San Francisco has been at the center of successive waves of technological and cultural change — from the literal Gold Rush days to the current gold rush-like AI boom. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to author, longtime San Francisco resident, and “chronicler of other minds” Annalee Newitz about the difference between this boom and previous ones, the pleasures and dangers of anthropomorphizing tech tools, and whether or not AI is embodied.
Guest: Annalee Newitz, journalist and author of Automatic Noodle and other books Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Annalee Newitz (00:00): What if it turns out language is just kind of nothing big? What if it’s just like, oh, the reason why LLMs can do this so easily is because it turns out language is no big deal. And it’s actually not what makes us cool. What makes us cool is something else. Because think about how bullshit written language really is. As somebody who I write a lot –
Robin Sloan (00:19): Hold on. McMillan, we have a new strap line to print across the front of all of Annalee Newitz’s novels.
Alexis Madrigal (00:27): I’m Alexis Madrigal.
Robin Sloan (00:30): I’m Robin Sloan.
Alexis Madrigal (00:31): And this is KQED’s Dream Machines.
Robin Sloan (00:34): A podcast about AI, how it works, what it means. How it feels. Yeah, how it feels. And importantly, it’s rooted here in San Francisco.
Alexis Madrigal (00:45): So of course, first episode of Dream Machines, we are talking about how AI took root here in San Francisco, Anthropic, OpenAI, and like 400 million other companies between here and Hayes Valley. The dream of San Francisco and the broader Bay Area as the place that is this incredible mechanism for bringing these audacious dreams forward, whether or not you kind of want them to, whether or not you think they’re a good idea or a bad idea, just incontrovertibly going back in time, this is the place. Semiconductors all the way through the PC, all the different components of the PC are happening here. The internet, of course, social media, the great horrors of social media, as well as all the Uber for everything companies. Each one of these things has these roots in this area. And it is one of those times where you’re like, was it just the gold rush?
(01:39): Did the gold rush somehow imbue some magic dust?
Robin Sloan (01:42): So for our first conversation, we wanted to find the ultimate
Alexis Madrigal (01:47): San
Robin Sloan (01:48): Franciscan.
Alexis Madrigal (01:48): The avatar
Robin Sloan (01:50): Of
Alexis Madrigal (01:50): San Francisco. Who
Robin Sloan (01:51): Can speak? Who can speak about this place in the long run? And across all these dimensions we’re talking about, cultural and economic and technical and everything else. And
Alexis Madrigal (02:00): That would be Annalee Newitz, of course, a nonfiction writer who really in their nonfiction works on this kind of civilizational scale. In fiction too, books like Automatic Noodle is creating dream machines. It’s creating these kind of other minds. And I do think Annalee is a figure that is just so San Francisco in this mix of being tech forward, being politics forward, being wild and free along dimensions other people in other regions of country maybe have never even imagined.
Robin Sloan (02:31): Thinking creatively and critically about the future, right? It’s those two things together.
Alexis Madrigal (02:35): Without further ado, here is our interview with Annalee Newitz, the first on dream machines. One of the questions that I think we’ve been asking ourselves is why San Francisco over and over for these booms? I mean, the Bay Area broadly, but also San Francisco quite specifically in this case and certainly over the last 20 years, what do you think? What do you make of it?
Robin Sloan (02:57): Because it’s easy to say, you want to say, oh, it’s a boom town. That’s the nature of it. But you’re like, okay, you’ve told me nothing. Over all these years, what’s your read of that tendency, that power?
Annalee Newitz (03:09): Yeah, it is true that this is a town of boom and bust, but more than that, it’s a town of booms motivated by engineering breakthroughs. And we’ve always had in the Bay Area, if you include things like Silicon Valley in the kind of greater Bay Area, we’ve always had innovators and industrialists coming together. And one of the things I think that’s so interesting about San Francisco is this weird alchemy of oftentimes very conservative proto-oligarchs of industry. Whether it’s the railway tycoons of the late 19th century or people like Peter Thiel now or Sam Altman now, you have these people who are just dumping money into the economy and they’re not interested in the public good really. I mean, or they have sort of a thin scrim of care for the public good. They just want to make money, but they’re dumping that money into a city that’s full of radicals and subversives, people who’ve been kicked out of every decent city in the country.
(04:15): People who are too queer for their families, too leftist for their political parties. And they come together, they meet that money, and then something fricking weird happens. That’s San Francisco. And I think that’s why San Francisco has such weird politics too. You’d think we’d be a city that would be like Arcada up north, that we’d have an all green city council. We’d be run by socialists. But no, we’re a city where the socialists somehow are hanging out with these industrialists.
Alexis Madrigal (04:48): Right, right, right. So Annalee, I know your origin story and I have read a lot of your wired.com articles and other things and following in your trail once I arrived here. I am curious, as you have watched this city change so much and through these different eras, but particularly this kind of AI boom, which is like trillion dollar companies suddenly implanting into San Francisco, how has that changed the city for you? And do you think that’s changed the way that you write about the city or write about technology?
Annalee Newitz (05:25): A hundred percent it has. I think one of the big differences between the AI boom and say the dot-com boom, which was the turn of the century, is that there’s a real nihilism to this tech boom. I felt like during the dot-com boom, yes, it was bonkers and there was way too much money, but there was a kind of exuberance and delight and silliness to it. Whereas I feel like the AI boom is associated with politics like the network state or very regressive sort of Peter Thiel style, let’s return to monarchy type politics. And so the politics are very reactionary and very anti-democratic. And that has really shifted my understanding of San Francisco, which I always though of as a very anarchic, freewheeling, happy town that maybe was a little too rich, always a little too rich, but also kind of spent money freely on sex and drugs.
(06:29): And now I feel like what I want to reflect in my writing about the city is this dark turn toward a kind of self-denial and anti-hedonism and pro-authoritarianism. And so the city is a darker place, but ironically, it’s made me want to write happier, cozier, more friendly stories about it to encourage people to remember, you can have some fun and you don’t need a lot of money to do it and the city could be beautiful.
Robin Sloan (07:03): We’ve talked about this quite a bit that among your many virtues and great strengths as a writer, you are perhaps the foremost chronicler or imaginer of other minds, including machine minds.
Annalee Newitz (07:17): It’s really both.
(07:18): I definitely got the inspiration. I get the inspiration from my non-human characters from the world around me and from the machines I interact with. And I am a ruthless anthropomorphizer and I do make fun of myself for this. And I realize that it’s kind of a character flaw, especially if you write about science. But I can’t help but see the personhood in everything, including machines. Although not so much in ChatGPT, maybe we’ll talk about that later. We need to get to that. Interestingly. But this microphone, I could easily have compassion for this microphone. How many times has it been breathed on? And what’s it thinking about that? Does it have opinions about different smells that it encounters? And what’s it going to do about it? So I think that’s part of what happens to me is that I’ll be writing a story that’s fact-based and evidence-based.
(08:12): And a part of my brain is like, “Oh, but what if this was alive? What would it be thinking right now?” Because what is human consciousness, but this thin little layer around a bunch of just survival imperative.
Alexis Madrigal (08:26): Why don’t you briefly set up the world of Automatic Noodle and we’ll use that to kind of think about some of these robots that you’ve created.
Annalee Newitz (08:33): Yeah. It’s the first book I’ve ever written that was set in San Francisco. And it’s about what happens in California after the state has won a war of independence against the United States. So it’s set five years after the war has been won. So things are being rebuilt and resettled. And one of the things that’s happened in the wake of the war is that some of the robots who were used in the fighting have been given limited civil rights in the nation of California. And that’s partly because the nation of California thinks of itself as very futuristic and wants to kind of be the first nation that joins the UN having these kinds of rights for sentient AI. But also it’s because it’s kind of undeniable that some of these robots are people. And so my main characters are four robots who have these limited rights.
(09:25): They’re free to work, but not to own property. They are free to associate with each other, but not form unions. And so they’re struggling with a lot of the same things that many people in the states have struggled with and now in the nation of California. So they decide through kind of skirting the laws that they will open a noodle restaurant to survive. And the book is really about them learning to get along with their human neighbors, cope with robophobia, and kind of find a home together in the new San Francisco. I just started writing the sequel.
Alexis Madrigal (10:03): Oh.
Annalee Newitz (10:03): Yeah. So you’re going to find out a lot about California politics in the sequel. It’s going
Robin Sloan (10:08): To be another sort of slim.
Annalee Newitz (10:09): Yeah, it’s going to be another novella. So it’s called Noodle Union. So that gives you a hint of what I might be thinking.
Robin Sloan (10:18): I mean, there’s so many ways we can get into this, but I would say primarily first as a writer, as someone who’s thinking about minds and voices and characters, do you look at this new creature before us with curiosity, with interest? Can you imagine a language model on the pages of an Annalee novel or just how does it all strike you?
Annalee Newitz (10:40): I am super curious about it. I’m very curious about humans’ reactions to it as well and seeing how many other anthropomorphizers are out there. And people are feeling anxious about whether these are people that we’re building, whether they’re just tools that will destroy our lives as people. What do we do with them ethically? I think all of that stuff is super interesting. And I’m glad we’re thinking about it, even though I am not convinced that the LLMs we have now are people. We absolutely should be thinking about what the heck happens if it turns out that they are. Because as I’ve said many times, the business model of most of these LLM companies is to build people and then buy and sell them. So we’re trying to reinvent slavery. Well, we are not, but captains of industry are. They love slavery. Oh, those guys are so crazy about it.
(11:34): But what I would say is that when you’re thinking about LLMs or you’re thinking about AI, what we’re calling AI more broadly, they do have bodies. We think of them as disembodied, but here we are in the middle of huge debates over data centers. Data centers are the bodies of these creatures, of these programs and algorithms and models. So it’s very late capitalism to have something whose body is remote and can’t be seen. And then you’re interacting with it as something that appears to be out of thin air.
Alexis Madrigal (12:11): A bright, friendly, chirpy presence.
Annalee Newitz (12:13): Right. Right. And all of the secondary effects that that thing is having on people’s lives and the environment is somewhere else, usually somewhere that is a have not state or a have not region. And so it’s very colonial. And many people have written about this, about the kind of colonial model of AI. And so I’m always interested in reminding people all of this stuff is embodied. There’s no such thing as an AI that’s like here in the air floating around as my first boss at the Bay Guardian said like, oh, the internet, it’s in the air. No, it’s actually not, dude. It’s in a server form.
Robin Sloan (12:51): Right though. Except that the thing itself, the voice, whatever it is, in a sense, I would argue it doesn’t care that it’s in the data center. It matters a lot that it is, but it doesn’t care. What it cares is that it’s in language. I mean, it’s terrain, it’s landscape. If you think of the robots of your novel, they’re hiking up hills and skating down the other side. The landscape, the literal environment of all these language models is language itself. And of course
Annalee Newitz (13:22): The – Is
Robin Sloan (13:22): It though? It absolutely is. And the –
Annalee Newitz (13:25): Don’t you think its landscape is circuitry and the wires it travels through and the ether that it travels through that it’s part of a radio wave and it’s part of an electrical current. It has a physical embodiment. Stop denying that it has a body
Robin Sloan (13:40): Robin. I shouldn’t have better than try to outplay Analynus. It’s just a normal physical body like the vast micorrhisal mat that connects all trees in the forest. Thank
Annalee Newitz (13:52): You. See, you understand.
Robin Sloan (13:53): Outplay it again.
Annalee Newitz (13:54): Listen, you’re the one that wrote about sentient sourdough bread, so you started it.
Robin Sloan (14:00): Fair enough. Do you think that this boom that’s been driven by this technology, do you think it’s different in scale or kinder character from the San Francisco booms before? Do you think it’s kind of just of a piece or how does it strike you as a longtime
Annalee Newitz (14:16): Chronicler? Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think it’s the same. So if it’s gold, if it’s microchips, if it’s models, LLMs, it’s all kind of the same thing because what ends up happening here in San Francisco is we get just crazy investment and huge levels of investment. I think $200 billion have been spent investing in AI in San Francisco alone over the last six years. It’s
Alexis Madrigal (14:44): Like half the money that’s gone into it in the world.
Annalee Newitz (14:47): Yeah. Imagine if we put even part of that money into say, I don’t know, public transit or a smart grid, which actually is AI. A smart grid is AI. Why don’t we invest in that? So I think that is the part that’s very San Francisco. We’re just going to put billions and billions of dollars into this thing that we don’t really know what it is. It’s like a tulip or maybe it’s gold or maybe it’s some other thing. Yeah, it’s definitely in character for this city.
Alexis Madrigal (15:16): I have to say I find it a little more thrilling than the couple previous booms. The kind of Uber for everything boom was really kind of sad in a labor exploitation hustle kind of situation. And then before that you had social media, which Rob and I have talked about as being maybe one of the great oxbow lakes in technological history. Eventually people will move on in some crucial ways. In fact, they kind of already have, at least from that kind of Mark Zuckerberg social network kind of sense of social media.That’s gone for most people now. And yet San Francisco was the heart and soul of that and the Bay Area.
(15:55): This one, I guess I find it interesting because I am really interested both in language and consciousness. And it seems to be just driving stakes through kind of cherished ideas that maybe I had about these things, that you couldn’t get this kind of linguistic performance without a conscious thing there. And it just turns out actually that does work. And I think the slippage between what you might expect and what actually happened is way more interesting than if you say, “What if we got rid of taxi medallions and anyone could drive around and pick you up?” That you could kind of imagine. It’s just kind of like a ground game logistics operations thing. And this has some mystery at the center of it where even the people working on it don’t totally get it.
Robin Sloan (16:46): I mean, you’ve put your finger on an important distinction there and that is a difference. It’s organic. It’s a technology that I don’t know if it’s fair to say for the first time is kind of as much organic as engineered or technical.
Alexis Madrigal (17:01): But sort of like an organism, it’s how those things on the multi-scale things work to generate the thing is still, that part is kind of mysterious. So that part of it I find very interesting. And at the same time, it’s also occurring against this socioeconomic and political backdrop that is so much more grim than when you first arrived in San Francisco in the 1990s, which was the survey data bears it out. It’s not just our vibes. People basically thought the world was getting better. And that is not across the political spectrum how people feel in 2026 as we’re staring down whatever is happening inside these models.
Robin Sloan (17:42): Is the mystery compelling to you, Annalee? Or are you kind of like, “No, I’m okay.”
Annalee Newitz (17:51): I know what you mean by the mystery. It’s that we have this technology where you’ll talk to a developer and they’re like, “Actually, we put in these inputs. We get some outputs. We don’t fully understand what’s happening in between.” I mean, people say that about Microsoft products all the time too. You know what I mean? They’re like, “Oh, this product is so big. Thousands of engineers contributed to it. No one person understands Windows.That ship has sailed. No one person understands a video game, like a premier video game because again, thousands of people have contributed to it. So calling it a mystery, sure, it’s a mystery. But the other thing about that is, as you guys were talking, and I think we all fall into this because we’re writers and we deal in language and we’re like, but language is the coolest, most awesome thing that makes us human.
(18:42): And that’s what we have over all of the other animals. We’re an animal, but we’re special because we have language. What if it turns out language is just kind of nothing big? What if it’s just like, oh, the reason why LLMs can do this so easily is because it turns out language is no big deal. And it’s actually not what makes us cool. What makes us cool is something else. That
Robin Sloan (19:05): Would be one of the great kind of recalibrations of all of history, actually. I welcome it.
Alexis Madrigal (19:11): Yeah.
Annalee Newitz (19:12): Especially written language.Because think about how bullshit written language really is. As somebody who I write a lot –
Robin Sloan (19:19): Hold on. McMillan, we have a new strap line for to print across the front of all of Annalee Newitz’s novels.
Annalee Newitz (19:26): Just get the audiobook people. But we think of written language as being this. It was this amazing technology. It has a mystery at the heart of it because oftentimes you can come across language without knowing where it came from. And you’re like, who wrote this? What even is this? Linear A, still trying to figure it out. And I write a lot about archeology in my science journalism life. And it really is the case that ancient civilizations that left writing behind are often harder to understand than ones that did not. And the reason why is because we get so tricked by the language and we’re like, “Oh, well, this culture was just all about King Jaya Varman.” Yeah. That’s all they though about all the time. And it’s like, no.
Alexis Madrigal (20:08): The one segment they found in the trb. Woodscriribe.
Annalee Newitz (20:11): Yeah. It was like the king had the money and the power to make people write stuff. But then there’s all these other people that we’re not even thinking about because we get so enchanted by this one piece of writing that we have. Or in Rome where it’s like the only people writing are the guys with power. And they’re saying all kinds of nasty stuff about freed slaves and sex workers. And it’s like, but we don’t know what the truth was. So the writing often hides the truth is what I’m saying. So writing is cool. I love it. I’m so grateful for it. It’s something I am good at. But maybe it’s just kind of yet another – The fact that it can
Alexis Madrigal (20:50): Reproduce those patterns of our language to you does not impress you as much as it might some other people.
Annalee Newitz (20:58): Well, I think, like I said, maybe that’s the recalibration is maybe we need to say, maybe it’s not impressive. Maybe it shows us that actually writing wasn’t really that cool of an invention in the first place. And we love writing, keep writing, but let’s keep going. Yeah, but
Robin Sloan (21:12): Let’s talk about some other better inventions like the noodle.
Annalee Newitz (21:17): Like cooking. It
Robin Sloan (21:18): Turns out
Annalee Newitz (21:19): That cooking might actually be a better
Robin Sloan (21:21): Invention than writing. I have to say, sometimes I feel like our conversations about this, and it comes back to humanness and the things that we love and sort of are proud of in almost a species level. And they feel like these bullworks, and then you set them up and they do kind of get challenged or even knocked down. In my novel Sourdough, I make a big deal about the egg test and how these amazing agile robot arms and they can do all these great things, but they cannot crack an egg with the grace of a human cook just knocking it with one hand. There is a robot arm company down in Palo Alto. They got these new robot arms. Now I don’t –
Alexis Madrigal (22:01): CEO emails
Robin Sloan (22:01): You check this
Alexis Madrigal (22:02): Out.
Robin Sloan (22:03): I don’t know if they read sourdough. I don’t know if they read sourdough, but they’ve got some really slick new demos and they are cracking some eggs. And I will tell you sincerely, I found it kind of both delightful and disturbing because I’ve thought about that so much. And I did. I sort of believed in it. And I think that’s one of the challenges of this time.This has been happening for the last 10 years with these technologies. There have been these really easy ways to say, yeah, yeah, nice, but it can’t X. And then it X’s. And how do we think about that?
Alexis Madrigal (22:35): I mean, I’m also curious about this, Annalee. I would say in your fiction, you come across to me as pro robot. You would like to have robots here in this room with us and you could interact and hang out with them and
Annalee Newitz (22:48): Run on the
Alexis Madrigal (22:48): Streets of San Francisco. But how do we get from here to there minus, I don’t know, some trillions of dollars worth of investment into LLMs and other things? Is there a preferred route of AI development for you that would somehow go around some of these kind of economic and political issues that you’re thinking about? That’s such a good question.
Annalee Newitz (23:11): It is a really good question. I think that one possibility is that we think about this as an economic problem. There’s way too much money going into the development of LLMs. And we’ve seen the results, which is that it’s getting stuffed into every product, into every service, places where we don’t want it, where we don’t need it, where it’s actually hindering productivity rather than bolstering it. And so that’s a very bad side effect of this huge amount of investment. I don’t think we should invest no money in it. I’ve heard lots of accounts that Anthropics products really do help with the development process and software. I heard a lot of people crying about that like, oh, all the things I was trained to do, I don’t have to do anymore. But at the same time, it’s exciting. It is a tool. It’s like a calculator would’ve been back in the 19th century.
(24:04): It’s like, oh, this can help us get to a certain point and then now we can develop on top of it. I would love to see more involvement of the humanities and social sciences in the development of LLMs. What if we poured some of that AI money into universities where we study the human impacts of this? Because all of these companies are claiming we are going to build humans, but we’re not going to consult the humanities, which is literally the study of humans and culture. It’s like, how do you make humans? How do you make people without understanding society? And I’m sorry, but software development, love it. It’s great. It’s not the study of culture and society.
Alexis Madrigal (24:49): I do think that a lot of the people who work in this field who now are scattered throughout the streets of San Francisco, more or less think like humans suck at figuring stuff out. That the way to do it is to just plow all the information into the machine and have it find the patterns of what is human? Well, this thing is going to figure it out. We’re just going to keep feeding it every word ever put out by humans, every video, every uploaded by human. Every podcast episode. Every podcast. And then out at the other end, they’re just going to say, what is a human? And something will emerge. Some pattern will be there. And that’s to me, the sort of bounce on effect of this for the city of San Francisco is we’re now like, there’s tons of people here who now think in the terms of these large language models and think in the terms of AI.
(25:44): And I’m not sure what that’s going to do.
Robin Sloan (25:46): The term of art for that in the industry and in academia is the bitter lesson. It’s literally called the bitter lesson of data, which also sounds like the title of a good novel that I would read. Yeah, bitter
Alexis Madrigal (25:57): Lesson. I would
Robin Sloan (25:57): Read that. Yeah,
Alexis Madrigal (25:59):
Yeah,
Robin Sloan (25:59):
Yeah. Totally. So yeah, people are walking around basically bitter lesson pilled. And it’s like, we’re not going to reason our way – We’re not going to figure anything out. Or puzzle our way out. We’re just going to. Yeah. Totally. Yeah.
Annalee Newitz (26:09): It’s very nihilistic and it is very anti-human. I think that it’s as much a reflection of contemporary politics as it is of any kind of technology. And again, all of the money going into this technology is a political choice. Saying that this is the primary technology that’s going to drive our understanding of ourselves. That’s again, a political choice. The technology is just going along doing sentence completion or whatever. It really is, as Emily and Bender has said, a stochastic parrot. It says horoscope or something. But the idea that we’ll shovel all of this data into a machine and get answers about people or about society, I think is a symptom of a culture where we’re moving toward authoritarianism, where the idea is that some single centralized entity will figure everything out and make decisions for us. And then we don’t have to worry about what actual people say that they want because the machine says, “Well, what you need is X.” Asking the machine what humans are is a way of avoiding democracy, avoiding voting, asking the actual humans who they are.
(27:23): We don’t want to hear from them. They don’t know. And it’s like, actually, it turns out we know best what’s good for us. And our voices should be heard, not filtered through a machine, through a model that distorts what we mean. Actually just talk to us. Ask us what we want. I just want trans people to be free. And I just want to have public transit that works. And you’re not going to get an AI to explain that to anyone. You have to do it at the voting booth. You have to do it in the streets.
Robin Sloan (27:56): Hearing you describe that, it kind of creates a paradox. It’s a very vivid paradox of this Titanic effort. I mean, sort of a construction effort, an infrastructural effort, a financial effort driven at least in part by exhaustion and sort of a community, a society saying, “I give up. We can’t figure this out. We’re not going to try anymore. Let’s just build a machine God that can
Alexis Madrigal (28:21): Do it for
Robin Sloan (28:22): Us.” So what’s the next five years look like right here in San Francisco? Forget the world. Just think about this. We’re in the hot crucible of this weird new
Alexis Madrigal (28:31): Thing. Just crash out.
Robin Sloan (28:31): Yeah. Yeah. What do you think it looks like, Annalee? That’s the first question. And then we’ll finally close out with what should we do? But what do you think? What do you think is just ahead of us now?
Annalee Newitz (28:42): I mean, there’s a couple of pathways. I mean, there’s many pathways. This is a city that loves to burn itself down. We are right near a massive earthquake fault. Bad things could happen. We could be on fire. We could be recovering from all kinds of – Are
Alexis Madrigal (28:58): These the hopeful scenarios or are they
Annalee Newitz (28:59): Not helpful? I’m just saying – Did you ask for hopeful scenarios?
Alexis Madrigal (29:02): No, no, no, I wasn’t. I was just
Annalee Newitz (29:03): Curious.
(29:03): I think we’re going to see a backlash to that investment model. We’re also going to see, and Robin, you and I were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, and a backlash against just the internet, information and language that we receive from places that we think of as kind of polluted by AI slop. I hear a lot of people talking about cozy technology. How do you create the feeling of coziness that was torn away from us when Twitter turned into X? So I think we’re going to see new kinds of community spaces, for example, like local economy, which Alexis, you’ve worked on so hard in Oakland, and I just think is absolutely a model of the future. And we’re going to see more and more of that. We’re going to see more new types of community gatherings in older spaces like bars or libraries or schools.
(29:59): And I’m more focused on authenticity being associated with something being physical. But I think that we are associating people just talking to each other and writing things down with human connection versus if you do it on the internet, you never know if an AI wrote it. Did a person write it? But if I give you a zine that’s all scribbled and weird and I’ve cut things up, you’re like, “That’s definitely Annalee.”
Alexis Madrigal (30:29): I mean, I do think you’re right though, Annalee. I think that there’s a bonus that’s now accruing to the physical world and anything that is. I mean, the problem is the words now can be printed from an AI, but just real actual three-dimensional IRL, real-time interaction suddenly has a bonus that it didn’t have before, which is you know you’re not interacting with AI slop of any kind. Wait, before we let you go, do you want to tell us about your new book just before you
Annalee Newitz (30:58): Want to do that? Yeah. So I’m working on two things right now. One is I have a new book coming out in October, which is called A Wall Is Also a Road, and it is about a cellular slime mold who is a grad student. Classic. And the other thing I’m working on is I’m helping to reboot the magazine Star Log as a print publication.
Robin Sloan (31:18): As discussed.
Annalee Newitz (31:19): No AI slop, nothing. It will be only print and that’s coming in November. So I’m very excited.
Robin Sloan (31:27): Amazing.
Alexis Madrigal (31:27): So much to look forward to.
Robin Sloan (31:29): Yeah. Annalee Newitz, the great chronicler of other minds. Thanks for bringing your real mind here with us
Alexis Madrigal (31:35): Of San Francisco.
Robin Sloan (31:36):
Yeah,
Alexis Madrigal (31:36):
What a pleasure.
Annalee Newitz (31:37): Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, the fandom is very mutual.
Alexis Madrigal (31:40): Annalee Newitz, thank you so much. Thanks for the book and the future books and everything else.
Annalee Newitz (31:46): Thanks so much for having me.