I recently had the good fortune1 to be able to sit down virtually with Karl Schroeder, award-winning Canadian science fiction author and futurist (and fellow Substacker2). I wrote last summer about Karl’s book Stealing Worlds, and he was graciously willing to talk with me for an hour about several topics that have been rattling around in my brain for the past year. I think the specifics of the technologies etc are interesting, but it also affords an opportunity to see how an expert pursues his craft and thinks carefully. Check out all the cool stuff we talked about, then go read Karl’s books and Substack.
Professional Arc
Here Karl talks about his career, where science fiction was his ticket to the Foresight community in Canada as the “wackiest person in the room”, to formal training through OCAD3, to consulting, all while keeping prolific as a writer.
Stealing Worlds
Here Karl gives a synopsis of his novel Stealing Worlds, explains how combining lots of ideas about the future may be doing science fiction the hard way (but is consistent with systems thinking), and gives some examples of how to better explore implications.
Rights for Nature + AI = Deodands
Here I give a meandering but reasonable definition of Karl’s concept of a deodand, a great example of what you get when you combine two emerging concepts, and Karl situates this in a post-humanistic economics and a new way to conceive of artificial intelligence agents. We then talk about recent developments in AI and how they fit into a world like this, and about the proto-deodands that are already starting to form in the world.
Putting the Ideas into Practice
Here Karl talks about Viv Games, which Karl and others have been using to put these ideas into practice, including how it’s a play to switch the metaverse from a place to escape to into a place where people go to solve problems that are much harder to address in the real world.
Connecting Worlds
Here we discuss4 the kind of change that would be required for the digital world to meaningfully gain the authority to affect the real world, Karl’s dismay about writing a book about the positive potential of NFTs just before the concept was discredited by grifters trying to make billions from ugly JPEGs, alternate technological solutions that might accomplish similar goals without all the baggage. Also, there’s an interesting detour about financialization and the need to ground all measures of wealth in the real world.
Mapping Reality
Here Karl talks about the blockchain oracle problem that lies at the center of making a rich digital representation of the physical world, the problems with trying to map concepts to objects5, how a plurality of digital framings of reality in connection and communication serve as an elegant solution to having an “official” digital reality, and the connection to real-world commons and Elinor Ostrom’s ideas of institutions of fractional ownership for making them work.
Monitoring Reality
Here Karl explains what it would look like to meaningfully tag a useful portion of the real world and how the effort would most likely start with industry as a supply chain and product management solution6. We talk about how this approach could support an economy that moves from direct ownership and control of objects to a “rights economy” of leasing everything from books to furniture, basically extending the Digital Rights Management regime from online media to the physical world. I call out the fact that this starts to sound like COVID conspiracy theories, and we talk about the distinction.
Trust is the Foundation
Here Karl explains the way modern technological infrastructure depends on trust, and whether basing trust on math and code (as is the case in smart contracts) can ever compensate for gaps in the social contract, including a discussion about reputation as a partial solution.
Wrapping Up
Karl talks about his current work, including his extension of a short story about generative AI making possible not just confusion of reality but documentation of entire other realities that make discerning the truth increasingly impossible, potentially destroying the basic model of the internet as an information delivery vector. Then I plug his Substack and we talk about the “earned optimism” that can be gained by reframing dominant images of the future into something closer to a preferred future. Go check out Karl’s work!
More specifically, working up the courage to ask cool people for interviews, plus being in such a positive, supportive, and collaborative community.
“Fellow” in the sense of “hundreds of times more successful”.
Despite my intense self-awareness of how weird it is to ask technical questions about the workings of a fictional world.
Including a discussion of the internet-favorite and increasingly bizarre trolley problem.
In a hospital, for example, almost every piece of equipment is barcoded, but that doesn’t quite get people to real-time location intelligence. Experiments with RFID are ongoing and may represent the next step.