peter Watts
No, it was fun.
[01:15:55.04] – Peter Watts
And again, I hang my head in shame about the whole forgetting entirely about you guys thing.
[01:16:00.18] – John Knych
If anything, it’s… I’m always nervous in the beginning, but we were able to just talk about your work and science fiction. So it was a nice introduction, just waiting. So it was fine. No problem.
[01:16:15.06] – Peter Watts
Ok, well, everybody go off and live your lives in the short period of time that we have left to live our lives. I hope when you’re fighting each other over the last tin of spam in the rubble, spare some kind thoughts for me and think, Hey, he saw this coming. He tried to warn us.
[01:16:35.06] – John Knych
He threw the dart. He threw the dart behind.
[01:16:38.19] – Peter Watts
Thank you, Peter. Ok, well, goodbye. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you for having me.
[01:16:42.21] – John Knych
Bye, bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. Enjoyed it. I really got a run. Au revoir.
[01:16:49.10] – Brandon
Thank you, Jack.
[01:16:50.16] – Noémie
See you guys.