Interview with Jon Richter on his novel Auxiliary: London 2039

I am a huge fan of stories in all forms of media, so I often find that my influences are a bit of a mash-up of books, film and video games. Gibson of course pioneered the cyberpunk genre, and I absolutely loved Neuromancer when I finally got around to reading it, but my love of that genre actually stemmed more from movies like Akira, Ghost In The Shell and (of course) Blade Runner, as well as video games like Flashback and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.

In terms of books, I really enjoyed Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan, and I’m a huge fan of Philip K Dick’s works, and there is undoubtedly some influence from both of those formidable writers in my novel. I have also read every single one of Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, many of which I think are masterpieces, but I was not looking here to recreate his vision of a very distant and different future – I wanted this one to be grounded in present day reality, with plausible technological developments extrapolated from current trends (driverless cars, robot couriers, even synthetic meat… but more on that later!)

The character of an omniscient A.I. is something of a cliché, but not only was it central to my story, I do feel that it is inevitable that such an entity materialises in the coming decades – our world simply has too many complex systems to oversee, too many risk scenarios to run, and too much capitalist pressure to remove expensive humans from the production equation. I therefore needed to include TIM, but wanted to make it a more interesting character than just a ‘super-righteous’ or ‘super-evil’ computer. I think there is a tendency in popular science fiction to make sentient AIs or robots automatically bad (Skynet, HAL9000, Ash and David in the Alien movies) and I wanted to avoid that, while still making TIM’s motivations and level of free will somewhat clouded and (hopefully) intriguing.

As regards TIM being a neural network, this was something I wanted to explore, because I am personally quite terrified by the implications of ‘big data’ and of systems that learn purely by copying the trillions of bytes of data that are fed into them. We now have AIs that can recognize, or even create, human faces, without having any idea of what a human or a face actually is. We’ve all heard the horror stories of chatbots that become racist and homophobic within hours of being ‘released’ onto Twitter, or of board-game-playing AIs that score astounding victories over grand masters without their programmers having a clue how they managed to pull it off. We seem to be creating a new kind of intelligence, one that we can barely understand – and if we can’t even understand our own creation, how on earth can we control it?

I think this ambiguity, this lack of any real rules and regulations, is what causes problems for TIM (and therefore us) in the novel. A simple set of more solid, irrefutable laws, like Asimov’s, would seem a logical way to avoid this outcome – but how can we know that they would be interpreted in the right way by a machine that simply copies what it observes?

One problem in our society is that legislation lags behind technology. If the next generation of Alexa/Google/Siri devices is more useful, perhaps because apartments will be full of more ‘smart’ devices that they can operate directly, then they will quickly become very widespread… and if one product is deemed by the market to be ‘the best’ (a little like the iPhone perhaps) then this will be the one that appears in most homes. Such a monopoly scenario is far from ideal, but may happen before the government is able to do anything about it.

Another way to look at this is by thinking of TIM less like Alexa and more like Windows – I know Apple’s OS is also in fairly widespread use, but in my twenty-year finance career (I work as an accountant to pay the bills between writing books!) I’ve never worked for a company that did not use Microsoft’s system. By the same token, it may simply become ‘easier’ for companies and individuals to use the most popular platform for their future AI assistant… giving it an uncomfortable level of involvement in and control over our day-to-day lives.Having said all of that, I actually think the ‘competing products’ outcome is the much more likely one, and we’ll find ourselves interacting with a number of different AIs in the coming years… I wonder if they’ll develop distinctly different personalities?

I have muddled views on this, to be honest. The next wave of automation, where AIs and robots replace highly-skilled and clerical employees as well as more repetitive lower-skilled labour, will undoubtedly reduce the number of available jobs. People argue that such automation will create other, new jobs, but I think they’re missing the point – capitalism is about competition and cost reduction, and human employees are unfortunately much more expensive and unreliable than machines. If humans can be removed from a process, corporations are motivated to remove them. There has, therefore, been a trend towards automation for a very long time, and soon I believe there will be a very limited number of jobs that can’t be handled by machines. Even thriller writers may soon become obsolete! This means that we are heading towards a future where the majority of people do not work.Where I have mixed views is whether this is a bad thing, or whether it could actually be a good thing. If society can restructure itself so that jobless people do not live in starving squalor, and change the culture from ‘working hard = worthwhile, not working = laziness/failure’ to ‘being happy and kind to others = worthwhile’, then I think this could even lead us towards something resembling a utopia. I don’t necessarily believe that people will get chronically bored and depressed just because they don’t have a job to go to – such a societal shift will simply force people to think harder about what they actually enjoy doing, and there will be an ample supply of experiences to be bought as companies rush to cater for a public with more time on its hands (we will, of course, have to implement a system such as Universal Basic Income to ensure that people who are no longer required to work can still enjoy these experiences, and lead fulfilling lives).But do I really believe this? Can people be trusted to embrace this sort of lifestyle? I certainly think the transition will be incredibly difficult, and it’s during this period that the book is set. Until machines and AIs become completely ubiquitous, the industries that are affected earliest will certainly lead to hardships for those forced out of work first; interestingly, after taxi drivers and long-haul drivers (with driverless cars imminent), the group that is second most at threat of obsolescence is apparently the finance sector, which is where I work in my daily life!

I now realise that some of my previous answer is probably more relevant to this question! So, as stated previously, I certainly think the outcome of automation is not necessarily bleak in the long term, and that I think machines are capable of doing a much better job of a lot of things than humans are. If we can find a way to structure our society so that humans can enjoy being human, experiencing life and all it has to offer, while machines do all of the difficult and boring stuff, then there’s no reason it can’t work to our benefit.

However, a different question from ‘is automation bad?’ is ‘is automation going to happen?’ and, as I’ve previously mentioned, I think it is an absolutely inevitable outcome of our capitalist model. The danger, then, is that automation occurs at pace to the benefit of big corporations, without any of the societal reorganization required to realise the benefits for individuals. To quote another technologically-advanced society, ‘resistance is futile’…

As with many of the technologies that feature in the book, I have tried to extrapolate what I see as current trends. I’ve been surprised in the last two decades at the take-up of what you might call ‘isolating’ technologies, and at how the average person seems to prefer to use them as opposed to dealing directly with another human. To pick just a few examples: How many people do you know who would rather send an e-mail to a colleague than pick up the phone, or go and talk to them? How many times have you ordered a takeaway online rather than phoning up the restaurant? How often do you communicate with your friends via Facebook rather than arranging a face-to-face catch-up?So I think what I’m saying is that I see increased isolation as the current direction of travel, not just as a by-product of our technologies, but because people seem, strangely, to want it. There’s something weird going on where we want to plaster pictures of ourselves and our personal lives all over the internet, while at the same time remaining strangely anonymous, shielded from any real direct human contact. I think it perhaps even comes down to our primitive brains, and a desire to defend ourselves from physical attack – communicating through a computer screen is inherently safer than being faced with an unpredictable, flesh-and-blood human.

How, then, do we avoid this outcome? I suppose the question is, really, deep down, if we’re completely honest… do we want to?

As mentioned above, I wanted to create a future that seemed realistic to me, as an extrapolation of current societal and technological trends. Huge strides have been made in recent years in the recognition and support of transgender people, and although there is a long way to go, we seem to be moving in a positive direction in terms of creating a more supportive and inclusive society. Not to include this aspect of the world in my vision of the future seemed like a glaring omission to me, and the recognition of a third gender with its own pronouns, for people that identify as neither male nor female, seems like a plausible possible development, and is the scenario I have envisaged in the book.However, as a cisgender heterosexual male myself, I am certainly not the best person to comment on the struggles and challenges faced by transgender people in our society. I sincerely hope that my handling of this aspect of the story does not cause any unintended offence or upset. For that reason, I considered removing this part of the story entirely – but I came to the conclusion that to do so would be much worse, in effect a cowardly avoidance of an important aspect of our developing society.

Dremmler’s attitude is representative of the attitude of, I think, a lot of the UK population – people genuinely not intending to cause offence, but simply unable to truly relate to the lifestyle and struggles of a transgender person. I don’t think Dremmler is unaccepting of Petrovic’s life choices, he just doesn’t understand them. I myself am part of this demographic, and some of my own unwitting prejudice and ignorance probably comes out in Dremmler’s ham-fisted language and behaviour. The story is set in a future in which transgender people exist, and are a bigger proportion of the population than at present, but they continue to face challenges ranging from well-intentioned ignorance to outright bigotry.

This is a challenging question, and I will answer it honestly. In envisaging a third gender, I imagined that it might be considered ‘gender neutral’, i.e. neither male nor female, and that ‘neut’ was therefore a logical abbreviation for the term. It is important to clarify that it is not intended as a label for all transgender people, merely people that have chosen to adopt this ‘neutral’ gender, as opposed to male or female. The term ‘neut’ was therefore not intended to be a slur or pejorative, but if it is interpreted as such it probably sadly illustrates my own ignorance and insensitivity.That said, it is likely that such unintentional discrimination would occur in a society adjusting to having a third gender as commonplace within it, and will be a part of our journey towards a very different society – individuals like Dremmler, and like me, will blunder through this journey and hopefully emerge as much better people.

Following on from the above, the primary intention of using ‘neut’ to describe gender neutral people was simply to differentiate them from male or female people, and as such is intended to be used in the same way as you would say ‘man’ or ‘woman’. However, Dremmler’s direct question about the ‘weird neut place’ is definitely intended to illustrate his dated attitudes, implying that (a) he doesn’t choose to visit such places, and (b) he thinks that gender-neutral people are ‘weird’.Dremmler is a sad, lonely and wretched character, and I wanted to give him a sense of being left behind in a world that is moving inexorably forwards. Petrovic, on the other hand, is much more in tune with society’s cutting edge, and tolerates Dremmler’s comments in the way that one might tolerate a bigoted remark from a beloved grandparent; Petrovic likes Dremmler, recognising that he is well-intentioned, and is prepared to tolerate some of his problematic attitudes, perhaps even seeking to influence and improve him.

This is a great question, and I had never before reflected on the apparent dichotomy between using language to differentiate people from existing male/female genders, and that doing so is essentially ‘othering’ them. The intention was only to use ‘ve’, ‘vim’ for gender-neutral characters, rather than for every transgender person in the story, so the idea here is that a particular group of people have chosen to identify with this new, third gender and its associated pronouns; perhaps this suggests a desire amongst this particular group, to some extent, to be ‘othered’, or at least that such differentiation is important to them.I think the emergence of these sorts of alternative pronouns is certainly a possibility, and is already widely discussed online, but their adoption will depend upon whether non-binary people find them helpful (e.g. to clarify that they are not male or female) or unhelpful (e.g. by ‘othering’ them). I would by no means suggest that transgender people ‘should’ select pronouns – I think language and society will evolve naturally to find the most appropriate lexicon as transgender people become a larger and less marginalised subset of the population.

I had not read that piece, but have just done so! It’s a really interesting read. I definitely think that technology will increasingly permit people to transcend limitations and shortcomings that their bodies enforce upon them (like McCann with his weak arm, like Petrovic who has chosen to change ver body to the gender that ve identifies as, and certainly people who suffer from serious disabilities or chronic pain) and that this ought to be a good thing – although, as always, there will be grey areas. Take someone like me who is largely unhappy with his physical appearance – is it right for me to use technology to change it, e.g. replacing my entire body with a more muscular, better-looking one? If the answer is no, what about an obese person who uses existing technology to transform their body and lose weight – personally I have no problem with this at all, but there are many people who think that this is an abuse of technology, a ‘shortcut’ that is somehow inherently wrong.Linking back to gender, it is clearly the case that modern technology can make people happier by enabling those trapped in the wrong body to realise their true identity, and my novel extrapolates this to envisage a third gender that people can choose to ‘become’… but Ben Berman Ghan takes this idea much further, perhaps suggesting that rather than selecting from a ‘menu’ of available genders, our technologically-enhanced bodies might define our gender, or rather our transcendence from a world of labels and pronouns and neat gender pigeonholes; instead, we will simply exist as individuals, and such classification will simply be obsolete.

I actually discussed this in a bit more detail in my recent blog post, which you can find here.In summary, the technology to use stem cells to grow animal meat already exists, and causes no harm to the animal. The tissue produced is indistinguishable from ‘real’ meat, even microscopically, because in effect it is real meat. If a solution can be found to reduce the cost of production, which is currently prohibitive, then this synthetic or ‘cultured’ meat could rapidly replace traditional products, both massively reducing the impact of farming on our environment, and removing the need for animals to suffer and die to enable us to eat their flesh.In the book, I’ve simply extrapolated this a little further, mischievously suggesting that once this solution is in place, why stop there? Panda burgers, tiger steaks, human (celebrity) fillets – if the source of the meat has not had to suffer or die, would eating these sorts of things need to remain a taboo?

By using the term ‘dark fiction’ I’m seeking to encompass all the genres I enjoy: from horror to crime thrillers to science fiction to fantasy, all of which I’ve read since I was far too young! I have no idea why I like stories that deal with dark subject matter (monsters, violence, gore, grotesquerie, ghosts, murderers, etc…) but fiction that doesn’t include these themes rarely interests me. Perhaps I am simply so familiar with it that it’s become a kind of bizarre comfort blanket – or maybe video games are to blame! (I’ve played video games since around the age of five, when my ZX Spectrum became my favourite toy – dark themes abound in this particular media, perhaps because of the need for conflict between forces of good and evil to drive the gameplay, although as the medium matures these conventions are being challenged.)

For whatever reason, I’ve always found stories that end ambiguously, or badly, to be more compelling. Perhaps they simply seem more realistic… or at least less predictable. And I am a sucker for a ‘twist’ ending! In this case, I’ve tried to make it unclear just how ‘bad’ the ending is – as you rightly say, there aren’t necessarily any outright ‘good guys’ in the story, and it could be argued that Dremmler’s death prevents mass hysteria and anarchy. TIM’s intelligence is very different from ours, but it is clearly a formidable intelligence nonetheless – and perhaps that is the statement I was seeking to make, that we should not underestimate our own creations. We might be teetering on the brink of an ability to ‘play god’, but that does not make us unassailably godlike…

There are a number of technological threads that would be fun to pick at, and I hope to explore more fully in future novels. As an example, Brain-Computer Interfaces, which are already being heavily invested in by the likes of Elon Musk, seem to me to be a particularly intriguing development, and the gateway to the long-envisaged ‘merging’ of our brains and our technology. These implants would, in effect, allow us to control our appliances simply with our thoughts – imagine an apartment of the future that could prepare your meal, adjust the heating, and turn on your favourite TV channel all by reading your mind? This of course begs the question as to whether corporations would also use the implants to extract other data, perhaps to channel into their ever-expanding neural networks, to help them become more and more convincingly human… or at the very least, to make them better at selling you stuff!

But I could ramble on all day, so I’ll shut up now. You can probably tell that, although I like to dwell on the dark side of emerging tech, I’m really just excited to see it all happen!I have nothing to add other than to say I hope everyone enjoys the novel and finds it highly entertaining and at least a teeny bit thought-provoking, and also to thank you immensely for the opportunity to appear in your magazine – it’s been a pleasure!