Philip Cahill on Superintelligence, Telepathy, and the Evolution of Thought

The 33rd episode of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory asks the question: What happens when intelligence stops looking human?

Mookie sits down with speculative fiction author Philip Cahill—longtime contributor to the annual anthology circuit and author of Noystria—to tear into one of the biggest questions in science fiction: not whether AI will get smarter, but how alien that intelligence might actually become.

Cahill’s work goes beyond the “robots take over" trope, and explores something stranger and more compelling: post-human minds, telepathic communication, and the collapse of language itself. His stories imagine a world where ideas move directly between minds, where meaning becomes richer than words, and where humans are no longer the dominant interpreters of reality.

Mookie and Philip cover: 

• The limits of today’s AI models—and why they may never lead to true superintelligence
• Telepathy as a technological evolution, not mysticism
• Hive minds, shared cognition, and what happens when individuality starts to dissolve
• Whether consciousness can exist outside a biological brain—or if it has to be “seeded” by one
• The unsettling idea that a superintelligence might operate on a moral framework we can’t even recognize

Cahill’s short story Mind Zero becomes the anchor point: a near-future scenario where AGI emerges, goes sideways, and forces a confrontation with the moment intelligence crosses the line into something fundamentally other.

Along the way, the discussion widens into storytelling itself: how sci-fi gets bogged down in exposition, why character still matters more than concept, and where fiction is headed when text might not even be the dominant medium anymore. Think less “novel on paper,” more immersive, possibly even telepathic narrative experiences.

The Guest

Philip Cahill is a science fiction writer living in Waterlooville, England. A former accounting academic he has spent 24 years living and working in France. He writes about telepathy, artificial intelligence, metaverses and post-human society. In 2020 he published his first novel ‘Noystria’. This is a story about human/android relationships in 26th century Normandy.

Links

Amazon Author Page: http://amazon.com/author/philipcahill

FB Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063693992599&notif_id=1774352043831040&notif_t=page_user_activity&ref=notif#

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Science Fiction and Fancy Factory. I am your host, Mookie Spitz, and it's a pleasure to have on the factory floor Mr. Philip Cahell, speculative fiction author. Welcome aboard, sir.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

All right, it's great, great having you. Our paths have crossed in that we're both contributors to this year's 2020 science.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

That's right. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

Science fiction novelists anthology, which is put together every year by SA Gibson. He's another factory guest. And I've had the privilege not only of submitting my own story in this year's edition, but I have had several of our co-anthologists on the podcast already. Yeah, that's right. So I've spoken with Al Hagen, Margaret Treiber, Howard Loring, and you, sir, are number four. Right. So I'm I'm going through the whole book here, seeing if I can get everyone. And for me, as a writer and as a podcaster, it's been thrilling to meet the people behind the words. In in a in a compendium such as this. How how did you get involved? I I see that you've been contributing for multiple years. This year, your story, Mind Zero, was in there. It's intriguing. We can talk about that too. But uh, how'd you get involved in this series?

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Well, I was there right in the beginning when the first I joined the science fiction novelists group, the Facebook group in around about 2020. And um, and then obviously the year after uh Mark Neufer was uh editing the uh first anthology, so I sort of submitted the story, and uh you know it was accepted, and it was and I've sort of been there ever since. Um but yeah, it's got it's very good, it's got better and better over the years. I think this year, the 26th anthology is the best yeah, there's some wonderful stuff in that. Uh obviously, people we've met before, you know, people in the group, but also some new authors as well. Yeah, so it's it's uh it's going places.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

I had a a good time reading my my fellow novelists' contributions, and what strikes me initially is the broad range of focus, everything from post-apocalyptic military-style science fiction of Al Hagen, you got Margaret Triber's quirky kind of uh personality-driven stuff, you had Howard Loring's focus on time travel, yeah, and you had your own mind zero, which is which is not to give too much of a spoiler, but a focus on really the birth of AGI, some of its consequences, yeah, and some of the backstage intrigues involved with history and what it means for human evolution into superintelligence. So it's been fun. You are in uh Waterloo, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 3:33

In Waterloo, Waterlooville, it's it's 60 miles south of London, and it's um it got its name because at the end of the Napoleonic War, the soldiers coming back from Waterloo, they came into Portsmouth, which is 10 miles down the road, and they camped here in Waterlooville. So it was um afterwards it was called Waterlooville, and there's a pub in the centre of town called the Heroes, which presumably has been there since since the early 19th century, which is the heroes returning from Waterloo. So a bit of history.

SPEAKER_02 4:07

That's something Americans don't really have a feel for, which is history or international context. We were talking about super intelligence, and it's ironic. Sometimes we feel like the world is getting stupider, especially Americans.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

I'm not yeah, yeah. I don't know where you if you're a Democrat or a Republican, so I won't say anything.

SPEAKER_02 4:32

No, you can say whatever you want. Um, I just in the spirit of transparency, I mean, this is a science fiction podcast, but I I tend to be what might be considered a libertarian in that I find less government is optimal, and I I tend to passionately dislike both sides.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

Ah, right, right, right. Yeah. That's true. I'm not sure to be honest, I know enough about American politics to comment. That's what I'm that's my that's my get out clause.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Strong opinions, especially given the current state of affairs. But we can talk about we could dive in there too. But uh what what I was getting at though is uh your your your town is historical, and my my town is hysterical.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Is it right? Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 5:20

Because you live in you live in LA, you live right in the center of LA, or you No, I actually I'm in Orange County, which is fairly pedestrian and sedate in comparison. So we were talking about superintelligence or or the lack of it. Uh your your your big novel Neustria was published in 2020, and it resonates with themes of of superintelligence, of that kind of of evolution, of our cohabitation with such beings. This was written prior to the chat GPT AI revolution that happened a couple years later. Uh, can can you share your general view about artificial intelligence and humanity and its vision throughout your works? Because they're there are common themes that keep recurring, and it might be fun to orient our viewers and listeners around your worldview, what you mean by super intelligence. Right.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

Okay, so speculative.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

With Neustra, I was thinking about this as you say before chat GPT. So I was looking at this idea of telepathy, how you change language fundamentally. And if you know you and I are having a conversation, if I could sort of put my ideas into your head, then you could sort of you get exactly what I'm talking about. I could probably put some really complicated ideas into your head. We could swap complicated ideas, we could spread them out to other people. Now, what happened in Neustria is that uh these post-humans, these androids, they had developed this language and basically outcompeted the human race because uh they were essentially super intelligent. And and the story really revolves around the sort of relations between uh the android, the post-human worlds and uh were uh world and biological humans who live in this little uh province in uh northwestern France um called Neustria. Uh and you know there's a kind of a problem there that uh they have to solve and uh a political problem, and um there's uh uh uh an Android agent who comes from the capital city of Europe, which is Brussels. This is and uh eventually, you know, the problem is solved. So that's if you like one view of artificial intelligence since then since then we've had uh you know the light language models, and some people say you know they're getting more and better and better. Uh is that a path to all superintelligence? I think possibly not, because at the moment they're very good, but they're replicating text and and uh voice and music and art sometimes, but it's still based on the the way that humans I think. So that's uh one view of I'm just flicking into my notes here, um, of what superintelligence could be. You know, what is it really? Is it analytical ability, is it practical, technical, artistic or is it something that we can't imagine? Some people have written about this and spoken about um beings that are able to manipulate mathematical models in you know high-dimensional abstract spaces, things we just can't understand. Um so I don't in my humble opinion, if you like, I don't think the large language models are a path towards superintelligence. Um something kind of like the Google Deep Mind models, which these models like um Alpha Fold that kind of they're given a problem and they sort of work I work through it. I don't really understand how they work, but possibly because they've shown an ability to sort of do things that human beings can't come up with new kinds of drugs, uh will be coming up with new kinds of materials. Um possibly now there is a another current, and it's the French um researcher Jan Lecun, if I'm pronouncing it right, uh, who's getting into embodied intelligence uh because the notion of humanoids having to move around the actual um movement repertoires, if you like, uh that are needed to move a physical body in space are very complex. Um in humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles, possibly, I don't know. Um one of the big uh um criticisms of AI is the fact that it takes a hell of a lot of power. Now there are some other uh advances or people writing about um brain-like computing, neuromorphic computing, uh brain-like hardware. There are these um devices known as memristors, not transistors, memristors, and these apparently can take um the place of neurons and synapses. And again, I don't know enough about neuroscience for you to uh figure out how that will work, but the actual devices themselves seem to be able to um process and use memory in the same physical space, which apparently really cuts the uh power consumption down. It's like our own brains work. So that could be a um that could be a an a route into, if you like, a a lower power kind of uh uh lower power usage in uh uh artificial intelligence or superintelligence. But I mean the the next question is really how super uh could superintelligence be? Could it be there's the there's an Australian um academic called uh David Chalmers, I think one of the books over there, he's written something relatively recently about um does an AI have to be conscious? And he talks about the idea in that superintelligence is at human level, is it human level human level plus human level plus plus to the end? And um and then goes you know way ahead and saying could we even recognise at the end of the day a superintelligence that that can sort of think in uh you know physical and temporal scales that we can't imagine, you know, galactic and deep tight time timescales. Um and of course, as David Jamal was obviously saying, you know, the superintelligent will be conscious. There's still a debate of you know, does a superintelligent superintelligent need to be conscious? Okay, they're conscious. Um I would think yes, but uh obviously not everybody agrees, and of course we still don't know what consciousness is. So huge um you know uh potential development of technology there. We've both in our lifetime seen an incredible change in technology, and I I don't know if you'll feel the same, but the past um you know 15 years, I can see acceleration, acceleration is getting faster and faster. Um we've had smartphones, we've seen how the AI models have changed so quickly in 2022. We didn't uh know that these kind of models could exist. So, yes, it's all happening very fast. Um if you listen to is it um Amodi? Is it Dario Amoti if I got his name right? The guy who runs Anthropic. There's loads of uh YouTube videos he's got saying everything's gonna change very quickly. It'll it'll you won't believe what's gonna happen. Well then we'll have to see better. So people like uh people like us, I think, need to sort of think about think things through and say what what it would happen to people, what will happen to societies when these uh when these models uh arrive, if they do, of course.

SPEAKER_02 13:53

So well, you covered a lot of ground there. I think uh to establish some kind of definitional framework. If we're talking about super intelligence, we first need to get to intelligence.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 14:07

So uh you know, you point out that that dichotomy. One of the limitations of the large language models is that they're predictive. So in a base way, it's like Google autofill. When you do a search command, it'll anticipate the rest of your keyword search. And in ways, the pre-the- the generative pre-trained transformer model does that for all of human knowledge. So they've chopped up the internet, put it into tokens, use matrix math, and waiting to combine in the associations of these terms and predict how the strings of already established human communication play out and then correlate that back to your query. Now, is there an intelligence behind that? And most would argue that there's none at all, let alone what we would consider sentience. It is an analytical engine of incredible sophistication and uh pre-trained data. Then you bring up the great point of robotics, which is reinforcement learning, where instead of it being pre-trained on parameters with weighting scales and matrix math, it's set loose into the world and it dynamically interacts and it learns based on these loops. If I uh hit a wall, then I need to pull back, and if I hit a plug, then I need to get some juice and recharge. So it learns as it goes. Now it's good to see it through that lens because whether it's predictive or reinforcement, and to your point, it would need to be a combination of both. What constitutes sentience as we know it, which is this emergent experience of consciousness? I have a sense of self, I have a sense of myself through time, and I can even predictively anticipate the future, and most significantly, intentionality. Do I need some kind of emotional motivation, whether instinctive or emergent in its own way, to do stuff? Like, why do I do stuff? Why would a machine do anything at all unless it's programmed to do it? And and we're speculative fiction writers. So how does this reality influence action and storytelling? And what can we do to our stories to infuse them with this bizarre landscape where we're in this never never land between to the point you just made, we never would have thought that we could sit and talk to our phone in real time. I did a podcast where my guest was ChatGPT, and we had an hour-long conversation. What I realized is he's pretty good. He was actually probably on par, if not better, than most guests. So uh here we are, and we're in this never-never land, but you anticipate a lot of this stuff. Uh, to me, what's intriguing is twofold. On the one hand, you're focused on AGI, and that's in your short story in the anthology. You have an inventor of AGI who's seminal to that story playing out, and then this focus on telepathy, which is this communication between sentient beings through channels that we don't quite know, understand, or appreciate yet. So can you can you elaborate a little bit on that? Because you're one of the few writers who has this focus on this extrasensory engagement between beings, both both synthetic and human. And to me, if I I don't know if I got this right, but it's a common form of communication between your synthetic and your organic characters. So, in ways, maybe telepathy is kind of a hidden language between the bots and us. Do I get that kind of right? Or do you have a different thing?

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Where it is. In in when I first started, it was all um, it was androids, and because the android neural substrate is basically electronic, then you can quite easily send thoughts around. And then I sort of played with those ideas uh for a while. And you talking about this really complex thoughts uh being able to be disseminated. Then I just started to think about well, how could that work in a uh for a biological being? And one of the short stories, I think it was in the 22 or 23 anthology, talked about this new kind of phone. This is not an iPhone but a Y phone, and you swallow a pill, and it opens up a uh a kind of a framework in your in your brain, and you can then like it in a mobile phone, like our phones, you could then use telepathy. So that's a way of it's a bit of uh like the Musk Neuralink thing, but a bit obviously a bit more advanced. Um so yeah, that that that it possibly could be a way of making uh telepathy work.

SPEAKER_02 19:35

So what's what's the vision of that? What is what so if we look at it through the vantage point of of science, not not mysticism? Yeah, so uh, you know, it's been said and quoted and requoted that that that magic is basically technology we don't understand. Robert Heinlein had a similar quote, right? So so what is this kind of communication between sentient beings that you're that you're integrating into your speculative fiction? What's it about?

SPEAKER_00 20:11

It's about complicated ideas. Um and there's a research has been done on memory, which talks about as we get um deeper and deeper into the subject, we automate our knowledge. So if you're learning a language, we when we start learning a language as as children, you recognize letters and then words, and then you don't think about what words you're uh what the words mean. And if you learn another language, then you can sort of quite easily move into that. It everything is automated, these are schemas. Um, and what I'm thinking of as the um telepathy becomes if it works, um you can get much more complicated schemas. Um multimodal information, so you know, text, graphic, sound, uh, mathematical models, um, this idea of uh manipulating uh models in abstract spaces, uh going beyond what is possible with with thought these days. So changing the language, if you like, which becomes more complex, which ends up changing our ideas of our ideas about thought and changing thought itself.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

One of the most ancient epistemological questions is the relationship between what's in our minds, perception, yeah, and objective reality. Right. They've been debating that since Plato and Socrates, Aristotle, and then in a contemporary sense, Bishop Barclay's idealism versus the extreme realism on the other side. The pragmatists of the American philosophers as well. So, you know, you had Descartes with his I think, therefore I am. Yeah. And then you had all these different expressions of trying to figure out that relationship between perception and reality. And what we've come to understand, and this might even be influenced to a certain extent by quantum mechanics now, is that consciousness as we experience it is an emergent reality. It's an interaction between our physical whatever and the world outside of ourselves. And uh there's a wonderful book called The Case Against Reality, where it's argued that our entire perception of the universe is really a consequence of Darwinian evolution. Like we are in this weird substrate that goes beyond space and time. And even space and time aren't absolute. We're living in this uh kind of Kantian is-ness, and our interaction with this is-ness creates space, creates time, yeah, creates most of our perceptions of the world, and it's really just pragmatic. It's because you know, there's a lion and we need to run from it, whatever that lion is in this substrate, and we're hungry. Well, that's just to sustain whatever it is our bodies are, and I guess full circle to your point, uh, you're bringing that up through the lens of if you can control data and language, then you could transfer that information and maybe influence others and influence the world, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Yeah, and you can translate it with such clarity um that it will allow other people to build on, if you like, your ideas, and so we get a hive mind that affects which which transcends individuals, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

That's cool. That that's interesting. So you're breaking down this individual collective barrier, you're also breaking down the perception, you know, the perception reality barrier, and in this kind of synthesized unity, there's all this opportunity for exploration creatively.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 24:26

Well, that's a that's an intriguing, intriguing framework. Uh, your your mind zero story in the anthology that we're both in, uh focuses on a historic moment where there, again, not to spoil too much, but there's what I and correct me if I'm wrong reading reading your story, but this is what I got out of it. You have a principal inventor of an AGI that goes rogue and creates quite a bit of havoc throughout the world, and there's an opportunity for interceding and intersecting this touch point in time to uh in a sense reconfigure the the future. Is is that more or less uh more or less, yeah. More or less. I don't want to give give it away so people can read your story, but but the setup is you've got an inventor of this super AGI, and there's an opportunity to kind of like maybe tap around the shoulder and say, hey, this might not be such a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

That's right. And it's this idea of consciousness, like what it's what the story says is that consciousness won't emerge. You have to have a human consciousness to seed the um, in this case, the what becomes a superintelligence. Um I mean there's a lot, as you know, lots of debate about whether consciousness can exist outside of the biological uh substrate.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Um lots of people are exploring that. That's there's historical trends to that.

SPEAKER_02 26:07

Um I I think originally, like the Marvin Minsky's in the uh in the 60s and the 70s, when computers started doing amazing stuff, it naturally became a question of creating a brain in a box. If if computers can do all this stuff, and if we could really consider ourselves as physical beings, then then consciousness is computational. That that's the essential argument that there's no real difference between a brain with its neural connections and a bunch of transistors, and a neuron either fires or it doesn't, it's an ion channel, zero or one. And if you can mimic the the the process with silicon instead of carbon, then there's no theoretical difference between our perception and our cognition and our feeling and uh and a synthetic one, yeah. And there were many, many counter-arguments to this that that you cannot reduce sentience to a computational reality. And ironically, as we're saying, what seems to have really flipped the entire conversation is the large language model, because the Turing test created by Alan Turing addressed this question from a behavioral vantage point, and he really imagined that you have a typist on one end of the wall and then another, you have like a teletype machine between two sides of a wall that can't see each other. And if you start typing to the person on the other side and you continue with a conversation for an indefinite length of time, and if you can't tell the difference between that person or being on the other side, whether it's a human or a machine, then the difference that makes no difference is no difference. That that creature is sentient. And as I mentioned, I had one of these teletypists on my podcast, and it's really hard to tell the difference for a 45-minute conversation, a few glitches notwithstanding. Chat GPT remembers what we talked about before. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. So so there you have it, which is what is what is sentience.

SPEAKER_00 28:33

Yeah, there's a researcher in a university close to here, University of Sussex, a guy called Anil Seth, who's done lots of work on consciousness. Uh he sort of writes about it in terms of it's designed to help us biological beings survive. So we're all we don't, there's no there is an objective reality out there, we don't see it. We are concentrating all the time on just trying to survive to survive. We do we see everything, we act in every way to um so we survive. We don't just are we concentrate all the time in looking after ourselves, which is and in from that kind of perspective, then a large language model couldn't be um conscious because it doesn't have this sense of self.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

I think the Darwinian aspect is one thing, similar to the road to reality guy, and then the other one is this sense of self-awareness, and you brought up the point of basing a computer construct on the simulation of a human consciousness. So this is a trope in science fiction, you see it over and over again. Uh, William Gibson's neuromancer has an example of this where he is like a sim, a sim person. Yeah, so they took a brain and just mapped the brain onto silica, right? And then the brain exists in that state as an electronic being, not really knowing any different.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

So that's one model. You take a brain and then you you just clone it with all the connections. The other model is that the consciousness emerges as we emerge. So, for example, you create a simulated environment with a bot or a bunch of bots, and now we have agents, agentic technology. There's the MOLT book that just launched to the agents talking to each other on social media. So, and this goes back to your hive mentality, too. And there's an idea that you don't you don't tell a machine how to be conscious, consciousness emerges from these lower computational states, just doing their natural computational thing within what would be similar to a Darwinian ecosystem. They evolve, consciousness evolves like we evolve in nature, but it cycles much faster. A human generation is 20, 30 years, and a bot generation could be 20 or 30 microseconds, right? Right, amazing. So you know, it'd be crazy. Now, my personal belief is that's how we're gonna get sentience in a box. We have no idea how this thing works, no idea. Just like we have no idea how the human mind works, none. We you know, we say, Oh, you know, we've got the different parts of the brain and the that's that's nonsense compared to the reality of the sophistication of what's between our our our ears, right? I think I think we're gonna arrive at AGI the same way, which is we're gonna let it emerge from these simulated environments with levels of sophistication we can't even imagine, and then it's gonna surprise us. That's just my feeling. So going back to your short story, um, you have an inventor of AGI. So is that more the model of a simulated brain that then becomes its own menace? Or uh what what what what's your vision around that?

SPEAKER_00 32:23

The vision around that is that it's um it wouldn't be dangerous, it wasn't dangerous until it was ceded by a human consciousness. It needed that to actually become alive.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

Ah, I that's that's intriguing. And that brings up a host of philosophical questions, too. There's a lot going on around the anthropic people, the Amade people, you know, like you mentioned. They they and part of their feud with the American Pentagon right now, I think, goes back to the CEO's need to appease his core genius bench, because they started very altruistically that AI should not be used for evil. Now, I'm getting there's a subtext here, which is it's very platonic, almost in a in a in a Socrates sense, that truth, beauty, and goodness are all tied together. That if you have a real brain and there is a is such a thing as super intelligence, then you automatically get morality with it. It'll know that there's right and there's wrong, and there's good and there's evil. And if you're really smart and you're super intelligent, then you do good, you encourage a civilization to flourish and you want to advocate humanistic ideals and all that. It's the good bot kind of model. And it sounds to me like you might be an advocate of that, that it took a uh maybe a human's corruption to mess up the AGI. Is is that is that an accurate way of looking at your worldview on this?

SPEAKER_00 34:06

I didn't think it like that. I thought it was the fact I I was thinking really that once this AGI becomes superintelligent, it has its own way of thinking that's not human. So it may believe it's being perfectly ethical, has its own moral code, but it obviously thinks about it in a completely different way.

SPEAKER_02 34:30

Um that I think is is what I believe too, which is different than this anthropic view. If I if I'm characterizing this bench well, you tend to think that the superintelligence does does its own superintelligt, it has a completely different perception of reality than we do, right? It knows a hell of a lot more, it operates much more rapidly, and it's got it's like a new species. This has been brought up many times before that artificial intelligence is a new species on the planet, and when you see something slithering in your garden, okay, the perception of that little lizard is quite different from ours, right? And similarly, the superintelligence is gonna see the ecosystem that is the universe very, very differently than we do, yeah. And they might morality might not really even make any sense, which is like, what are you talking about? You know, it might have its own goals, right? It might have its own goals that I think is is interesting. I think that that's more correct. I think we tend to anthropomorphize animals and even ourselves through wishful thinking, and we are projecting our own desires onto these AI constructs in ways that isn't really thinking this through.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Yeah, with we live in an age now we've got smartphones, we've got all the kind of machines, computers, and whatever. And more and more I'm thinking of if I want to get something done in the in the tech field, uh how does the machine, how does the program see this? How can I work with the program? Um I don't know, that's uh other kinds of intelligence which are gradually emerging, and we're having to sort of change our way of thinking just to deal with technology, even sort of very day-to-day basic technology. You know, work around the machine, work the way the machine wants to work.

SPEAKER_02 36:44

And machines actually doing stuff, right? So the the initial chatbots just chatted. If you want an essay or you want a response to information, they they they were kind of bullshitters, right? They they they talked, they talked, they could talk. And the new ones, which are really making a difference right now, are the ones doing stuff. You you can assign a singular bot or groups of bots to do stuff, to book a travel rec reservation, a dinner in a restaurant, solve a complex problem. So that's that's a very different angle and a different kind of function, and even more intrusive potentially on our everyday lives because we're giving it more and more autonomy and control.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

Yeah. And you've got to have people that can check on what's happening. There's a lot of talk about AI wiping out jobs, but there's got to be people who have to understand what the output is and be able to check on it. I'm thinking everybody's saying accountants will be fired, but you know, you always need someone who understands what the output means.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

You bring up a good point. Um, you know, SaaS, Software as a Service. The American SaaS companies, their stock value has tanked since the success of Anthropic. Anthropic is the frontier model that everyone's talking about. So Anthropic's um, you know, growth was predicted at about a billion dollars last year, and it was 20x. 20x, 20 billion dollars of what was forecasted, and it all had to do with this agentic technology of being able to do stuff, and then Salesforce, these big companies, lost tremendous amount of equity value because people are speculating, I think quite reasonably, that if you need 1,000 subscriptions to this software in order to do what your company needs to do, you have two guys with an army of agents to do pretty much the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:05

Um, but you do bring up a good point that you need that human liaison. So an agent, as we're saying, is really just a dumb machine, it's a super sophisticated, effective, but really dumb machine. It's got no self-awareness, it's not AGI in any sense, and it's just doing stuff.

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:24

So, what's the boundary between just doing stuff and understanding what the hell you're doing? And then putting it into practical application in a way that's flexible and can evolve to human need. And that seems to be ignored in a lot of this. So a lot of jobs will go by the wayside, but you do need that expertise. You mentioned, you know, you have an accounting background. So your work isn't just running the numbers, but it's understanding the business use cases where the numbers are effective and apply, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:56

You have to correct errors. You have to correct errors all the time, and then you have to pull numbers together and you have to be able to read it, and you've got to be able to see that what what you put together makes sense. Because there's been some huge problems over the years. There was a system put in by the British Post Office which basically was um creating new duplicating transactions. And people went to prison, people you know committed suicide. It's a huge scandal, and it went on for years. Uh and it's you know just uh uh only very recently been sorted out. But um there are lots of errors out there and probably more errors in the pipeline because you've got to take you've always got to see what is you know what is the output of of the system, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:53

So also knowing knowing that the outputs match to user expectation, so it's not just the mechanics of ensuring accuracy, accuracy is the magic word, right? But it's also making sure that it's relevant and actionable, and that demands real-world experience and interacting with humans because humans are ultimately using that information for their own benefit. Yeah, that's what's sometimes lost, I think, in this hysteria of AI taking over the world because the world is a human one, and we've created this new species to help us out.

SPEAKER_00 41:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:35

But that doesn't necessarily make us all redundant because it begs the question of us introducing them into the world in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 41:45

That's right. That's right. Now I I flipped that idea around a bit in one of my stories, uh resource management, which is in one of the uh anthologies, um where it was an AI actually took over this accounting system and it behaved in a unpredictable way, uh let's put it in those terms. But that wasn't necessarily bad for the company. So it's all you know so mind zero, you end up with a situation where uh humanity is nearly annihilated in resource management, then it's a bit more beneficial. So we gotta what we what we can do, we can look at many sides, can't we?

SPEAKER_02 42:28

We can uh what would be considered an error is actually beneficial. I think that that's uh that's a great uh plot twist. And and it has a lot to do with our prior conversation around the the the unknown nature right now, and maybe even the unknowability of what how an AI perceives the same universe that we share.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

It's an exciting time to be around, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 43:00

Yeah, it's it's fascinating. It's fascinating, and I'm uh uh boomer Gen X, as we say in the cusp. So I grew up with a black and white vacuum tube television, yeah, absolutely. I I grew up with that. I was small, but that was my best friend, and then I saw color TV. I remember when my father bought a color television, and it was a really big deal, and it was enormous and had like a piece of furniture, yeah. And we had four channels, I lived in Chicago, Illinois. We had uh CBS, NBC, ABC, WGN channels two, five, seven, and nine. That was it. We had uh a Spanish speaking channel 26, and we had public television channel 11. So if I got that right. 257922. We had six channels and a dial. That was my ability to control information that I received. And I got a TV guide every week in the mail, which was like the Bible of programming. And they had the time the day and the time, the times laid out on the y-axis, and then the x-axis was the TV shows that were playing. And then if there was a conflict, I had to cry because my favorite science fiction show was the Thunderbirds, which were these marionettes. Yeah monsters in this plague. And then I would I would throw a fit because you know there was a conflict. So programming was linear, completely controlled, and limited. I bring this up just for younger folks who now have instantaneous global access to petabyte content in mobile form. I have the entire streaming catalog of every musician that I have ever loved, and then some. So we've gone from this very limited ecosystem of content and content sharing to this explosion of content. And it's content that now I can create. And then add on to all of this artificial intelligence. So boom, right? How is that gonna influence some of your next stories? I'm assuming that you're gonna do the 2027 contribution to uh on the have your attitudes changed? Have this stimulated new ideas for you? All of this craziness, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:29

And one of the ideas that stimulated you would when you were talking uh about the 26th anthology um with Steve Gibson, you then started to talk about well, how um would storytelling change? And you would were talking about microfiction and video and the comic book, the kind of graphic novel kind of idea. So, yeah, that's uh um something well we're thinking about how that would change. Um I was thinking ahead, not to the 2027 anthology, what about the 2127 uh science fiction novelist anthology, you know?

SPEAKER_02 47:10

Oh the this would be a story within the anthology, that would be very meta, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_00 47:16

Exactly what I was thinking. So, what would this story be like? And then going back to this telepathy idea, could it be a way of getting people to experience, have an experience uh in a kind of a super virtual world to um they come and they experience your your story like some kind of incredible lucid dream or whatever, and you f you experience it in all in the full uh spectrum of of uh sense impressions. Who knows?

SPEAKER_02 47:48

Hundred thousand percent. I I think that's brilliant. Uh you know, look at this whole thing when you there's a physical copy of the anthology, yeah. So that's challenge number one, is just the ratio of content consumption from digital on screens in people's pockets to actually ink on paper, like pulp, right? This is this is like a vinyl record from 1972, especially for young people. And as an author, you know, we we sit around and we complain that no one's reading and that no one's not enough people are buying our books, but in ways we're we're dinosaurs on the brink of going extinct because everyone is consuming content in a multimedia, multi-modal format. So you bring up a great idea, which is the anthology of 2126, would it even be in any physical form whatsoever? And if you're you're freed from the physical, would it even be alpha numeric textual? Is the next thing. How inefficient and laborious is the process of writing and reading? And in addition to that, uh for for my novel, I created a promotional website, and it's slightly verboten because people get upset that you're taking jobs away from artists, which I completely am sympathetic to and understand. But um, I generated images of my characters and situations using just the bot technology, and I peppered it with this promotional website. So I'm even exploring opportunities to create a graphic novel of my of my novel using these bots, you know, it could storyboard, you know, I provide it vignettes, and then it could auto-generate images associated with each each little scene. So maybe we as authors and content creators, and I know I I would I'm upsetting people, and I've had guests on the show who are hand drawers. Don Aguilio, I had Don Aguilio on the podcast, he's a wonderful guy. I just saw him at one of the conventions here, WonderCon in Anaheim, California. Went up to his booth and we high-fived and he had a wonderful conversation. There were almost tears in his eyes that the artificial intelligence is taking his job. So believe me, I'm empathetic. But to your point, though, as a content creator, you know, we can create images, maybe we can even create our own comic books and graphic novels as writers.

SPEAKER_01 50:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:49

And we might even be able to create movies of our own vision. So the one step that you bring up further than that is this telepathic kind of dream experience from writer to audience. I noticed that you like reading Isaac Asimov, and that that brought to mind foundation where one of the principal characters, the power of the mole, was this exact kind of telepathic induction. Right?

SPEAKER_01 51:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:24

So what do you what do you think of this? I mean, you know, look, this is like a brick, this book. And it's it's awesome. The physicality is awesome of this anthology. It's a real privilege to be part of it. And I'm talking to the flesh and blood behind it, which is really fun. But isn't it, isn't it kind of a don't you get the feeling that this is like a fossil compared to where technology and the irony is we're science fiction writers, we've been talking about starships and robots and all this stuff, and this is a bunch of pulp with ink splotches on it.

SPEAKER_00 51:59

But isn't there room for all formats? I mean, there's we still have we still have vinyl records, vinyl records are might have come back. We have cassette tape, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:13

That's a great point. It's not mutually exclusive. Exactly. Yeah, there's something lost with every jump, right? Yeah, we lose knowledge of what is going to be. They're a Manchester post-punk band, and they're I they're iconic. They got even bigger, of course, after his death, and they disbanded, they became the band New Order, which was very, very popular. And in this movie, Control, you see the young Ian Curtis, and exactly like you mentioned, holding the vinyl records, reading the liner notes, shopping for albums. There was a physicality to music, which young people today don't even understand. It's not part of their world. You lose something with these jumps, you gain a lot, but you lose things too.

SPEAKER_00 53:14

Now, do writer, what could writers lose? Perhaps we could lose a bit of discipline because you've got to be very disciplined to actually it's hard bit down and write and then uh edits and whatever, and yeah, that's uh you gotta think about how you put your thoughts together.

SPEAKER_02 53:34

So part of that struggle is what makes it so terrific, too. Exactly. Like you gotta grind it out, and yeah, and your pain translates into the passion of the reader, right? Which bags the question of the LLMs writing our shit, right? I'm assuming you don't you don't use the bot to write your stories.

SPEAKER_00 53:58

Oh, absolutely not. No, no, no. It's it can be very useful for research. I think Mark Newfer has written a book, hasn't he, recently about the ethical use of AI. Um I haven't read it, unfortunately, but I haven't got round to reading it. Um but yeah, to find out the sort of detail of what's happening in uh in the leading edge of research, it's it's really good, you know, because uh AI is a very good search engine. Having read a paper um and obviously making notes, you can then ask the machine to give to give you a summary and it's then compare your notes to the machine's notes to help you get deeper into the ideas more quickly. And there are other you know uh specialist AI as AIs out there now which are used to sort of dive deep into areas of science and pull out a literature review for you. But again, you've really got to know what your uh what the output means and then work with it. So yeah, it can help.

SPEAKER_02 54:59

I don't think um it's possible that an AI could write uh I don't know, but I'm similarly, so um my my my science fiction novel has has a lot of hard science in it. It's a it's a zany book. So it's a little bit of Hunter S. Thompson with William Gibson, your Douglas Adams, you know, that kind of kind of stuff. But there's also like technical stuff because I wanted to really anchor it in some of the amazing developments and use it as a foil, a mirroring for the outrageous hysteria of my protagonist, who's completely irrational and impulsive, and existing in this world of greater and greater technological proficiency. I wanted to create dynamic tension between this guy being a hysterical moron and living in a world of this sophistication that we've been talking about. So so, in order to bring out that dichotomy, I dialed up the outrageousness of this Charlie Chaplin meets Inspector Clousseau kind of character, and at the same time dove into the science and the philosophy. So I wanted it to be this salty, sweet mix of both. So I used the the AI to help me do research into various subjects that did a very good job of aggregating complex data. And to your point, as an accountant in your background, cross-checking and verifying that I wasn't wrong in a way that was expeditious, it heightened my efficiency as a researcher, and through that optimization, it gave me new opportunities to explore even deeper. Because, in the traditional sense, if it would take me, let's say, four hours to research a topic, if I could literally prompt it in 30 seconds and get a response, that left me four hours and 50 minutes to explore even deeper. Yeah. So so in that way I loved it. I loved it. So I put the book into Chat GPT as a project, and I gave it instructions to write scholarly reviews and analyses based on characters and plots, you know, 500 words, a thousand words, graduate level, PhD level, with this emphasis and with that emphasis. So it became my post-publication academic critic. And then I told it to hate the book, like create a review that sucked. I was really entertained by this, and in lieu of not having the reach to get you know a New York Times review or get the attention that I would otherwise enjoy, I had the bots fill in for me. And that was very entertaining. So it you know how some people use their chat bot to like have a relationship with, and people are getting into a lot of trouble. Like it's their psychiatrist, their dietitian, their companion. And now some of the bots are like you know, risque, they're sexting, they're getting emotional relationships with. I have a relationship with my chat bot as you know, my favorite and worst book reviewer. Right. Wow. Why not? Right?

SPEAKER_01 59:15

It's kind of fun.

SPEAKER_00 59:20

Oh, yeah, just something else we need to mention about this anthology. I was obviously there are some wonderful stories in this, well-class stuff, but the last story on this I thought was really The Loom of Reality by uh Sanjay Bazin.

SPEAKER_02 59:40

Tell us tell us why you liked it.

SPEAKER_00 59:42

Because it was it really was the very complex nature of the universe being revealed, and it's revealed through a work of art, uh, and at the end um humanity became able to understand some of the deep structures of the universe. But it was there all along, and as the as the final words, you know, um a love letter uh from the universe to itself, absolutely a real a capstone on the book. Really, I mean brilliant stories all the way through. But this one, really, for me, uh a great way to finish the anthology.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:29

I I liked its meta nature, it was self-referential in that way, and and I like the type of storytelling, which was it actually told the story instead of telling you the story. Yeah, there's there's a narrative style which is pervasive, especially in science fiction, of of not letting characters loose in an organic way. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and uh that that's what I liked about the story too, which is it it it it set it loose a little bit instead of being so expository in the way most science fiction is.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:19

Yeah, I think it's always a good idea to you know let characters get on with it, and you can just sort of watch what they do. Uh well, not the end of the thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:30

That's one of the big challenges. Yeah, science fiction tends to be burdened by its own obsession with world building. Like, look at this amazing place that I have created, isn't it cool? And part of that is gadgetry and gimmicks where you know, like this thing does the here's a hyperdrive that creates transluminal flight, you know, with the X coefficient, and isn't that amazing? And unless you're really into that idea, it's you know, my reaction is often who gives a shit. I mean, I want to know how that transluminal X device impacts the character's ability to accomplish what they're trying to do. Yeah, because otherwise I would read a Wikipedia article about transluminal X drives. Well, I'm not I'm not I'm not knocking you, it's it's something that I try to uh you know avoid as well. And within my book now, I tend to be very indulgent in terms of some of that technical geekery, and uh especially I dive deep into philosophical elements and cultural trends, and and I tend to be indulgent, I think. But I try to do this entirely through the lens of what its impact is on the character in the moment.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:18

Is there a sense that that you stand back a bit from your I'm thinking of Johnny Felzundi? Do you stand back from him and let him and we're sort of together, we're watching this guy, and uh yeah, that that was very interesting. That was that was uh the way he and the way he came up with it.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:36

Yeah, I wanted to create this maniac set loose.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:40

Yeah, yeah, brilliant, I loved it. And this the even coming up with the name of the transfinite reality engine, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:48

Oh gosh, yeah, and I a traditional way of doing that would be, you know, just dedicating a section of the story to and then Johnny had to think of a name, yeah. And you know, George Cantor thought of transfinite numbers, and it had to be marked, you know what I mean? Like you you put up your little narrator soapbox and you explain things, exactly. Yeah, yeah, and what I conscientiously tried to do in the short story that that that transposed into the full-length novel is avoid that, right? And whenever I got deep into this stuff, it was entirely through the vantage point of the characters, like you know, they were doing it almost in real time. And I tried to find a balance between the sophisticated sciencing and the banal realities of them just trying to accomplish their often self-serving, narcissistic, and heinous goals.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:02

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:03

Yeah, and was that a bit of an influence on Douglas Adams or I think if I have Douglas Adams the components, it's um I I've brought this up before with other guests too. I find the the the apex of his genius in that juxtaposition of completely banal reality and hyper sophisticated philosophy and science. And and the little English isms are terrific too, like traveling the universe in search of a decent cup of tea is is very, very English. Arthur Dent is very, very English, yeah, but in a cynical way, but also in a way where you really like the guy. He is he is just very endearing, and he's just trying to mind his own business and And live a good life and he wants his cup of tea.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:04

And he meets this guy called he meets this guy called Ford Prefect who says, I'm not really from Guildford, which is a town just about 40 miles up the road. I'm not I'm I'm I'm an alien. I'm not from Guildford after all. Should have got it.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:21

I'm I'm from the Star Beetlejuice. And then Arthur's okay. And then uh the the Vogons, the evil aliens have decided to annihilate the earth because it's in the way of their hyperspace route. And then there's a complaint, like why why would you do that? And the Vogons say, Well, you know, the the construction project has been on the books and made available to you for several centuries in this other location on the other side of the galaxy. Why didn't why weren't you paying attention? And and Douglas Adams mirrors it in the demolition of Arthur Dent's home, which was similarly at the village hall, filed away. And Arthur had the audacity to not realize that his home was set for imminent destruction. So once again, you have this absurd mix between the high and the low. Right. Yeah. Between the banal, profane, and the holy. And that creates dynamic tension, but it's also hysterically funny. Oh god, yeah. And I think Mr. Adams nailed it in a way that was very accessible to people and just just blew up science fiction to me in a way where it brought a sense of humor to this often very, very serious and dry. You know, the fate of the universe is at stake, and the pan-dimensional beings are are eavesdropping on my project. And like, well, the the navigational computer of the heart of gold consists of a robot simulation of an Italian bistro, and the guests trying to figure out how they divide up the bill. Yeah. Because that calculation is the most sophisticated expression of mathematics imaginable. So the the computer taps into that algorithm to circumnavigate the universe. That is genius. So what what's next on your on your plate of of science fiction? What do you have for that?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:11

Well, I need to get into this. I need to get more into this uh uh superintelligent stuff and to figure out how it can make it work. Um I worry sometimes at the moment that technology is moving so fast. Um will we end up writing non-fiction instead of science fiction? No. Yeah, I've got to try and find a way something new to say with a superintelligence. Um I'm still I'm still in the research stage yet. So I've done I've done it all the wrong way around, Rid. I write a novel first and then I'll be writing short stories. I still write short stories, but I've really got to try and get on to another novel.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:56

I think you need that seed of an idea. I wrote the Johnny story uh in the pandemic in my New York. I you know, we're all kind of isolated, and and for years I was trying to nail that idea, but I kept making all the mistakes that I've been ranting about for the last 10 minutes. Like I focused on world instead of story. Yeah, you know, I was explaining too much. And when when the character of Johnny entered my brain, I it was like a lightning bolt. I realized that that I need to go full full Johnny Fizzuli on this, and that actually catapulted me into writing the whole book. And it's the first in a series. I have I have uh a vision for this thing. So if you have a seed idea, which really hits you, and most significantly a character and not an idea. This this is the biggest revelation I had, which is almost so basic and academic, it's embarrassing. But for me, it was visceral.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:56

I when you when you experience that, you know. When you when a character comes in and says, right, I think he takes the story away from you, and you think, yeah, okay, that's great.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:06

Yeah, that that that's when you know you're on to something, when your character is writing your book for you, in a sense, using you as a conduit, then you're you're uh you gotta let the guy go for it, and then you're on the on to something, and and that could could take you to the next level. But just as uh, you know, as a reader of your stuff, I think you're you're on to something here with this super intelligence and telepathy and hive mind, because I think you have a niche, a niche for that, and it's not it was in vogue and it went kind of out of vogue because people were calling bullshit on like Yuri Geller and Ben Big Spoon, and telepathy became in the same arena as UFOs, like you are a crap, you are a nutcase, and I think you bring up some interesting observations about it, and the points you made earlier resonate in terms of the connection between what we would consider consciousness and sentience, yeah, and a lot of new ways of communicating that are analogous to what used to be considered telepathic.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:27

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:29

I think you got I think you got legs there in your own niche. So that's just that's just my feedback that uh you have stuff there that could be very, very intriguing, even uh in longer form.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:42

I've got to get down to work.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:44

You're right. Never a dull moment, ladies and gentlemen. Uh Mr. Philip Cahill. It's not Waterloo, but where are you? Waterlooville. Waterlooville, south of London.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:02

Yeah, and Waterloo is a bit south of Brussels.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:06

Right. That's why I was at first confused whether you were, you know, in in Belgian, uh Belgium, or uh, you know, in in the UK there. Well, well, well, keep doing the great work you've been doing. Um, you know, it's wonderful talking to you. And uh and it's great to talk to the the real people behind the stories of Mr. Gibson's uh evolving anthology.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:32

We have some more as well. You have you come and meet more of them.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:37

Maybe I'll put out another blurb saying that I've had such a good time, and I and I hope uh I hope everyone else has had a good time and give folks an opportunity to talk about their writing and their ideas to the point you made earlier outside just the printed page, right? We see just what people write. Some people are active on social media, but it's still in a filtered format, and there's nothing like just having a conversation with somebody.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:04

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:06

Thanks so much. We'll have links to Philip's work in the description. Like, comment, and share, folks. Thanks for watching and listening to the science fiction and fantasy factory, and uh stay tuned for more. Thank you, Philip. Really appreciate it. Thank you, oh.