Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Norriy with you,
Speaker 2: Robert Sawyer with us. His latest book is called The Downloaded.
Speaker 2: What are the chances of this becoming a movie?
Speaker 3: Robert, Well, you know, we are really trying to do that.
Speaker 3: I do have the film and TV rights to it,
Speaker 3: and of course if Brendan Fraser would agree to start
Speaker 3: in the movie, I think it'd be greenlit overnight.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Obviously start in the audiobook version. But my Hollywood agent
Speaker 3: and I are hard at work trying to get this
Speaker 3: set up. We both think it would make a really
Speaker 3: fine feature film. And as you may recall, I had
Speaker 3: a TV series on ABC a while ago, Flash Forward,
Speaker 3: based on my novel of the same name. So you know,
Speaker 3: it's always a long shot to get something made, but
Speaker 3: I had something made in the past. We're hoping that
Speaker 3: The Downloaded will become a movie as well.
Speaker 2: Would Brendan become one of the Astronauts or one of
Speaker 2: the games, he would.
Speaker 3: Be the main prisoner actually is the character you played
Speaker 3: the main ex convict in the audio version, and tumble
Speaker 3: guy who made some bad decisions in life. It is
Speaker 3: trying to redeem himself. And you know, we all make mistakes.
Speaker 3: His was more catastrophic than most of us have are
Speaker 3: making our life. But he also trying to redeem himself,
Speaker 3: and he did it with such heart, such an emotion.
Speaker 3: You know, sometimes Brendan doesn't get the credit that he deserves.
Speaker 3: I mean he does now that he's an Academy Award winner.
Speaker 3: But we think of George of the Jungle, we think
Speaker 3: of Encino Man, we think of the Mummy movies, and
Speaker 3: we don't necessarily think of a subtle, complicated performance. But
Speaker 3: he brought that very much to the audiobook version of
Speaker 3: the Downloaded.
Speaker 2: So the Book of Course has to do with an
Speaker 2: incredible possibilities of science fiction in the future. How realistic
Speaker 2: do you think that is?
Speaker 3: I for me, now this isn't true for all science
Speaker 3: fiction writers, but for me, it has to be realistic.
Speaker 3: It has to be plausible. If it's not plausible, then
Speaker 3: it's fantasy. It's not science fiction. And I think all
Speaker 3: the things that I talk about in the Book of Course,
Speaker 3: we've already mentioned the cryonic suspension, the freezing of bodies
Speaker 3: for eventual thawing out reanimating of formerly dead people. Absolutely,
Speaker 3: I think that technology is very near at hand. The
Speaker 3: book also talks enormously about artificial intelligence, and I mean
Speaker 3: that's galloping ahead, as you well know, George, where every
Speaker 3: time we turn around there's some new breakthrough, new level
Speaker 3: of sophistication in what AI can do. And so that
Speaker 3: absolutely I think is also in the cards. And the
Speaker 3: third technology in the downloaded is intertellar travel, not by
Speaker 3: going faster than the speed of light with a Star
Speaker 3: Trek style warp drive, but the kind of technology that
Speaker 3: we have or will have very soon. We take a
Speaker 3: long time to get to say proximate century close to
Speaker 3: star other than the Sun to Earth, but that doesn't
Speaker 3: mean we couldn't do it, and I suspect we will
Speaker 3: do it this century.
Speaker 2: Robert, we were talking about Larry Knivin, the great sci
Speaker 2: fi writer, and Heat partnered up with the lady Jerry Pronell.
Speaker 2: Did you know Jerry at all?
Speaker 3: I knew Jerry very well. I was so sad when
Speaker 3: Jerry passed. You know, we had differing politics, we had
Speaker 3: differing personalities, but we were friends. And what a lesson
Speaker 3: you know that you can have people on different ends
Speaker 3: of the political spectrum, different different belief systems. That Jerry
Speaker 3: was Roman Catholic and I'm, you know, a person of
Speaker 3: no faith and still be friends that have civil debate.
Speaker 3: I miss him, and I miss that whole ethos that
Speaker 3: used to be so prevalent in the world and seems
Speaker 3: so rare today.
Speaker 2: He would have liked the download it.
Speaker 3: I think he really would have. I think he would have.
Speaker 3: He was, you know, and that pleases me because he
Speaker 3: and Larry as mitched Larry him, Jerry Pronell. They wrote
Speaker 3: what Robert A. Heinlein, the great dean of American science fiction, called,
Speaker 3: you know, the finest science fiction novel he ever read,
Speaker 3: The Moten God's Eye, a wonderful book, good people.
Speaker 2: So without giving away the book, we don't want to
Speaker 2: do that. Something happens at the end dramatically, doesn't it. Oh?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And you're always leading up to that. I mean,
Speaker 3: you ask people to give of their time, and of
Speaker 3: course they're buying the book some of their money, but
Speaker 3: you're taking a portion of a person's life. If you're
Speaker 3: an author and you have to give a payoff at
Speaker 3: the end, you have to, you know, if they're going
Speaker 3: to invest whatever number of hours it takes to read
Speaker 3: the book or listen to it. If you listen to it,
Speaker 3: it's about six hours in the audiobook version. I owe
Speaker 3: it to you, any author owes it to you that
Speaker 3: in the end there's a payoff that makes it worthwhile.
Speaker 3: And I really do think it is there in the download.
Speaker 3: And I tried very very hard to give people not
Speaker 3: just value for your money, of course that's what we
Speaker 3: all want to do for in some kind of business,
Speaker 3: but value for the time that we took out of
Speaker 3: somebody's life to pursue whatever piece of art or creativity
Speaker 3: we've created.
Speaker 2: How realistic is the book based on the future.
Speaker 3: I think it's very realistic. I, honest to God, believe
Speaker 3: that artificial intelligence, truly self aware artificial intelligence, not just
Speaker 3: chad GBT that throws back at you, you know, things
Speaker 3: have scraped that other people have created on the web,
Speaker 3: but true AI intelligence. Yes, I think that's very plausible,
Speaker 3: very likely, and very near in the future. All the
Speaker 3: other technology I talked about absolutely, yeah, I think there
Speaker 3: were at such a threshold of new technologies and breakthroughs.
Speaker 3: I'm going to be if I do make it to
Speaker 3: be ninety nine years old. As we alluded to in
Speaker 3: the earlier segment, I expect to see all of these technologies.
Speaker 2: Robert Sara's website is linked up with Coast tocosdam dot com.
Speaker 2: He was on with me about a year ago. We
Speaker 2: were talked about The Oppenheimer Alternative. Did you see that movie?
Speaker 3: Of course I did, yeh three hours. I must say
Speaker 3: I saw the movie and at the fay I endured it.
Speaker 3: That was a long movie that could have been all
Speaker 3: due respect to Chrisivern Nolan, the director, could have been
Speaker 3: a shorter movie. But it was certainly you know, the
Speaker 3: definitive date at least screen treatment of the Oppenheimer's story.
Speaker 3: My novel, as you know, The Oppenheimer Alternative was an
Speaker 3: alternate history novel that I wrote and published before it
Speaker 3: was even announced that Christopher Nolan was making making his movie.
Speaker 3: So it wasn't me cashing in. But his movie certainly
Speaker 3: helped my book sales, so I can't complain.
Speaker 2: And Oppenheimer had regrets.
Speaker 3: Many regrets, you know. He was like many of our scientists.
Speaker 3: He was given an interesting puzzle. He called it. It
Speaker 3: was his favorite adjective sweet, A sweet problem in science.
Speaker 3: You don't split the atom and make all kinds of
Speaker 3: energy and big explosion. And he didn't even think about
Speaker 3: the moral ramifications of what he was doing until after,
Speaker 3: really after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, the
Speaker 3: one that was dropped on Nagasaki. The first one, you know,
Speaker 3: there were arguments pro and con about whether it was
Speaker 3: necessary in order to end the war World War two.
Speaker 3: But the second one he felt was overkilled, the first
Speaker 3: time that word had ever been used, overkill, excessive, and
Speaker 3: that was when he started to have real regrets about
Speaker 3: what he had made possible.
Speaker 2: I think that Japanese should have surrendered though immediately after.
Speaker 3: Well totally. But the problem was that, you know, the
Speaker 3: telegraph lines were down, the radio stations in Hiroshima had
Speaker 3: been destroyed. It takes days on foot or by. The
Speaker 3: railways were broken to get to Tokyo, where the high
Speaker 3: command was. We bombed them a second time, seventy two
Speaker 3: hours after the first time. And today we think, of course,
Speaker 3: I just go on social media, I'll just you know,
Speaker 3: tweet at President Biden and say, hey, surrender. He yeah,
Speaker 3: girl's render. That kind of instantaneous communication just did not
Speaker 3: exist in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2: Closer, though, you have your study in twenty fifty nine.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: How close are we to that kind of scenario? Oh?
Speaker 3: I think you know, you play a game when you
Speaker 3: pick a date for a science fiction novel, just like
Speaker 3: as I mentioned earlier two thousand and one a space odyssey.
Speaker 3: Well that they didn't turn out to be right. We
Speaker 3: did not have a city on the Moon, we did
Speaker 3: not have orbiting hotels, we did not have interplanetary crewe dimissions,
Speaker 3: we didn't have true artificial intelligence, we didn't have critogonic suspension.
Speaker 3: All of those things are in two thousand and one,
Speaker 3: here just twenty three years later. Oops, they got the
Speaker 3: date wrong. But we every time we miss one of
Speaker 3: these predictions, we hone our ability. I don't mean just me,
Speaker 3: but all of us who play this game of futurism
Speaker 3: to get closer and closer to being accurate in just
Speaker 3: how far down the road things are. And I think
Speaker 3: twenty fifty nine is a very plausible date for the
Speaker 3: technologies that I talk about in my novel That Downloaded.
Speaker 2: I've always wondered if the terrorists from nine to eleven
Speaker 2: pick that year based on the movie.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting question, quite you know, I suspect they
Speaker 3: simply did it as soon as they possibly could do it.
Speaker 3: I don't think the subtleties of symbolism, well, symbolism for sure,
Speaker 3: I mean going after the Pentagon, going after the World
Speaker 3: Trade Center. Obviously they understood that level of symbolism. But
Speaker 3: I don't think they were buying large, subtle, sophisticated thinkers.
Speaker 3: They were thugs, and we still reel from the incredible
Speaker 3: carnage that they wrought for no good reason.
Speaker 2: We're going to take calls with Robert Sawyer next hour
Speaker 2: here on coast to coast and jump in and check
Speaker 2: in on artificial intelligence and give us your thoughts on that.
Speaker 2: It seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.
Speaker 1: AI.
Speaker 2: Don't you feel out one hundred percent?
Speaker 3: I was just talking to some of my writing colleagues
Speaker 3: over the last couple of days. We're all very worried
Speaker 3: about our jobs. George. You know, we write books and
Speaker 3: it takes us months or sometimes years to write a book,
Speaker 3: and an AI can crank out a book in minutes
Speaker 3: or seconds. I, you know, very lucky.
Speaker 2: Can I write it though, just as creatively as you could?
Speaker 1: Not?
Speaker 3: Today? It can't, but it can do it, can do
Speaker 3: it as good as me in eighteen months from now,
Speaker 3: maybe not thirty six months. I'm starting to worry. Seventy
Speaker 3: two months from now, I suspect it we'll be able
Speaker 3: to do it, not just better than me, but better
Speaker 3: than William Shakespeare, better than the best writers ever in
Speaker 3: human history.
Speaker 2: Fascinating. How does it get to be able to do that?
Speaker 3: Well? It has one advantage. You know, many writers go
Speaker 3: to university and do a four year degree, say in
Speaker 3: English literature, and during that four years they might read
Speaker 3: fifty or sixty really good novels that have been, you know,
Speaker 3: considered to be the most important ones. Maybe it's Smoby Dick,
Speaker 3: maybe it's To Kill a Mockingbird, You name your favorites.
Speaker 3: The AI has read everything. When it was revealed last
Speaker 3: year what chat gpt he had scraped to use the
Speaker 3: sources for, you know, its the ability to mimic human text,
Speaker 3: twenty four out of twenty five of my novels were
Speaker 3: in that group that they'd scraped. They've read it read
Speaker 3: everything I ever wrote, everything, Stephen King every wrote, every
Speaker 3: writer you never heard of, ever wrote. And you get
Speaker 3: to be very good when you've got lots and lots
Speaker 3: of examples of what's good and what's bad. The most
Speaker 3: interesting thing in some ways is that Amazon owns not
Speaker 3: just all the books that you know are on Kindle
Speaker 3: and so forth, but owns all the reviews of all
Speaker 3: those books. So the AI gets to look and say, oh, well,
Speaker 3: people don't really like it when there's an ending that
Speaker 3: it's just a dream. Oh the butler having done it,
Speaker 3: that's a cliche. Well I better not do that, and
Speaker 3: so on and so forth. It's got an enormous database
Speaker 3: not just of what people have created, but what others
Speaker 3: have done. Is the reactions to what people have created.
Speaker 2: Bills today, Robert with my phone and oh yeah, and
Speaker 2: I'm amazed at how that apparatus can remember your user
Speaker 2: name and password for the various sites you go to
Speaker 2: to pay bills or something like that. Right, Absolutely unbelievable,
Speaker 2: and in.
Speaker 3: Theory remember them securely. But yes, absolutely, it is astonishing
Speaker 3: because you know, when I was in university, and I'm
Speaker 3: sure when you were going to school and so forth,
Speaker 3: so much of it was memorization. You had to memorize,
Speaker 3: you know, whether it was chemical formulas if you're saying chemistry,
Speaker 3: or the capitals of the states, or the presidents or
Speaker 3: whatever it was. We don't memorize anything anymore. We just
Speaker 3: have to ask for the information. We have offloaded whole
Speaker 3: parts of our intellectual process to machines, the biggest one
Speaker 3: being are detailed memory. We no longer require one. We
Speaker 3: simply ask and are given the information, and we hope
Speaker 3: that the information and is accurate that is given to us.
Speaker 2: The beginning of artificial intelligence, I think, occurred at electronic
Speaker 2: cash machines cash registers, where young people no longer have
Speaker 2: to do mathematics in their head. They let the machine
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 3: Absolutely yes. And it's interesting because I used to be
Speaker 3: really good at mental math, and now I'm going to
Speaker 3: have a practice of it because there's not much call
Speaker 3: in my day to day life to work out, you know,
Speaker 3: the percentage of a tip, or to add up a
Speaker 3: series of numbers. And when I do it, and now
Speaker 3: in my head, I actually double check it, and I
Speaker 3: never used to it. I used to have confidence in
Speaker 3: my basic, innate mathematical abilities that most human beings who
Speaker 3: were you know, born in the let's say, pre internet
Speaker 3: era had, And now we're saying I better just double
Speaker 3: check that because I'm not in practice for what used
Speaker 3: to be a fundamental basic human.
Speaker 2: Skill without a calculator, without something like that, that kind
Speaker 2: of device, how many young people today can do adding
Speaker 2: and subtracting and division in their heads exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I'm old enough, as I say
Speaker 3: in an earlier segment here, I'm sixty four years old.
Speaker 3: Now I'm old enough to remember when pocket calculators there
Speaker 3: was the debate. It was when I was in grade
Speaker 3: seven was when the debate was, well, well, we let
Speaker 3: the students bring a calculator into math class.
Speaker 2: Texas Instruments, Texas.
Speaker 3: I had the Texas Instrument thirty five, the TI thirty
Speaker 3: five exactly, with not an LCD screen but an LED screen,
Speaker 3: the red glowing digits, and it took a nine volt battery,
Speaker 3: but a wonderful machine. And ultimately where I was in Toronto, Canada,
Speaker 3: the jurisdiction after jurisdiction came to the same conclusion that yeah,
Speaker 3: students should be able to use calculators, because there was
Speaker 3: no conceivable reality when those devices would not be available
Speaker 3: to them. And the people who say, yeah, well what
Speaker 3: happens when you know they run out of batteries, and
Speaker 3: of course Texas Instruments and Cassio responded, will make them
Speaker 3: solar powered, and you can buy a solar powered calculator,
Speaker 3: which means it'll run forever for five bucks at Staples
Speaker 3: or any other office supply store.
Speaker 2: That's so true, Robert Sawyer with us, We're going to
Speaker 2: take your calls next hour about science fiction, about artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2: Jump on bout just how far can you think, Robert,
Speaker 2: artificial intelligence will go. I mean, it's diagnosing diseases, it's
Speaker 2: helping doctors. Like you say, it could be a writer
Speaker 2: one day, it could be a talk show host.
Speaker 3: Well, I fear for us both, George, I have to
Speaker 3: say that. You know, we were talking about the fact
Speaker 3: that Brendan Fraser narrates the audio version by the downloaded.
Speaker 3: But right now I just saw an article from Bloomberg
Speaker 3: that forty thousand audiobooks are available now on Audible that
Speaker 3: are narrated by AI that aren't hited by so actors,
Speaker 3: you sere losing their jobs. They're the first to go.
Speaker 3: And I think what we need is solidarity talk show hosts, writers, actors,
Speaker 3: visual artists. As a theatrical artists, you know, stage play artists,
Speaker 3: all of us have to stick together and remind the
Speaker 3: audience that art is supposed to be a human exercise,
Speaker 3: not something that's machine generated.
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