Lars H. Hoffmann's Blog

Companion piece: The Forgetting

I grew up reading many of the classic science fiction stories by authors such as Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and my all-time favorite: Isaac Asimov. Asimov wrote straight forward stories with clear prose. The science fictional element was key to the story, not just part of the backdrop. The science was always pivotal for the plot.

This is still the kind of science fiction that inspires me. Sure, light sabres and space operas can be entertaining, but I prefer science fiction that takes future possibilities and examines the societal consequences of them. Asimov was a master at that. For example; he came up with his now famous three laws of robotics and then tried to poke holes in them. Would they hold up? What would happen if they were worded slightly differently? What would happen if the 2nd law came before the 1st? And so on. He created many short stories around this theme, some of them collected in the anthology “I, Robot.”

My most recent publication is a short story titled “The Forgetting”. It has been published in Alien Dimensions #7 available in print and for kindle on Amazon.com.

Classic science fiction stories like those written by Asimov, and most noticeably his book “The Caves of Steel” were my inspiration for The Forgetting. I wanted to write a story describing a strange futuristic society where things like memory, aging and social interactions worked in a very different way from what we are used to. Unfortunately, describing a society does not make for a very compelling story, so I used the good old trick that Asimov has so many times taken advantage of: I added a murder mystery.

I do not want to spoil anything from the story but suffice to say it is a dark and at the same time humorous murder mystery. You can find it here:

Alien Dimensions Issue 7 Digital

Alien Dimensions Issue 7 In Print

Thanks to editor Neil A. Hogan from Alien Dimensions for publishing this story.

Companion piece: In a Stranger Space

My short story In a Stranger Space was published in September 2016 by Nomadic Delirium Press in their yearly anthology The Martian Wave. It is available in both print and as an e-book from mayor online retailers like Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, or straight from the publisher’s website. The anthology focus on stories about exploration of the solar system. Here are some of my notes regarding the story, where the themes come from and some of the science and technology behind it.

The Capgras Delusion.

In early 2016 I was reading a lot about neuroscience and particularly certain disorders related to brain damage or age related deterioration of the brain. I find the subject matter utterly fascinating because it touches upon our definition and perception of the self, who we are, and how we interact with the world around us. In fact, the more you learn about neurological disorders, the more you realize that there is no such thing as the world around us, there is only our perception of it, or at least, that is the only part that matters. The late great author and neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote many anecdotal books and stories about his patients and their disorders. I devoured his books. They are both entertaining, educational, and accessible to someone like me who does not have any training in neuroscience. I highly recommend reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakening, but many of his other books are great as well. Another recommendable book on a similar subject matter is The Tale of the Duelling Neurosurgeons, by Sam Kean.

One particular, and fortunately rather uncommon disorder, is known as the Capgras Delusion. Those who suffer from the Capgras Delusion will recognize people in their lives – friends and family – but their brain fails to elicit any emotional response to seeing familiar faces. This means that although you can recognize someone as your mother, sister, or friend, you would not generate the usual feelings when seeing them. Your brain intuitively concludes that something is wrong. If you are looking at a person that looks and acts like a family member, but you feel no affection for them, your brain will conclude that you are looking at an impostor. Someone who has taken the place of a loved one and is now pretending to be them. It can be difficult or even impossible to convince a Capgras patient that they are in fact interacting with the real person and not an impostor. Rejection usually ensues. The patient will be estranged and can even become paranoid and hostile.

The Capgras Delusion is caused by some very specific neural pathways being blocked usually by trauma to the head. These neural pathways relate to the visual cortex that processes information from our eyes, which means that the delusion is typically limited to people you are viewing. A Capgras patient can talk to a relative on the phone and not have any problems believing who they are, but as soon as they meet and see each other, the delusion returns.

I wanted to use the Capgras Delusion as a device for exploring how a character perceives others and in turn how that defines himself as a human being. I also wanted to set the story in a place where only a small number of people were available and could interact. Hence a spaceship in a near future mission to Mars.

Getting to and from Mars.

Setting the story on a spaceship heading for Mars also gave me plenty of other material for the story, that tied nicely into the Capgras Delusion. The reason for the spaceship going to Mars was for setting up habitat there using remote controlled machines. The crew was never meant to land on the planet, but simply control the machines from orbit. Landing would inevitable entail launching from Mars to get back home to Earth, which is complicated to say the least. Mostly because of all the fuel you would need. Let’s run through some of the calculations for what it would take to escape Mars’ gravity in a small capsule and rendez-vous with an orbiting vessel, similar to how the Apollo moon landings worked.

Imagine we use a spaceship that weighs 2.1 tons to take off from the Martian surface. This is the same weight as the moon lander used to visit the Moon in 1969.

With Mars’ gravity of 3.711 m/s² we would need to reach an escape velocity of 11.200m/s to take a spaceship back into orbit. Compare that to the just 2.420m/s escape velocity of the moon and it is clear that we would need to generate a lot more thrust to get away from Mars than we would to get off the Moon.

The problem now becomes the tons of fuel needed to generate Mars escape velocity, because that fuel itself also adds to the total weight of the vehicle and thus we would need even more fuel for lift-off. Hence the more fuel we need to lift of, the more it weighs and we need even more fuel.

This is a well-known problem with launching rockets and this is the reason why rockets use massive boosters to take off from Earth. The problem is somewhat diminished on Mars, as Mars is smaller and has less gravitational pull than the Earth, but it is still a problem. When the Apollo missions went to the moon in the late sixties and early seventies, they had a similar problem, but the moon’s gravitational pull is much smaller than both Earth’s and Mars’.

So, we need tons of fuel to take off from Mars, and that fuel needs to get there somehow. In Andy Weir’s The Martian, the fuel for returning is generated in situ on Mars by an automated system launched years in advance. This is indeed a way to do it,  but it is difficult and time consuming.  If something unexpected happens with the system, it could also be difficult to service. Instead you could option for bringing the fuel from Earth. However, we run into the same recursive weight problem we had before. If a large amount of fuel were to be transported from Earth, it would add to the weight of the Earth launch vehicle and using the same principle  as before, we can calculate the amount of fuel needed to take off from Earth.

As is clear, transporting the fuel from Earth that we will later need to on Mars is not a viable option. Many have observed this before and it is one of the reasons why manned missions to the red planet are so difficult to achieve. You could of course do what Mars One proposes and simply leave the people there without a plan for getting back to Earth. Not ideal though.

The story In a Stranger Space relies on systems for setting up habitats on Mars, before actual human missions to the surface is done. These habitats could be in place for long-term settlement while mining and processing of resources on Mars is done. This way humans could stay on Mars for a longer time, eventually creating the fuel for a return trip.

Creating a habitat on Mars

The question then becomes how to set up a habitat on Mars before we have people there. People have suggested to send pods with ready-made facilities down from space. This is a possibility but it sets strict limitations in terms of weight and structure of what can be built. The key to building a sustainable habitat on Mars is ISRU – In Situ Resource Utilization. If we could somehow send sturdy autonomous machines to Mars and have them set up the habitat for us by utilizing resources naturally found on Mars, the problem would be solved.

Unfortunately, machine autonomy is far from sophisticated enough for them to reliably carry out such a task. We have certain semi-autonomous machines roaming the red planet. The most famous is of course the Opportunity Rover. The vehicle is moving around on the surface collecting samples and analysing its environment. Though it is directed remotely from Earth, it has a certain level of autonomy. This is necessary because of the distance from Earth to Mars. Both planets describe an elliptical orbit around the sun, but Mars takes 687 days to complete its orbit and Earth takes only 365 days. This means that the distance between the Earth and Mars varies between 56 million kilometres and 400 million kilometres. A radio signal that travels at the speed of light, 1C or 299.792 km/s would take between 187 seconds (3.1 minutes) and 1,334 seconds (22.2 minutes) to get from The Earth to Mars, depending on where in the orbit each planet is found. Therefor the reaction time for a remote-controlled machine on Mars is a minimum of 374 seconds (the signal would have to go from Mars to Earth and back again) and at most 2669 seconds. The Mars Opportunity rover moves at a maximum speed of 0.05 m/s. It needs to be able to autonomously determine and avoid obstacles because if it were to rely exclusively on instructions from Earth, it would at full speed move a minimum of 18.6 meters and as much as 133 meters before reacting to an obstacle. By which time it might have driven into a chasm.

To remote control machines on the surface of Mars, we would need to be much closer so the time delay would be less pronounced and complex operation would be possible. One place this could be done from is a spaceship in orbit around Mars. By not descending to the surface of Mars, the spaceship would avoid the fuel problem, and could safely return to Earth with its crew after having completed its mission. The distance from orbit to the surface would only result in an insignificant signal delay.

Perfect control and the Neural Lace

What would be the best machine that we could possibly use for construction? What would give us the ultimate flexibility and control to build something as though we were there doing the hammering and screwing ourselves? In my story, I describe a proxybot. The proxybot is a high-powered construction robot, which two legs, two arms and a general human shape. It is a little bigger than a human and a lot stronger so that it can do the actual construction. I envision something like the Power Loader from Aliens. The one Ellen Ripley rides inside and has the final battle with the Queen alien in.

Except In this case, you wouldn’t be controlling it with joysticks and other such manual controls. To achieve perfect control of such a machine, they would interface directly with the pilot’s brain and feel like he was moving his own body. This is a common trope in science fiction. Iain M Banks wrote about the neural lace, that interfaces man with machine. A small construction that can connect with individual neurons in the human brain.

One of the interesting ways we can push information into cells is through a technology known as optogenetics. Opto from light and genetics because the cells we want to affect needs to be genetically modified to be susceptible to light. Optogenetics is a real thing and many animal experiments have been done with it. Mice behaviour has been controlled through optogenetics by directing tight light beams at specific neural centres in the mouse brain. Optogenetics has the possibility of being a neural lace.

In a Stranger Space combines all the above, I hope you will check it out and enjoy it.

Writing goals for 2017

Back in 2014 I spent a lot of time travelling for work and inevitably I sat around airports and hotels for hours. Too much time was wasted looking at overpriced belt buckles in airport shops and watching hotel movies, there was little else to do except for work. An idea had however started to form, an idea that would later turn into my first short story. It was about combining quantum entanglement and relativistic time dilation on space flights. The idea had come to me while listening to science podcasts like The Naked Scientists, The Star Spot, Star Talk, Big Picture Science, Nature podcast and several other similar shows. I have always been interested in science, space travel and physics so this was what I was listening to when relaxing.

I started writing the story Entangled in hotel rooms and airports and finished it in the summer of 2014. The style was inspired by authors such as Greg Egan (especially his short story collection: Axiomatic), Isaac Asimov and Neal Stephenson. The science and technology was very much at the centre of the story. Without the science part, there would be no story. In fact, the story switches between telling what is going on and exploring the technicalities of the science behind it. I tried to write the kind of story that I would like to read.

After finishing Entangled I promptly sent it to the biggest science fiction magazine I knew of expecting them to roll out the red carpet for me. How could they not? My story was positively brilliant.

Months went by without a reply and I thought that I should write another. I had an idea for a more humorous story. A murder mystery set on a generation ark. Sounds like fun, right? I finished The Forgetting a few months after Entangled and sent that to a different science fiction magazine. A few months later I got a polite response from the editors of the first magazine thanking me for sending the story, but it wasn’t quite right for them right now.

Still, I was off, and another two short stories had formed in my mind while I waited for replies for the different magazines. One of them came to me as an idea while driving home from work one day. The idea was so complete and powerful that I had to stop the car at the next gas station and just sit there for fifteen minutes planning everything out in my head. I went home and wrote Indefinite Hiatus in two days.

The other story was slow and arduous. I struggled with the characters and the plot. After much sweating over the keyboard I finished the first draft of Zero Sum. I read it through from end to end and promptly re-wrote the entire thing.

I was also accumulating rejection slips from editors. All my stories had been rejected so far. Some editors took an extraordinarily long time in responding. Entangled was sitting with a literary magazine for a year and a half at some point. Their reply came back with a detailed critique of the story. They said they really liked it but could I tone down the science a bit and put some more character building stuff in there please? They even said that they would like to see a re-write of the story and would consider publishing that. I thought about following their advice and rewriting the story to something less sciency, but decided against it. Instead I was going to look for a market where the science was appreciated.

In the meantime, I had written a flash fiction story called Saving Andie, just 400 words about a sentient robot and gender perception. I sent it to 365tomorrows.com who publishes a short science fiction piece every day of the year. I remember sending it on the 23rd of January and waking up next morning to an email saying they accepted the submission and the story was already up on the site. My first thing ever to be published. Hurrah! After the story had been published, I sent it to the flash fiction podcast No Extra Words and they also accepted it for publication in audio format.

2016 was when publication speed started to pick up. Two of my stories won honourable mentions in the Writers of the Future contest, and a short story of mine called In a Stranger Space was included in the print and digital anthology The Martian Wave 2016.

Towards the end of 2016, Entangled was again free to be submitted after 580 days sitting with an editor. I had started to read a new science fiction magazine called Compelling Science Fiction which right away looked like the perfect home for Entangled. Compelling Science Fiction specializes in hard science fiction where the science is well explored and technically detailed. Perfect!

I sent them Entangled and a month later – on my birthday – got confirmation that they would like to buy the story. Instead of re-writing the story to fit other magazines, I had found a magazine that appreciate the story for its true nature.

Entangled comes out in Compelling Science Fiction in February 2017. You will be able to read this story online for free, but I encourage you to support the magazine (and subsequently the authors) by subscribing through Patreon. It is just $3.60 per issue, which is well worth your money.

From the summer of 2016 I have also been working on a novel. This is a very different task from writing short stories since it requires much more planning and research. I struggle to find the time to work on it but it is slowly coming together.  I plan to finish the novel in the first half of 2017 and spend the second half finding a publisher for it.

I still write short stories and in 2017 I hope to publish as many of them as possible. My goal is to have 10 stories published by the end of the year and in 2018 collect them into an anthology.

Happy New Year!

What’s the big deal with autonomous vehicles?

What’s the big deal with autonomous vehicles anyway? Is it going to make any difference whatsoever to you and me if a car can drive itself? Yeah, it seems like a nice gimmick to have, like cruise control or power steering, but is it fundamentally going to change the world?

Let’s have a look at some of the ways fully autonomous vehicles will impact our society, because I think few have covered the full extent of the importance.

When I say fully autonomous, I mean a vehicle that is capable of driving itself under any condition, day and night, city and highway, open country and tunnels, without any human involvement. A vehicle like this would be able to drive without anybody inside, and would be many times safer than a human driver doing the same task. This is what is referred to as Level 5 Autonomy. You’d get in your car, punch in the destination and the car would take you there without needing any further input from you.

What consequences would the introduction of the fully autonomous car have?

The consequences of this are many and wide spread, so I have decided to split them into subjects.

Personal time

Like millions of people around the world I commute to work by car. Five days a week I drive 45 minutes to get there and then 45 minutes again to get back home. That is 1.5 hours per day, 7.5 hours per week, 30 hours per month, or 15 24-hour days every single year. It is a staggeringly large amount of time to waste. It is basically like working a full extra day a week.

This is time I could have spent with my family, reading, doing sports or should I feel so inclined, to work. Instead I am sitting staring out the windscreen of my car.

If I had a fully autonomous car, the time commuting to work could be used much better. I’d get in the car, set the destination and I’d lean back the seat and get a nap before arriving. If I had an autonomous car, I could even move farther away from my job and it would not cut into my spare time. I’d sleep less at night because I’d get more sleep in the car.

I could also get some work done in the car. Pull out my computer and get some of those pesky emails out of the way.

Urban planning

An enormous amount of real-estate in a city is dedicated to cars just being parked. They are sitting there either in a parking lot or at the side of the street faithfully waiting for their owner to come and pick them up again.

If cars were autonomous there would be no use for them to park in the already congested city. Your car could drop you off at work, then drive itself out of the city to more open areas where space isn’t a problem. Later, when you needed to get back home, the car come pick you up. In cities, parking houses would make little sense. With space at a premium in cities, using prime space for simply placing a car during hours seem inefficient.

Traffic

With the possibility of the car being able to drive itself, it would be natural to imagine the number of cars on the streets would go up. Even if the total number of cars would remain constant, traffic would increase as cars would spent more time in traffic. They would be able to drive both when they were occupied, but also when they were alone, maybe looking for parking outside the city. You can also imagine that it would be easy to send your car on errands. Send it to pick up the shopping while you spend your valuable time doing something you actually like – we all hate shopping, right?

It is easy to imagine that the car would spend more time in movement than it currently does, so total traffic might go up.

If you look at traffic jams you quickly notice that many of them are not necessarily caused by the absolute amount of cars in transit, but rather but drivers frustrated by the slow movement of traffic. They push their luck n intersections and end up causing grid lock and obstructing traffic even further. If autonomous cars were good enough drivers, much of that would not happen.

Another thing that often causes traffic jams are accidents. Not only can they block traffic lines, but curious drivers might block traffic in lines that aren’t otherwise affected. Autonomous cars would be many times safer than human drivers and car accidents and hence traffic jams might soon be a thing of the past.  Interconnected autonomous cars would mean even safer driving still

Society and economy

The autonomous car could spell bad news for people employed in the transport sector. If cars could drive themselves, lots of jobs could be lost. Some of the companies that are pushing the hardest for getting to the driverless car are some of the companies that employ most drivers. Most notably Uber is working hard on giving cars full autonomy. Then they can get rid of that annoying middleman between them and the customer that is the driver. Tesla has also figured this out and already announced a ride sharing service. Currently more than a quarter of a million people in the US alone are employed as taxi cab drivers. If the car could drive itself, there would be little or no use for them.

Add to that the number of truck and long distance drivers, and we are looking at a serious number of jobs in danger of disappearing or at the very least transforming into something completely different.

Long distance driving would be changed significantly. Currently professional drivers are forced to stick to certain limited drive times as they need to rest at set intervals. With autonomous vehicles, these mandatory breaks would not be necessary. An autonomous vehicle would be able to go on for hours or even days without needing rest. This would mean a significant drop in transportation costs and therefore merchandise could be transported further at less cost.

The autonomous car is just one of many ongoing developments that is forcing us to re-think traditional jobs. More about that in my post The industrial revolution and the end of scarcity.

If the car could drive itself, everyone could go by car. There would be no reason for people to get driver licenses. You could send your car to pick up your children even though they aren’t old enough to drive themselves. The elderly, who sometimes are isolated because they cannot move around, or must move out of their houses because they can no longer drive a vehicle, would be able to move around much easier.

Another aspect is that you might need less vehicles. Some families that currently have two cars, one for each parent, could perhaps get by with only one car, that would drive the two parents to work in turn. You could also imagine entire communities sharing cars. Where ten families before would own ten cars, they could perhaps own only five between them since one could always be summoned to come and pick you up.

Security

I have touched upon this earlier, but autonomous cars would be much safer to drive and to be around than human drivers. We as people get tired, distracted, and impatient. All things that can cause accidents. Sometimes we drive aggressively because we had a bad day or because we are in a hurry. We make bad decisions and compared to a computer, we are hopelessly slow. An autonomous vehicle would have none of these flaws. It would be able to see traffic 360 degrees around it. It could anticipate problems occurring behind it where a human would not be looking and act to avoid it. And it would be able to take those decisions much faster than we could. It can use input from the surroundings that our senses simply do not have access to. Like radar, ultrasound, infra-red sensors and many other.

The autonomous car is basically a computer, so it could receive information from the cars around it. Ad-hoc networks could be formed on the fly so when one autonomous car detects an object, it can be broadcast to the cars in its vicinity and they can all react like a giant hive-mind. All we as humans can do to communicate with the other human drivers around us is use our horn, lights and middle finger.

Every year 1.25 million people die worldwide as a direct result of driving accidents. This is a staggering number. More people die from traffic than from wars, drugs, violence, suicides, or drowning. We pay a very high price for getting around indeed. Though there will be a transition period where the security of the autonomous car will only be somewhat better than that of human drivers, eventually, autonomous driving will be many times safer than human controlled vehicles. I imagine that the death toll will never reach zero, but it is easy to imagine something very close to that.

Energy and environment

If the cost of transportation goes down, more miles and kilometres will be driven. Hence more energy will be needed to fuel these vehicles. Cars are constantly becoming more fuel efficient but only a certain amount of energy can be extracted from combustion and the energy needed to accelerate a certain mass is not going to change. There is a need for vehicle propulsion to move to clean energies if we want to avoid creating even more polluted environments. Air pollution is a huge health concern worldwide, mainly in cities where exhausts count for a large part of cause. Air pollution is identified as causing all sort of diseases, including cardiovascular, pulmonary and cancers.

Electric vehicles using energy from renewable clean sources are the only true future for the autonomous car.

Summary

The autonomous vehicle will be a seismic shift in transportation with consequences for almost every aspect of modern life. Both at the individual level and as a society, there are some challenges, but mainly opportunities and benefits for having self-driving cars.

And when are we likely to see it happening? Some say as as soon as 2017.

Others might have thought more about this than I have. Can your foresee any additional mayor effects of the self driving car? Leave a comment and let me know.

The industrial revolution and the end of scarcity

Right now we are living in the middle of a revolution. It has been going on for quite a while, but we are near the end of it. As with all revolutions it will bring about great change, in fact, it has already brought about so many changes that people think the revolution is over. Done and dusted. Move on. Nothing more to see.

However, that is not the case.

The revolution began almost three-hundred years ago and was considered to have been over after less than a century. It was then followed by a second revolution fifty or so years later. calling it a revolution could be a misnomer as it could be argued it was all gradual change, but it nevertheless changed the daily lives of millions and had profound social effects.

I am talking about the Industrial revolution started around the middle of the 18th century. The industrial revolution changed production from a craft where almost everything was created by hand by individuals to an industrial endeavour. Efficiency improved drastically. Better and more products could be produced in safer ways.

The social impact was enormous. People went from being subsistence farmers producing the most basic of produce to working in factories producing derived products. Trade, education, health, and practically every other aspect of life was improved as a direct result of the industrial revolution.

The first industrial revolution is said to have ended somewhere around the middle of the 19th century, but followed shortly by a second industrial revolution where amongst other things, electrification made a massive difference in production capability.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Increased output often let to lowered cost which might seem like a great thing, but it made for a bumpy economic growth as the commercial value of goods sometimes fell quickly enough for companies’ business models to break. Arguably this caused some of the economic depressions, including the Great Depression in the 1930s.

But overall on a larger scale the industrial revolution was an overwhelmingly positive thing for humanity.

And it is still going on. The industrial revolution is accelerating and will over the next decades change human lives more than they have been changed in the previous three centuries.

The technologies that are currently being worked on will render humans as a resource completely obsolete. This is a profound change that will force us to restructure economic models and rethink basic human values.

Let me clarify what I mean by that:

Artificial Intelligence is already taking over many of the tasks otherwise assigned to human beings. Current AI is narrow in scope and nothing like what we see in science fiction where self-aware artificial beings have been commonplace since Isaac Asimov and others popularized the idea. Even so, current AI can do many things better than us mere humans can. Typical factory production lines employ less people per product produced (say that quickly five times!) than they did twenty years ago, because welding, transport, stocking, quality control and many other tasks are done by narrow AIs that outperform human labour in terms of quality, speed and, of course, cost. At the level of raw product production like farming and mining, there are now less people employed than ever before producing more raw materials with the help of all sorts of narrow AI.

Many sectors can easily see that they are going to be hit over the next decade with automation and AI taking over human tasks. Transport is an obvious victim. Driverless trains are common in many subways systems around the word and advances in AI will soon make cars and trucks driven by people less reliable than vehicles operated fully by automatic systems.

AIs are more precise doctors, able to determine a diagnosis better than even the best trained practitioners. AIs can write articles about sporting events that are indistinguishable from texts written by their human counterparts. Large parts of the stock markets around the world are run exclusively by autonomous programs choosing where to invest.

And there are thousands of other examples. As AIs become broader in scope and gain more abilities, the fields in which a human worker will be needed will be ever shrinking.

Other technologies that will have similar effects include 3D printing and molecular nanotechnology. Our ability to print 3D objects will bring an end to many typical forms of production. Soon even complex machinery incorporating multiple materials could be printed either at home of in a nearby print shop. This would be much more economically than shipping the goods half way around the world where they currently have to be produced due to labour cost. 3D printing is important because it takes the physical world and turns it into an information industry. Just like movies, music and books are now handled digitally and distributed without a physical medium, so too will objects turn into an information technology.

Nanotechnology will take this a step further, enabling us to create complex electronics and medicine on the fly. As long as you can download the blue-print to something, you will be able to create it.

The industrial Revolution has so far brought enormous change to the world and the people who live in I, but it is nothing compared to what will come in the future.

Looking forward at changes to come it is always scary to observe potential jobs being lost and people being substituted the machines, but if we look at the changes that has already occurred, the vast majority of them have been positive and have improved our quality of life. There is no doubt that jobs will be lost in such sectors such as transport and production. Some say that up to 40% of all jobs will be substituted by in automatic system within the next 20 years. The fear is of course that this will make our economic system collapse and pull the foundation of existence out under the feet of the average Joe.

The changes are however no different from the change suffered with the first Industrial Revolution. If you had asked anyone in 1750 what would happen to the world if you could no longer survive as a farmer, I am sure they would have been terrified at the prospect. How would people make a living?

And that is the situation we find ourselves in right now. We can clearly see that a life-defining job we spend a third of our time on earth dedicated to will soon be taken over by a toaster.

But we should rejoice. Most people don’t actually like their jobs and the only reason they do it is to have an income. This is nothing but obscured slavery. When more and more of our time can be spent doing things we actually enjoy and doing less time at slaving away at work, the industrial revolution will finally have reached its conclusion.

But what will we live off? If we don’t have jobs, how will we pay the rent?

Our current economic model would have to change significantly. We would be able to produce more goods and services for less labour, so there would be even more riches for the people. However, assigning individuals a salary based on some kind of production model would not make sense. It is an important point to understand that going to fully automated production would not make the world a poorer place, just because no work would be done by people. It will be an overall richer world since we can increase production and lower the cost. Overall there would be more to go around. As a society we would be richer plus we would have a lot more spare-time on our hands.

We would have to break away from simple retribution based on work performed. Retribution would have to be assigned based on other parameters, such as age, number of people in household, health and other necessities.

I know this sounds like a future super-communism, and we all know that doesn’t work. If we however keep basing economic retribution on productivity by the individual, we will shortly find ourselves in a situation where those who own production capabilities will sit on all the wealth while the vast majority of people will have no source of income.

Fortunately, it will be a gradual change so there will be time to react. I am confident that an economic model will emerge over the next two decades that eventually will give us the answers. After all it will be a richer world.

When that happens we can kick back, travel, create art and do all the other personal projects we gave up on because we have a 9 to 5 job that puts food on the table.

Good luck!

Companion Piece: Saving Andie

This is a Companion Piece to the flash fiction story Saving Andie, first published on 365tomorrows.com on the 24th of January 2016. In Companion Pieces I will talk about the themes and ideas of my stories. I recommend that you read the story before you read the Companion Piece.

You can find the story here.

I would first of all like to extend my gratitude to the guys at 365tomorrows.com for publishing my story and helping me get it out there. 365tomorrows.com is a great site where you can read a new flash science fiction story every day. I submitted the story to the site on a Friday afternoon, Saturday I got the acceptance email and Sunday the story was up on the site.

Saving Andie will also be featured on the podcast No Extra Words some time in May 2016. If you like short fiction I encourage you to check this podcast out.

I first thought of the story while listening to a podcast. I think it was Science Friday, but it could have been StarTalk or The Naked Scientist – I’m not sure. The show was about digital assistants like Siri and Google Now and a caller pointed out that most such voice enabled digital assistants had female voices. Is this because it is hard for us to take advice from a man or because it feels less threatening to have a subservient woman?

How we as people behave towards systems that give the impression of being female differs from how we behave towards a male persona. Microsoft, Google and Apple all have teams of people whose job it is to analyze and improve their digital assistants response to different queries. One of the thing these people have to deal with is how their digital assistants are being treated and addressed. It is no accident that most digital assistants have a female persona.  It is a deliberate choice made to influence the way we interact with the digital assistants.

Would you behave the same to Siri if your iPhone was called John and had a deep bass voice? Probably not.

Except for the voice, there is absolutely nothing female about these digital assistants. There is nothing male about them either, they are totally genderless. They take on gender determined personas in order to control and manipulate the way we behave towards them.

And there, I thought, was the story. An AI that chooses to appear as female in order to manipulate a male dominated group of people into taking action to save her.

Another important part of the story was the AI itself. I had to come up with an AI that needed help from humans as opposed to getting help from other AIs. As always I was following news about Mars rovers like Opportunity and I am fascinated by the narrow AI these machines need in order to drive semi-autonomously on the surface of Mars. You can’t just remote control a Mars rover from Earth because even the radio signal traveling at the speed of light takes several minutes to reach the red planet and your remote controlled rover might have driven off a cliff before you have time to hit the breaks. At the same time I was reading books by Ray Kurzweil, who describes self awareness as an emerging properties of a complex intelligence. In that sense, if an AI becomes intelligent enough, it would inevitably become self aware.

Et voila! Andie was born. To make her situation a bit more dire I sent her to Saturn’s moon Titan instead of Mars. This served the additional purpose of pushing the story a bit into the future. We are not going to Titan right now, so the story must be set 10+ years in the future. I didn’t want it to be far future either, so I have one of the characters stand with a cigarette in her hand. Cigarettes date a story as it is hard to imagine such a dangerous and outright lethal habit to survive hundreds of years in the future.

The final line of the story was suggested by a friend of mine after I showed him a first draft of the story and I think it is a really good punch line. I enjoy gender aware fiction that challenge typical gender perceptions and think it is important to erode gender stereotypes – especially within the tech industry that has one of the largest gender divides of all. I realize that my story does this is a roundabout way, since the AI actually portrays itself as a damsel in distress, but I hope the irony of it is obvious enough.

Let me know what you think of Saving Andie.