I’m taking a break from my media studies series (you can read the first three installments here, here, and here) to talk about my forthcoming novella, Automatic Noodle! It will be out on August 4, and you can pre-order it now. I’ll be going on tour in August, too — catch me in San Francisco, LA, Tempe, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC!
Let’s say you boiled down all the breathless business plans and tech journalism written about AI and robots in the past decade. You’d be left with reams of content attempting to address the following questions:
Will AI/robots take our jobs?
Will AI/robots rise up and destroy us all?
How can we make sure AI/robots obey us?
When will AI/robots solve all our problems for us?
When will AI/robots do all the shitty jobs that we don’t want to do?
You know what I say? Fuck those questions. They are near-replicas of the kinds of questions that white people asked about Black people during Jim Crow, that men asked about women during the suffrage movement, and that the U.S. government is asking about immigrants today. They’re a reflection of the contradictory desires held by an ownership class that wants to control laborers violently, but also to receive their care and attention endlessly.
If you’re about to birth a new form of personhood, as a lot of AI developers say they are, those are the worst possible questions to start with.
So what’s the alternative?
To answer, I told a story. My forthcoming novella Automatic Noodle is about our future robot neighbors in San Francisco. In it, I ask things like:
Where will robots want to live and work?
How will robots deal with traumatic memories?
What kinds of aesthetics will robots have?
How will robots choose to alter their bodies?
How will robots have romances with each other?
How will robots protect themselves from humans who are asking questions from the first list?
Automatic Noodle is set in the 2060s, after a devastating civil war has left California destroyed but liberated from the United States. Key to the new nation’s victory were tens of thousands of bots, many of whom died in combat. As a result, robots of the post-war era in California have gained a few civil rights. Freedom of movement. Freedom to work. But humans still control everything, and robots can’t even open a bank account or vote.
I wanted to imagine what would actually happen to human-equivalent bots in a world very similar to our own. They would not be rising up; they would be living in fear, trying to survive in a world that defines them as dangerous weapons and interlopers. The four bots in Automatic Noodle — Staybehind, Sweetie, Hands, and Cayenne — just want to run a small, neighborhood noodle restaurant. But even that modest act of autonomy is laced with danger. Legally, bots can’t own their own businesses, and robophobic humans are hellbent on stopping them from having jobs at all.
When the bots in Automatic Noodle create a website to advertise their restaurant, I imagined them reflecting ironically on the human aesthetics that influenced the early internet. “So this is the content that humans put into the brains of their first computer networks,” they might say. Maybe they would watch recreations of the Hampster Dance the way queer people today watch old movies with exaggeratedly gay villains. It would be a campy, so-bad-it’s-good appreciation, full of the bitterness that comes with consuming the culture of people who are oppressing you.
After I finished the novella, I asked Mule Design’s Mike Monteiro to design a retro-90s Automatic Noodle website at the exact URL the robots buy in the book. Then we needed a logo for the swag that the bots sell through their online shop. Mike connected me with the incredible illustrator Lucy Bellwood, who recreated the logo that the bots use. (Yes, you can pretend you are supporting a bot business by buying some Automatic Noodle swag today — I’m selling at cost, so the profits go to our imaginations and fulfillment company Printful.) It was wonderful to see the goofy, hopeful website I had imagined taking shape on the actual internet. I liked clicking around on it, picturing my bots amusing themselves with digital DiY aesthetics.
Setting up an indie website isn’t just a way to parody humans, though. The store ultimately helps the bots to thrive in a country that barely acknowledges their right to be free.
Make no mistake: AI people, if they emerged in this current moment, would be oppressed. Companies trying to develop “artificial general intelligence” — or human-equivalent cognition — do not deign to call these potential creatures “people” or even “creatures.” Sometimes they’re called a “superintelligence,” reducing them to a very specific, economically valuable function. The idea is that we can make money on these future artificial people, if we imprison or abuse them correctly with software.
What happens when we stop thinking about AI as instruments, and start seeing them as people? It means looking back at ourselves. We have to acknowledge the needs, memories, dreams, and desires that actually define human minds. But that’s a big ask for humans. We rarely acknowledge each other’s personhood, let alone the personhood of other life forms.
I do not want to live in a future where we create amazing new kinds of people in order to enslave them. And so I told a story about a noodle shop where bots and humans build a community together — not as masters and slaves, but as small business owners and customers. As neighbors and friends.
That’s why Automatic Noodle isn’t about superintelligence, or robot uprisings. It’s about people who just want to make a decent life together. And to sell you some really good noodles.
I’m doing other things, too!
As always, you can check out my monthly column in New Scientist (the latest installment is about the future of weather prediction), and my fortnightly podcast Our Opinions Are Correct (the latest episode is about the politics of science).