From the Crows' Nest

Lisa Yaszek [00:00:02]:
So I think that part of what science fiction can do is even if scientists themselves aren't allowed in their official writing to create these long term narratives, it can allow you to create them in your head or at earlier stages when you're imagineering or prototyping new technologies.

Ken Miller [00:00:27]:
Hey everybody, thanks for listening to From the Crows' Nest. I'm your host, Ken Miller from the Association of Old Crows. Before we jump into today's episode, please give our new Instagram page a follow. You can find it @FromtheCrowsNestPodcast. We're going to be posting photos and other snippets from behind the scenes of the work that we do here on the show and answer listener questions. So if you want to be more involved or if you have any question about electromagnetic spectrum operations, please give us a follow again @FromTheCrowsNestPodcast. Thanks for listening. All right, let's get into this episode and my conversation with Lisa Yaszek on science fiction.

Ken Miller [00:01:02]:
I am pleased to be here with Lisa Yesick, Regents professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech. Lisa, great to have you here on from the Crowsnest.

Lisa Yaszek [00:01:11]:
Thanks for joining me, Ken, it's a pleasure. I'm so glad I can be here with you today.

Ken Miller [00:01:15]:
I've been really looking forward to this conversation. You know, this is part of a little bit of a, a series that we're going to be doing here on from the Crow's Nest where we're taking a look at innovation and kind of trying to understand what it takes to get ideas from the whiteboard, from the, from the idea world into the field. A lot of different pieces to that puzzle. And in, in a lot of our conversations, we talk about, when we talk about innovation, we talk about art of the possible. A lot of times that conversation quickly goes into what we can and can't do from a regulatory perspective. And I want to kind of break out of that and use this conversation with you as a, almost an introduction into this world of innovation. And hopefully many of our listeners here who might not understand what we do from a electromagnetic spectrum operations perspective will be interested in this, this concept that we, this field that we work on on a daily basis. Because it just blows my mind on a daily basis.

Ken Miller [00:02:17]:
And I've been looking forward to having these conversations about how do we, how can we think differently about this, how can we democratize it to the general population. So thank you for taking time and, and really being a guinea pig on this, on this topic. So I appreciate it.

Lisa Yaszek [00:02:31]:
Yeah, my pleasure.

Lisa Yaszek [00:02:32]:
Right?

Lisa Yaszek [00:02:32]:
I mean, I'm down for a good experiment anytime. So let's go.

Ken Miller [00:02:36]:
So I wanted to kind of start out by talking a little bit about this notion of your background. Your. Your expertise is in the world of science fiction, science fiction writing. You've done a lot of work with women science fiction, which aligns a lot with what we're doing as an association where we're trying to elevate the role of women in our sector as well. So this is. This kind of brings together a lot of what we're doing. So I wanted to kind of start out with understanding the roots of science fiction.

Lisa Yaszek [00:03:05]:
Yeah.

Ken Miller [00:03:06]:
Each episode we do here on from the Crows Nest, we talk about the roots of electromagnetic spectrum operations and electromagnetism and that cool scientific field. So I want to spend some time talking to you about discussing the roots of science fiction. And why is there such an attraction to this genre and why do writers immerse themselves in this field? Because I think that this field establishes or influences the culture which informs how we innovate. So I want to kind of go back into the narrative and talk a little bit about the attraction of this genre of science fiction, and then we'll take that breadcrumb trail deeper into the topic.

Lisa Yaszek [00:03:45]:
Cool. Yeah. Well, science fiction is really popular. It speaks to us.

Lisa Yaszek [00:03:50]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:03:50]:
Because it's the literature of techno scientific modernity. It gives us the story types and character types and themes and tropes that we need. A sort of grammar, if you will, A way that we can talk to each other about our hopes and fears about science and technology and our dreams for the future. And we can use this kind of grammar to talk to each other across centuries and continents and cultures. Because really, if you think about it, whether or not anyone likes science fiction, it's like oxygen. It's everywhere. And I think we all know you can go almost anywhere in the world and talk to anyone. And even if they tell you they've never read a science fiction novel or seen a science fiction movie or played a science fiction game, somehow they'll manage to spend at least an hour talking your ear off about science fiction and why they do or don't like it, it's just so much part of the fabric of how we talk to each other.

Lisa Yaszek [00:04:38]:
Even when we say, I don't do science fiction.

Ken Miller [00:04:41]:
Yeah. And we were talking before the show, and I was just saying, I'm not a huge science f fiction reader myself, but I could similar. I could talk for. For hours on it because it. It creates a space where there is no impossible. And I Love that because you just kind of instantly begin to think about not what you can't do, but how fun it would be if you could do anything.

Lisa Yaszek [00:05:05]:
Right.

Ken Miller [00:05:06]:
And I know in our field in electromagnetism, electromagnetic spectrum operations, our community, we are a community of problem solvers. We love to solve things on the fly. And that mindset kind of gets into that fabric of what you're thinking, like we need that fabric that's almost the point of origin to a lot of our solutions is that ability to step into that possible space. Everything's possible space. And look at it differently.

Lisa Yaszek [00:05:30]:
I think that that makes a lot of sense.

Lisa Yaszek [00:05:32]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:05:33]:
And I think especially for people who are interested in, as we were talking about earlier, sciences and technologies that are on the cutting edge and whose promises are still in the future, you need to speculate about what will this be like 5 years hence, 10 years hence, 50 years hence. So I do think that there is a similar kind of mindset between science fiction enthusiasts and sort of science and technology enthusiasts in general, that these are people who recognize that there's still a lot more out there to explore and discover and problems to solve.

Ken Miller [00:06:04]:
And you said now, you know, science fiction is almost a key to techno modernity.

Lisa Yaszek [00:06:08]:
Yeah.

Ken Miller [00:06:09]:
And in our field, we talk a lot about cat and mouse game. Somebody does something and we have to have a response to that or the next iteration of, of advancement. And so we stay current that way. We, we talk about having an advantage or, or being able to, you know, stay current in that. So I want to kind of pull that techno modernity influence and work with that a little bit. I love to read. And so one of my favorite quotes, in terms of imagination, in terms of science fiction is, literature is luxury, but fiction is necessity. That's from G.K.

Ken Miller [00:06:44]:
chesterton. Another quote is from Einstein. Einstein says imagination is more important than knowledge. So I want to talk about those two quotes because I think that that kind of opens up the discussion about the role that fiction plays in techno modernity. It's a necessity over a lot of other things that we do.

Lisa Yaszek [00:07:03]:
Yeah.

Ken Miller [00:07:04]:
So talk a little bit about that.

Lisa Yaszek [00:07:06]:
I love that idea that, that it is a necessity. And I think this makes sense. As humans, we're narrative producing creatures. We make stories to make sense of the world all the time. And we've always done this and we've always worked in the speculative register. You can look at any culture across the world and their earliest recorded stories. There's always someone trying to explain, like, how does time work? What might the relationship be between the things we see in the skies and the things on the ground, like how is it exactly machines work when we build things? Like, what are the cause and effect situations here?

Lisa Yaszek [00:07:36]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:07:37]:
So we always are telling these stories. Right. And I think that that's so important in both science and science fiction because they both really proceed in a lot of the same ways.

Lisa Yaszek [00:07:47]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:07:47]:
That both scientists and science fiction authors start by asking, what if? So, so what if I took this cool science or technology and evolved it in these ways? So we're always asking what if? And then, of course, as you had mentioned, we also ask other questions. If only, and if this goes on, if only we had this technology, what really great things could we get? Or which is maybe even more relevant to the subject at hand for a lot of your listeners is if this goes on, what could go wrong? Like, what could we anticipate some of the potentially dangerous or even disastrous outcomes to be, and how can we avoid those or fix those or somehow work our way around them and anticipate them and get around them? And so in a lot of ways, scientists and science fiction authors do have to work through a lot of the same issues when they're starting to think about the future of a science and technology. So imagination is really at the core for both groups of people. Absolutely. And narrative is too, because we're saying, here's this thing we invented and here's the impact it's going to have on the world, both material and social, and. And here's how we as heroic scientists and creative engineers, right. Can anticipate promises and perils of these and win us better futures. I think the key difference really between science fiction and scientists has to do with that timeline as we're talking about.

Lisa Yaszek [00:09:05]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:09:06]:
That in particular, because scientists are often working under the constraints of needing to get money or other kinds funding or some kind of support for their research. You can only speculate out so far. Right about, I think three to five years is considered sort of a radical limit, whereas science fiction authors are in no way bound to that three to five years.

Lisa Yaszek [00:09:24]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:09:25]:
And in fact, since the beginning of the genre, it's always been 50 years hence, 500 years hence, you know, 5,000 years hence.

Ken Miller [00:09:32]:
That's a very interesting point because my mind is going back to. I was having a conversation last couple weeks ago, I was on the road and we were talking about War Games, the movie back in the early 80s, and the influence that that movie had on at the time, President Reagan and. And the entire US Cyber initiatives. It didn't really exist until he saw the mo. And then all of a sudden I was like, wait a second, can that, can we really do this? And of course, his advisors came back and like, Mr. President, yes, we can. A and B, it's worse than you think. We've been doing this for decades.

Ken Miller [00:10:06]:
And so like it. It actually allows us to uncover even the layers of work being done within a sector because it's it. So it has both a push and a pull, so to speak, to. To our work. So does that make sense in terms of like, what I'm trying to get?

Lisa Yaszek [00:10:25]:
Like, it makes sense and it's actually, you know, fun. Historical fact was that Reagan actually had an advisory group that was comprised of retired military people and science fiction authors.

Ken Miller [00:10:34]:
Oh, really?

Lisa Yaszek [00:10:35]:
And I'm forgetting the name of the group right now. It might have been like the Concerned Citizens Advisory Board. But anyways, Larry Niven was part of it and Jerry Pornell. And then I'm forgetting right now, names on the military side. My apologies. I remember the science fiction side a little bit more. But I remember once I was actually having drinks with Larry Niven and we were talking a little bit about this, and he wanted to make it very, very clear to everyone that calling it the Star Wars Defense Initiative was in no way his fault or the fault of any other science fiction author who was on that board.

Ken Miller [00:11:06]:
But you could see almost at least the effort to take a technology initiative and put it into the fictional world or relate it to the fictional world where people could grasp it, you know, And I think you can almost say the same thing a little bit about Golden Dome concepts that we hear about today. It sounds science fiction to read about.

Lisa Yaszek [00:11:26]:
Right.

Ken Miller [00:11:26]:
But it shows our desire to kind of pursue that path or to connect with people on that level.

Lisa Yaszek [00:11:34]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think if you even think about something as simple and seemingly non scientific or technological as the Space Force uniforms, they are all designed with really clear references to other really popular science fiction franchises. And you see a lot of those visual motifs repeated in them and it makes sense.

Lisa Yaszek [00:11:53]:
Right?

Lisa Yaszek [00:11:54]:
How do you make sense of like this new force working with these new sciences and technologies in new spaces?

Lisa Yaszek [00:11:59]:
Right?

Lisa Yaszek [00:11:59]:
And we go to the stories we already know to help us convey that.

Ken Miller [00:12:03]:
To people with that. You know, I, I think when we talk about fiction and we talk about stories, a lot of times we are afraid to talk about stories because we quickly run into this thing called risk. And you mentioned, you kind of alluded to it when you talk about the timelines of, you know, scientists have to face three to Five years out in the future. They're looking for resources, they're looking for credibility, trying to get an, you know, understanding from their own community. You quickly run into risk. Well, we can't do that. It's too risky. We, we need to be.

Ken Miller [00:12:41]:
Have more assurance of a return on investment and things of this nature.

Lisa Yaszek [00:12:44]:
Right.

Ken Miller [00:12:45]:
I've always felt like the. One of the key elements of fiction is the ability to basically ignore risk in a lot of ways. There was another quote that, that I've. I don't know who it came from, but it's basically imagination is not to make strange things settled so much as to make settled things strange. And so, like, there's an element of risk involved in that. But in fantasy fiction, science fiction, so it's basically imagination without a consequence. There's no consequence in science fiction in the sense that you can say, hey, we're going to travel to Jupiter. That's a terrible example.

Ken Miller [00:13:23]:
I apologize. But you could travel to Jupiter and get there tomorrow in a science fiction novel.

Lisa Yaszek [00:13:29]:
Well, in a fantasy novel.

Ken Miller [00:13:30]:
In a fantasy novel.

Lisa Yaszek [00:13:31]:
I mean, the thing is, there are rules to science fiction.

Ken Miller [00:13:34]:
I want to be plausible. You're actually getting exactly where I'm going. So you're saying, no, no, this is, this is fantastic. This is awesome. So you're, It's a terrible example, but you're like, hey, we, we want to, we want to travel in space somewhere, right? And we want to reach there in a certain time. And the, you can begin to think about that without having to worry about cooling systems, transportation, all the things that would, you'd actually need to do it. In reality, you can step outside. However, there are some things you have to follow.

Ken Miller [00:14:03]:
You can't just automatically create something that doesn't exist. So talk a little bit about that tension between using your imagination without a consequence, but also having to follow rules that we know of today. And we, we think we understand the rules as they are evolving into the future.

Lisa Yaszek [00:14:23]:
I think the way to think about science fiction, right, is that it's structured play, that you can use your imagination and ask those what if questions. And like you said, one of the beauties of science fiction or of any literature or narrative form is that you actually do have to simplify things. Like, you can't, you can't really have all the complexities of the real world in your fiction, or you're probably writing a lab report or producing a documentary, and that the goal is to follow the thread of like, one line of inquiry to see what would happen, or maybe two or Three, and that can be really useful and it's liberating, right, in some ways because you can follow that to its logical conclusions, as you said, without having to over overly worry. Maybe some of the other details can maybe wave around and black box them. So that can be really exciting. But at the same time, we want to remember it's science fiction. And part of the reason why we're willing to be thrown into these new worlds that are unsettling in the ways that Chesterton talks about is that we know as science fiction readers there are rules to the game and that eventually someone's going to explain to us why the world is the way it is, at least partially and at least indirectly. But at some point you're going to get an explanation and it's going to feel plausible, right? It's going to feel like, yeah, I could see how that future could come given what we're doing with science and society today.

Lisa Yaszek [00:15:45]:
So you do have to follow those rules. And I think, like, maybe a great example is the Martian, right? Like that's a movie a lot of people have seen and it's a movie where we really get to play with like, what would it be like to colonize Mars? And what are all the sort of creative ways we could survive on a different planet. But it's also told within this very focused and structured narrative. So it's not just trying to do everything all at once. And the reason, right, that that's a great one. And why I think so many people were charmed by both the book and the movie and it felt so plausible, was because the author would publish every chapter online as he was writing it and get scientists to make sure it seemed plausible and that that could happen. So he had this really fun tension between the play and the structure that I think is just really obvious right there.

Ken Miller [00:16:26]:
What do you view from a science fiction perspective? Some of the greatest authors, and you work with a lot of great authors, you have a number of different collections out there. What do science fiction writers often get right or wrong about innovation and the evolution of technology? You mentioned the author of the Martian incrementally testing whether or not it's scientifically plausible.

Lisa Yaszek [00:16:50]:
Right.

Ken Miller [00:16:50]:
And that seems like a very good model, but I can't imagine everybody does that. So what do people get right or wrong when they are dealing with technology?

Lisa Yaszek [00:16:57]:
There's a couple different things. I think that some of the things that almost always science fiction authors, especially when they're doing good science fiction in any medium, they tend to get their techno scientific extrapolation more correct than you would think. Authors know that their fans are also going to be experts at certain things, and so that they have to do their research well. And that's part of the game of science fiction, of course, too, is for readers to catch those, you know, authors out in their mistakes.

Lisa Yaszek [00:17:23]:
So.

Lisa Yaszek [00:17:23]:
And also these are authors who are inclined to want to talk to scientists and engineers and to do this kind of research. So it's interesting every time my students read an old story and they're like, oh, wow, that author couldn't have known anything about it and is just making it up. And I'm like, go look it up. And they're like, oh. Literally, that's what the science was doing at the time. So there's some great stories from, like, the 1910s about comets with poisonous gas tails. And my students are like, how silly. And it's like, well, except we had literally just found out there was cyanide in the tale of Halley's comets.

Lisa Yaszek [00:17:51]:
So not so silly, right? So I think they're often good at that. And when you think they're not, check yourself and go check Wikipedia. This is my advice to everyone. I do it all the time, too. It's enlightening. I think another thing that you tend to see is that science is actually dramatic and that the process, even when it's small and incremental, is dramatic. And that the process of getting science out of the laboratory and through, like, whatever kinds of public policy hoops it has to get to and then to people is also dramatic. And science fiction can show you that drama, right, because it makes you care about one or two individuals within these larger systems, and then you follow them through and you can learn a lot about that.

Ken Miller [00:18:31]:
Would you say it almost helps you distill kind of what's important or the most important elements of advanced technology advancement or.

Lisa Yaszek [00:18:40]:
And I think it. What it does is it maybe also can round out our ideas about this, about how innovation comes from surprise, from mistakes and failure, and that it is not necessarily a clean, straight line, but that it's almost iterative and fractal in its own ways. And that can be really exciting. And I think the other thing science fiction can really show us is the imagination and creativity that goes into science, because we don't get to see that so often, especially since scientists need to protect or project in the media.

Lisa Yaszek [00:19:10]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:19:10]:
A certain sort of home and competence, let's say. We don't always see how creative and wacky and funny scientists can be.

Lisa Yaszek [00:19:18]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:19:19]:
We all know that image of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. But I think what most people don't realize is like, you got to take that attitude with you into the science as well. It's not just mugging for the camera.

Ken Miller [00:19:30]:
We talk a lot about in our world, in the MSA world about having to fail fast in innovation and making sure that as we try to loosen our belts in terms of risk taking, risk, if you're going to take a risk and fail, do it fast so that you can learn from it and do it right. What can our scientists today, how can they engage science fiction, the science fiction realm or authors to help understand this notion of failing fast or failing at all and how to build upon the failure for future success?

Lisa Yaszek [00:20:14]:
Well, I think right. What part of what science fiction can do is it can give you a narrative and a sense of what that would look like, what might it look like to fail, what would next steps be, et cetera. And whether or not you agree with how that's dramatized in the fiction, it's important that you're engaging it and thinking about it half the time. It's not necessarily that science fiction is right and tells a scientist what to do as much as a scientist, like, oh, I don't know if I would do it that way, I might do it this other way. But the point is it spurs innovation anyway about it. So I think that part of what science fiction can do is even if scientists themselves aren't allowed in their official writing to create these long term narratives, it can allow you to create them in your head or at earlier stages when you're imagineering or prototyping new technologies.

Ken Miller [00:20:57]:
When we get into the R D world, the research and development world, AOC does annual shows in Europe and US and so forth. A few years ago we had a guest speaker who is a keynote speaker who was also a trained evolutionary biologist and him, one of his main points was that everything you're trying to do in EW is already done in nature somewhere. And it was a fascinating look into that realm. I want to unpack a little bit more about this, that same kind of understanding of telling a story. Because the way that you present scientific fact, if you, you lose a lot of people if you stick to the protocols of experimentation and just kind of the rigid, the rigid rules of that you have to do to kind of get credibility in the field.

Lisa Yaszek [00:21:43]:
Right.

Ken Miller [00:21:44]:
From an M perspective, as my listeners have heard me say time again, I've never been in the military, I'm not a trained scientist, so. But I love this field I love this field because electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces of the universe. And it's something that we can control, manipulate, collect, manage, do different things with. And it's. That's exciting and it's a story that I want to tell to the masses. So how can we do a better job as a scientific community at telling a story that gets people understanding the scientific truths and possibilities within our world of electromagnetic spectrum operations?

Lisa Yaszek [00:22:26]:
Well, again, I think that one of the things, right. That fiction does so well, especially Western fiction, is it dramatizes the psychological struggles of the individual. Whereas I think, you know, science fiction and science are often about institutions and big negotiations between groups of people.

Lisa Yaszek [00:22:43]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:22:43]:
And in fact, these days we sort of push against the idea of like the one creative, like capitalist or scientist who's going to sort of, you know, bring everything through and like, create new futures for us. Having said that, lots of people don't deal well with large abstract narratives about social institutions, right. Because it seems to have so little bearing on their personal lives. So you need to create a story that somehow people can connect with. And whether that's by creating a story that says, well, what if this evolved in a way that it would impact everyone's everyday lives? Like, how do we already use electromagnetics in the home? And how might that be important in the future? I actually was just looking today at a Great story from 1931 that's all about using electromagnetics to hold dishes in place in outer space so that we could all have civilized meals. Yeah, great. Fantastic stuff, right? So you never know again, these weird things and it's small, but like, who knows, maybe thinking about how like, one thing sticks to another and orients could be important in other areas as well.

Ken Miller [00:23:47]:
And that's what's so fascinating is this field has been talked about for at least a couple hundred years. I mean, like, oh, it's as old.

Lisa Yaszek [00:23:54]:
As science fiction itself.

Ken Miller [00:23:55]:
Right, Exactly. So I mean, it's, it's amazing going back when you, when you look at what people have written about or, or the stories they've told, you know, 200 years ago, you're like, ah, that, that's actually not far off now. Obviously they had no idea back then, but you, you even mentioned it with President Reagan and the, that council that had fiction writers in it, like being able to, to translate what you're doing in the real world into a story that can captivate a listener or captivate the general public, because that's ultimately who we're serving with everything that we do in government? How do we tell that story? What are some of the attributes that make a good science fiction story that we should be thinking about, including in our pursuit of innovation, Storytelling within bureaucracy and agency and government.

Lisa Yaszek [00:24:49]:
So this is so great. This is like the kind of stuff I talk about in the first day of my science fiction class, actually.

Lisa Yaszek [00:24:56]:
Right?

Lisa Yaszek [00:24:56]:
But there are, there are certain things. Even though science fiction is a gigantic tent, and especially if you want to call it speculative fiction and include fantasy and horror and utopian fiction, it gets really big, which is cool. There's something for everyone. But we all kind of know what science fiction is when we see it. And I think it's because it does have a. There's a few things that like, we all sort of recognize as belonging to that particular kind of storytelling, right? One is that there's got to be a new thing that makes this new world. And the new thing has to be like a new science or technology. So we like to use the fancy Latin word and talk about the novum of the story, right? So Star wars has two novums.

Lisa Yaszek [00:25:32]:
It has space travel and the Force, right? So. And you can't have the story without any of those other things, for sure. So that's cool. And I think you have to have that. And more important, not just have it, but then we talk about this. You can tell a story about a science and technology and it can be kind of dumb and not really science fictional and not open up the imagination, right? But what you want to do with that novum is think about, like, what are the moral or philosophical or social implications or economic implications of applying this in society? And that will start to get you, I think, to more interesting and imaginative kinds of questions. And that the kind of thing, right, that I think people would want to know, like, okay, great, so emso exists. What does that mean to me?

Lisa Yaszek [00:26:17]:
Right?

Lisa Yaszek [00:26:17]:
Like, so what? How does that impact my life? So I think that science fiction gives you these guidelines for how to write that you can't just have this, but you have to build a world and then create a story within the world caused by the thing that created the world. So that's all nice and focused. I think the other thing, like I said, that science fiction does that's interesting is historically science fiction has not been good at characterization, as my friend Pamela Sargent, another amazing science fiction author and anthologist talks about. She says it's a literature of ideas more than a literature of character. And I think contemporary science fiction, it's both, actually. And maybe that's always Been true. But it is true that what science fiction is so good at doing is taking big ideas and turning it into characters and into familiar objects and characters and really putting a lot of energy into those. So when the space jock shows up, we all know what the space jock's going to do versus, like, the mad scientist.

Lisa Yaszek [00:27:09]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:27:10]:
And we're all really well prepared. So I think that having these kind of shortcuts for ideas can be very helpful and especially familiar ones.

Lisa Yaszek [00:27:18]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:27:18]:
That we can map to. Like, all right, maybe I haven't seen this in my everyday life, but I certainly have seen this in science fiction film a lot. Yeah. And then I think the last thing that science fiction does, and this is linked to our discussions about imagination. And again, the Chesterton quote about being settled and unsettled is science fiction puts us through a specific cognitive experience that you really don't get with other kinds of fiction or narrative. And we call it cognitive estrangement.

Lisa Yaszek [00:27:47]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:27:47]:
So you get dropped into a science fiction story and you're really estranged at first, and you're like, why is this world like this? Why am I here? I'm even thinking about something like the beginning of Water World, which is not a great movie, but you're like, why is this man standing in an ocean and peeing like. And you're like, I don't know why, but it's. It gets you interested.

Lisa Yaszek [00:28:03]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:28:04]:
And as a science fiction person, you know that at some point someone, you know, maybe Professor Exposition is going to show up and light her pipe and just explain it to you. Or maybe you're going to figure it out indirectly through, like, casual conversations or finding a journal or something, but someone's going to explain how that world, why it is like that to you. And then you're like, okay, cool, I get how this future could happen. And then there's one last final moment that happens in the best science fiction, and that's when you return to the real world and you look at it and suddenly that world is full of estrangement and possibility. And all of a sudden you say, why is this world the way it is? And what could I do to make it different if I wanted it actually.

Ken Miller [00:28:42]:
Can make you question what you thought was settled.

Lisa Yaszek [00:28:46]:
Yes, but in an exciting way.

Lisa Yaszek [00:28:49]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:28:49]:
Like, not in a. Maybe a little scary, but not in a way that makes us shut down and want to very much hold in what we already know and sort of stay with the same, but in a way that's exciting, that produces what we call in the community a sense of Wonder that the world, the universe, is much bigger than us and we are not the center of it. And that's exciting because that means there's so much more for us to do.

Ken Miller [00:29:11]:
When you think in that way, then that helps you take that next leap, whatever that looks like in, in whatever context you're. You're working in, because you know it. Things like this will surprise you, like thoughts like, you know, when, when you're trying to go back and forth between the, the science fiction world and the real world, you'll get surprised by what you didn't think was possible before reading that. So with that, there are a lot of examples of science fiction that's, you know, inspired our real world R D that's was inspired by science fiction. You can go into directed energy weapons, you can go AI machine learning. A lot of, you know, you go, go to pretty much any science fiction movie or book, and there's probably elements of using electromagnetism, the science behind electromagnetism, to accomplish things.

Lisa Yaszek [00:30:03]:
Oh, yeah.

Ken Miller [00:30:04]:
So when, when we're talking about R D and kind of advancing innovation, one of the characteristics of our community for decades was that we were always so far ahead of everyone else from a technology perspective. And a lot of what we did in innovation in the private sector was first done in the defense sector in DoD, when fewer, maybe fewer people were watching or whatever. But within the bureaucracy, there's a lot of stuff going on, a lot of development that would then leak out into the private sector and the private sector would take it. But its roots, whether it's, you know, a lot of the common household, daily things that we use today, really got its start in DoD. Today, however, it's quite the opposite. It's coming out first in the private sector, it's coming out first in society. And then DoD or the Defense sector is kind of trying to catch up and say, wait a second, we need to be. We need to be leveraging those ideas versus the private sector leveraging our ideas.

Ken Miller [00:31:05]:
This seems to put a little bit more of an onus on the ability to operate within this realm of storytelling and fiction and so forth. Because would you say that today fiction and storytelling is driving things differently or more so than they have in the past? Or is this a constant that we're just needing to look into more from our community?

Lisa Yaszek [00:31:30]:
So scientists have always been clear about their indebtedness to science fiction authors.

Lisa Yaszek [00:31:35]:
Right?

Lisa Yaszek [00:31:35]:
And this goes back to Leo Sislard, decided to become a physicist. Right. He eventually worked on the Manhattan Project because he was inspired by H.G. wells writing about nuclear weapons, I think in the World Set Free. And. And like you said, we continue to see that.

Lisa Yaszek [00:31:50]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:31:50]:
Like both the acronym ICE for Counter Electronics and Cyberspace come from William Gibson, of course, and yeah, so we see that a lot. Richard Feynman, who, like, you know, plenty of room at the bottom. That lecture that started a whole new discipline was really based on a series of science fiction stories that people in his lab were reading and talking about about small scale engineering. So I do think that that has long been there. What seems interesting to me, if anything, is that I've noticed in the last. I would say looking as a historian speaking, not like I literally remember this, but if anything, in the last 50 years I've seen a shift, especially in government rhetoric. It's. It's complicated that while we know that certain parts of the government do work with groups like the advisory group I had talked about, and also now the Sigma Group, that's a current group of scientists and science fiction authors who do government and NGO consulting for the most part.

Lisa Yaszek [00:32:47]:
Like, if I feel that that fear of fiction has also sort of led scientists to talk less about how they've been inspired by science and technology. And one place I think that's really interesting again is you really see this in nanoscience and technology. For sure. When Feynman was first thinking about the field, he was perfectly happy to admit to everyone that he was talking with people about literature. And when Eric Drexler started working in the field, same thing. He's like, I was. He's like, I wanted to make solar sales like Arthur C. Clarke was talking about.

Lisa Yaszek [00:33:19]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:33:20]:
And that led him to other problems that really got him into nanoscience and technology. Oh, and another fun one, more people have been recruited to NASA By Nichelle Nichols, Lt. Uhura from Star Trek, just by her existence in the media and the fact that she actually did recruiting for NASA than any other NASA initiative ever. So clearly this stuff really appeals to us. But like I said, one thing I've started to see is actually a sort of pushback against that and the sense that, like, oh, what we're doing isn't fiction, it's not science fiction. So on the one hand, there are these sort of longstanding relations between government and literature or government and art, which I love. But increasingly, like, if you go on especially government websites for fields that are really reliant on emergent technologies, there's a lot of this is not science fiction. And if you Google the phrase science fiction, you'll find this Is not science fiction comes up dozens of times.

Lisa Yaszek [00:34:15]:
And you have to think, why do you keep saying it's not science fiction that's so interesting you feel compelled to say that. So if anything, obviously this sort of interesting shift in the other direction, which is odd, especially because we know that like people, science fiction still is an incubator for, for new ideas. A great example came from Kip Thorne's work on interstellar. Kip Thorne is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who was hired to do consulting on interstellar so they could get their black holes right. And ironically, they realized you can't depict a black hole right in the media because it looks weird and no one will understand what you're showing them. But what is cool is Thorne had access to so much computing power, he actually was making discoveries about black holes, like, not huge ones, but like cool, small, important ones while he was consulting on the movie. So we're literally seeing like this collaboration that works. And I think it's a shame that there are so many places where you can't have that freedom to play like that necessarily and look for these sort of surprising and unintended effects through these collaborations.

Ken Miller [00:35:17]:
Well, it seems, you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier, if you're cutting out the role of science fiction or you're trying to say it's not science fiction, it's just science, you are undercutting your ability to take risk. Yes, on some level, because you're already saying something is not something else. And so therefore you're limiting what you can and can't do. And therefore you're increasing your risk and you're, I think, ultimately increasing cost. Because let's face it, I mean, a lot of science fiction, it's quote unquote, free to thinking is free. Imagining using your imagination is free.

Lisa Yaszek [00:35:59]:
It's a virtual laboratory. You can run all kinds of simulations. And historically, scientists have done this when they can't get grant funding. And this goes all the way back to W.E.B. du Bois, the great African American sociologist, couldn't get grants, so he wrote science fiction and sort of gamed out the stuff that way. So it is a shame. And it's interesting as we're talking about this, that, like, when I think about my creative friends, they get hired to do imagineering projects by industry, not as much by government. Like I said, there are a few groups that are doing that work, but way more people are doing that work in the private sector for sure.

Ken Miller [00:36:32]:
So I want to talk a little bit in our field. One of the topics that gets the most attention is the role of artificial intelligence. And I want to use this as an example because this has long been a subject in science fiction and it's here today, at least in a subtle form. I want to kind of use that as an example. And you deal with fiction every single day. What are the works of fiction that speak to you the most about where we're at the moment with AI and how we're grappling with it? And what can we learn from science fiction on artificial intelligence that will help us evolve that technology safely and effectively for future generations?

Lisa Yaszek [00:37:16]:
The trick is, and this is one of the places where I think this can be a limit of science fiction because it's so good at dramatizing things and narrativizing things, it sometimes transforms objects into people. And so we have like, really ever since E.T.A. hoffman's the Sandman, early 1800s. So like almost, yeah, 200 years at this point.

Lisa Yaszek [00:37:36]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:37:36]:
Of stories about embodied AIs that are like people. And the reality is our AIs are not embodied. Or if they are, they're embodied in objects, not in things mostly that are like people. Although that is one line and a really interesting and a whole other line to talk about.

Lisa Yaszek [00:37:55]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:37:55]:
But for the. The reality is most of us are interacting with devices with some mode of AI in them, not with like AI caretakers or anything like that yet. So I think that that's interesting, right, is that sometimes things can become over personalized. And then we all expect our AIs to be either like C3PO or HAL 2000 and even like X something like. Like Ava from Ex Machina or Chappie from the movie Chappie by Neil Blogkamp. And I love those movies. And I think they actually do teach us important things about the ethics of AI and how we use them. But most of us are not going to be dealing with embodied robots that are going to like help us rob banks or take care of us when we're old or anything like that.

Ken Miller [00:38:35]:
Does sometimes science fiction, can it too often cause us to jump to a conclusion of where it's heading?

Lisa Yaszek [00:38:44]:
I think, yeah, if a trope becomes prevalent enough, sure.

Lisa Yaszek [00:38:46]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:38:47]:
Like we have like the rampaging versus the friendly robot. We have a really hard time thinking about complex robots and. And how robots might be like people. I think the Matrix movies have started to move the needle a little in that direction. Of all things.

Ken Miller [00:38:59]:
I'm thinking of the HBO series Westworld as well.

Lisa Yaszek [00:39:03]:
Oh, Westworld is good too. And actually Spike Jonze is her when, when, when you had first sent me this question and I was thinking about it, her is actually the first movie that came to my mind for two very different reasons. The first actually is I think the opening scenes of that movie are the absolute most realistic depiction of AI I have ever seen, including in things that are claiming to be nonfiction. Right. Because it dramatizes this process that we are going through now, which is a process of de skilling for a lot of people and maybe reskilling for others. So, and I think that we see that and then, especially with the protagonist's work, this is another thing that's interesting, right? Is that with the rise of AI tools that are allowing us to do like AI generated art and AI generated science, there's been a pushback against that and there's suddenly the celebration of boutique human produced things. And of course we get that in the movie too, because his whole job is he hand creates like messages, right, for greeting cards. So you're not just using an AI algorithm to create something generic, although sometimes ChatGPT can be great for that stuff, I have to admit.

Lisa Yaszek [00:40:10]:
So. But I do think that we see that. And in fact, I just had a wonderful argument with a really, really earnest, very young artist about he was just utterly convinced that AI is just the most horrifying thing in the universe for art and for humans and for the environment. All of which he has good points about, for sure.

Lisa Yaszek [00:40:27]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:40:28]:
So I think that that's interesting, but the D and reskilling thing, I think that feels so important and so little science fiction really deals with it. It's really interesting. Now, having said that, there is a tradition going all the way back, at least to the 1950s. Elizabeth Mann Borhees, the daughter of the famous philosopher Thomas Mann, she wrote science fiction and she wrote a story called For Sale Reasonable. And it appears to be the story of a robot selling itself and by why it's better than all other robots. And at the end you realize it's a human and it's. It's softness and cheapness and flexibility that makes it still more desirable than robots, which is actually the case we're in right now.

Lisa Yaszek [00:41:04]:
Yeah.

Ken Miller [00:41:05]:
It's fascinating that some of this is. Has been dealt with in decades and you're not even aware of the influence that's had on our thinking today.

Lisa Yaszek [00:41:13]:
But having said that, I do think science fiction. Let's go back to the positive stuff that it does with us for AI. I think it teaches us a lot of things that we forget about, which is that AI is programmed by people, that it is potentially responsive to learning, which is a really interesting moment. And I think the other thing that it can be useful for is helping us think about the way all people are sort of treated under modern political and economic and social systems. And I think that you see this all the way back as early as blade runner, the first 1984 blade runner, right? When you have the scene where there's a human interrogating a replicant and trying to figure out if the replicant is indeed a replicant and a criminal, and they're both sitting in chairs, like gigantic chairs that swallow them up, that say, Tyrell Corporation, right? And you figure out eventually it doesn't even matter if you're a human or machine. What matters is the Tyrell Corporation and what it's doing. So I think science fiction can sometimes show us how to connect some of the dots between things that are happening with AI in one realm, and then maybe AI in another. AI will surprise us by interpreting its own programming in weird ways.

Lisa Yaszek [00:42:27]:
And that goes all the way back to Isaac Asimov. I mean, he invented that story form, right? Where you're like, oh no, the AIs are rebelling. And then you realize, oh no, they're just interpreting their programming in a different way and everything's fine. So that's good, right? Maybe some warnings about not necessarily panicking without using a little imagination and shifting our perspective first.

Lisa Yaszek [00:42:46]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:42:47]:
But then also that AI are probably going to be more interested in each other than they are in us. And we're already seeing that AIs are getting increasingly hallucinatory because they refer back to each other constantly, all the time now. And they're sort of drifting away from this sort of baseline, sort of human interaction, which is kind of cool, actually. I mean, it's not useful for us, but it's neat from a fictional perspective, I think.

Ken Miller [00:43:10]:
What are the. Some of the trends today that you see in science fiction that we need to be paying attention to from the science world and leveraging to help our field innovate and take risks?

Lisa Yaszek [00:43:26]:
There are obviously always a lot of new things happening in science fiction. 1 I think, though, that's interesting to keep your eye on, especially from the perspective of thinking about. Well, actually all of this is cyberpunk, right? That William Gibson in The, in the 80s was really one of the first people to really think about electromagnetics, not just in terms of AI development, but also in terms of. Of war technologies, for sure. You know, he was an anti war protester and I think he thought a lot about this during the Vietnam War as he was watching the development of the arpanet. So I think it's interesting that we are seeing a revival of cyberpunk right now. And it tends to look quite different than the early cyber punk did. Early cyberpunk was very Western or very Japanese, maybe very much about alienation and isolation and very pessimistic that we were going to make it through this moment without really losing our souls.

Lisa Yaszek [00:44:18]:
I think whereas a lot of current cyberpunk is more hopeful that we can be angry at these situations and we can maybe connect with each other and do science and technology a little differently. And maybe we're not going to like have some huge revolution and change the future, but we can win better futures, right? We can all live a little longer and prosper a little more. And I think like watching the Murderbot series right now that's streaming, or if you read the Murderbot books by Martha Wells, excellent example of all of this, for sure. The other thing, I think that's really exciting that's happening. And I think maybe the most useful thing for all Westerners and Northerners to think about is the rise of what we're calling co futurist science fiction. And it's not really the rise as the recognition of it, but the recognition that it's really felt like Westerners and especially Americans kind of had a lock on science fiction for a while. And it is true that we did the most media production throughout the 20th century for sure. But the reality is every culture has always done speculative storytelling.

Lisa Yaszek [00:45:21]:
And anytime any culture begins to touch the modern world, they start telling science fiction stories. And I think it's really important to look at these traditions that come from other parts of the world, because these are people who've had other experiences of science and technology and are therefore going to generate different solutions than we have. And if we want to start coming up with new ways to solve the wicked problems of the present and get better futures for us all, we're gonna. It's all hands on deck, right? We need to look at every single solution out there possible. So I think that looking through these co futurisms is really helpful, especially because often what you'll realize is, oh wait, not only are these people who've written science fiction for a long time, they've been doing the science and technology for a long time. Like, like lots of people in Nigeria have been involved in the space race since the 50s and 60s because both the Soviet Union and America had listening posts out in area, right? So you Start to get, I think, different perspectives on how this would work. And then the last one I want to shout out to. And I'm not sure how it's useful, but I think we need to make it useful for MSO and for every field is.

Lisa Yaszek [00:46:22]:
Is Hope Punk. And Hope Punk is. Yeah, it's a. It's a. Never heard of this new genre. Yep. Got named back in like 2018 by an author named Alexandra Rowland, but a lot of people are talking about it now. And Rollins talks about how often in our stories we tend towards either, like, the incredible optimistic, like, it'll all work out fine, especially if we just create the right science or technology.

Lisa Yaszek [00:46:47]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:46:48]:
Or the incredibly pessimistic that there's no way we're ever going to solve this problem and this is going to continue to go on and it will be terrible. But Hope Punk says, children, let's step back and be a little bit calmer for a minute.

Lisa Yaszek [00:47:00]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:47:00]:
And the issue isn't trying to be like a great hero or a great villain, but trying to sort of survive these moments in smaller and more meaningful ways by making connections, using our imagination, shifting our perspectives. And what she talks about is that it doesn't matter if the glass is half empty or half full. What matters is there's water in the glass, and that's worth fighting for. And I feel like that kind of attitude, this sort of hopeful sense that there are better futures out there and that we can use these sciences and technologies to get to them. Maybe not in the ways we had assumed in the past, and maybe instead we've got to connect with each other in new ways and come up with creative new ways to do it, but that maybe we can use these to do the future differently.

Ken Miller [00:47:42]:
It's interesting. It almost seems like it's a. It runs counter to the polarization that you see. Oftentimes it's either utopian or dystopian and. And how to find hope in between those two outcomes. Because a lot of times we think utopia and then the moment that's not materializing, we go straight back to the. To the other end of the spectrum, no pun intended, where it's dystopia and we can't manage in between. So that's a very interesting trend.

Ken Miller [00:48:09]:
I've never heard of the. The hope punk, but that's definitely seems to something that we help you grapple with today.

Lisa Yaszek [00:48:14]:
Yeah. So like all the punk movements, it's kind of angry at the world as it is, especially with current economic and technological arrangements. But again, it's hopeful that we live in a world where things change and humans do have impact on the world and we can change the material world and the social world.

Ken Miller [00:48:30]:
Your list of accomplishments is fantastic.

Lisa Yaszek [00:48:32]:
Thank you.

Ken Miller [00:48:33]:
I said a lot of it at the top of the show when I introduced you. But one of the initiatives that AOC is currently doing is Empowering Women in AW initiative and it's basically trying to highlight and elevate the role of women in our field. You have a lot of award winning books, anthologies, other works that you've contributed to, but heavy in the world of futurist female. Talk a little bit about the role of women in science fiction and science in general and how, how do you work to elevate women in this field?

Lisa Yaszek [00:49:09]:
So one thing that's really cool that actually we've found out, I was working with another author and we were looking at this, is that the, the percentage of women in science and the percentage of women in science fiction has exactly mapped for the last 150 years, which is really, really interesting, especially because initially a lot of women said they went into science fiction because they had families who didn't want them to pursue science educations and this sort of became a way to do science anyway. Or these were women who had science degrees too often and weren't sure what else they wanted to do with it necessarily. So we often tend to think about both science and science fiction as being about essentially boys and their toys, if you will, and, and, and in particular, we can even start modifying it. White boys and their toys, et cetera. Great, you get where I'm going here. And indeed, it might seem to many people that early science fiction didn't have a lot of women in it, because the history we often tell is that the field was invented by a woman, Mary Shelley. And then I don't know where all those women went for the next 150 years. But until you get the second revival of feminism in the 60s and the rise of authors like Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russell, like we, the story we hear is Mary Shelley and then Nothing till the 1960s.

Lisa Yaszek [00:50:18]:
Which makes you wonder, if that's the case, then how do we enjoy so many amazing women writers today? And women tend to be much more highly visible than male writers. They win disproportionate numbers awards, they run disproportionate numbers of initiatives within the community, et cetera. And the reality, of course, is that women were always there. And like I said, just like they've always been in sciences and in roughly the same Numbers. So I think that that's really cool. And a lot of my work has been going back and looking at that and looking at the ways women have advanced the genre, just the ways I think that, like, women, we look at the way women advanced science. So it's been interesting to look at the kinds of contributions women made. Especially early on, men weren't sure what to do with representations of women in science fiction.

Lisa Yaszek [00:51:04]:
Joanna Russ in 1969, famously claimed, There are plenty of images of women in science fiction, but there are very few. And it's true. You get, like, love interests and damsels in distressed. Or if you're lucky, you might get to be a scientist's daughter who gets to, like, pick up a gun for a while, like in a 1950s B movie. Actually, the scientist daughters get to do a lot of action in those movies. So that's pretty cool. But you're always sort of defined in relationship to a man. I guess if you're kind of lucky, you might get to be a beautiful alien monster who then gets flashed by the human who, like.

Lisa Yaszek [00:51:36]:
And then be like, oh, you're so powerful, and I give up my powers for you, and I become a housewife.

Lisa Yaszek [00:51:40]:
Right?

Lisa Yaszek [00:51:41]:
And, yeah, women, yeah, they. They weren't so down with those images, especially since science fiction and science, modern science as a profession, both grow up right alongside feminism.

Lisa Yaszek [00:51:51]:
Right.

Lisa Yaszek [00:51:51]:
And so modernity is all tied up with this in some ways. And, you know, it was really important for women. One of the ways women got the vote was by arguing they were scientific and rational people, like men. So. And then women writing science fiction, we're imagining futures where you're like, look, let women vote. This is fine. It's all good, right? Yeah. Women from the beginning are.

Lisa Yaszek [00:52:13]:
They're doing two things. They're giving us new character types to remind us of the kinds of new roles that women are really doing in the world. Like, women are being scientists like Marie Curie. Right. And explorers like Amelia Earhart. And so from the beginning, women, and some men, don't get me wrong, are indeed sort of writing in alien queens and sensitive space jocks, let's say, and lady scientists and domestic engineers. So you do have these kind of cool character types that map to things in the real world. But I think the really important thing that women historically did is they drew attention to the ways that science and technology are transforming not just public spaces like laboratories and launchpads, but the way that they transform private spaces like libraries and living rooms and laundry rooms even.

Lisa Yaszek [00:53:04]:
And showing us that technoscientific innovation has impacts in the private sphere and is sometimes pushed and innovation occurs out of that sphere rather than maybe out of public spheres as well. So I think that those are some of the most exciting things that historically we've seen and now maybe the most exciting thing because now women get to write all the same things men do. And and they can continue, of course to still write about the women's experience. But what I think is cool is these days we see men and non binary people also sort of taking these models that were created by women to write about their specific experience as gendered people in scientific and technological worlds.

Ken Miller [00:53:43]:
Lisa, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I've enjoyed every minute of it.

Lisa Yaszek [00:53:47]:
Oh, me too.

Ken Miller [00:53:47]:
So much more we could talk about. But I do appreciate you taking time. If any of our listeners are interested in the empowering women in EW, you can go to our website. It's crows.org membership EWN EW one word so and it outlines some of the initiatives that we are doing from an association perspective for empowering women. But I think this is a great message for that group to carry because I think it's a fascinating field and one that I think we need to be paying more attention to if we are going to have confidence in the evolution of the technical world that we live in. So thank you so much, Lisa for joining me. It's been great talking to you and hope we continue the conversation in the future.

Lisa Yaszek [00:54:31]:
Thanks, Ken. I'd love to do it again, for sure.

Ken Miller [00:54:34]:
Well, that will conclude this episode of From the Crows' Nest. I want to thank my guest, Lisa Yaszek, Regents professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech. As always, please take a moment to review, share and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.