Daniel Suarez,self-published his first novel,Daemon, in 2006. The book and its sequelFreedom™ chronicled the rise of a botnet that uses self-driving cars to kill humans, crashes the stock market, and creates a new society in its own image. His next novel, Kill Decision, published by Dutton in 2012, was about aerial drones that could decide when to use lethal force independently of any human.
After reading his books, you could be forgiven for thinking it was time for someone — the government, maybe — to put the brakes on technological progress for a while. But he wouldn’t agree with you. In fact, his latest novel, Influx, explores the idea of trying to control technological progress. And it’s just as scary as his previous stories.
Influx, which will be out next Thursday, is the story of Jon Grady, a physicist who invents a machine that can reverse gravity. But before he can share his work with the world, a secret U.S. government agency called the Bureau of Technology Control seizes it and arrests him. He soon learns the BTC has seized many other inventions, including cold fusion reactors and quantum computing systems. Using the technology it’s stockpiled, the BTC has become more powerful than any government. And it’s completely out of control.
I interviewed Suarez about Influx, the real reason that technological innovation has slowed down and why he has reservations about Bitcoin.
TechCrunch: Your previous books focused on the dangers of certain technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, robotics and drones. But your new book focuses on the dangers of withholding or restricting technology. What made you decide to change direction?
Daniel Suarez: I’m not sure I would say that it’s a change of direction. Let me revisit how you describe what I do. I actually love technology. I worked for 18 years as systems analyst in technology. If we are going to be addressing the very major problems that you see before humanity, it is going to be technology that’s going to rescue us, basically. We are going to have to think our way through this and that’s going to involve obviously a lot of people and all these conflicting ideas.
That’s why I push back when people describe my books saying that I’m showing the dangers of technology. Not just the dangers.
I think that for all of the dangers of technology spreading, I think it is more dangerous in some ways that it doesn’t. My simple reason for that is we’ve got 7 billion people on the planet and we have these very serious problems and I think we don’t know who’s going to have the answers to the problems that are coming around the bend. That’s why we really need everybody thinking on it. We need every Einstein on this planet to help us.
Who’s going to have the idea that modifies a technology that brings it to the next level or combines it with another technology? I think in the long run we’re going to be better served by sharing knowledge as opposed to creating silos of it.
The role I see for my books is trying to think through the consequences of various things because a lot of the issues around technology and the nuances in it are not usually widely appreciated. That’s how I view my writing as I sort of explore this terra incognita ahead of us in an effort to try to understand where we might be heading. And I do that using the thriller genre because I think it’s a useful way to explore the territory in a realistic way without boring the crap out of people.
TechCrunch: You wrote this book before the Edward Snowden NSA revelations, but you’ve said that the Snowden revelations weren’t that surprising given the leaks that had come before. Did you have the NSA in mind when you wrote the book?
Suarez: Well, it’s funny that I showed them in the book as sort of hapless victims in a way of the BTC. There was something appealing of course about seeing the NSA being tapped and helpless, trying to figure out how to resist a technologically superior foe. I thought that that was an interesting way to look at things. It’s not just the NSA, but any unseen and unaccountable concentration of power that I’m trying to portray in this story. And right now that might be the NSA, but over time it might change. And I wouldn’t really put a specific nationality on it. It’s a story about progress and an effort to try to retain advantage.
So, yes, it was partly about the NSA but then it’s also partly about the broader issues — the broader issues of control and transparency.
TechCrunch: It feels like the power imbalance isn’t just a political power imbalance but it’s also the lack of understanding and awareness on the part of the public as to how these things work.
Suarez: And possibly interest. It’s been mildly infuriating to me to speak with even friends and people I know who shrug and say “Well, you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about surveillance?” And of course you and I would probably say well, actually, it’s not just people doing things wrong. For example somebody running for Congress 20 years from now I think is going to have a very detailed record to have to defend. “Why were you standing next to this person every day for five years and this person later turned out to be a criminal?”
I think that is why these revelations were powerful. I don’t think that many technology or IT people were surprised by this, but I think it became much more personal with Snowden. Now, it’s dying down again but I think there will be more revelations that hopefully wake people up. We can’t just be passive. Being a citizen in a democracy really does require some interest.
TechCrunch: Were you also thinking at all about the power imbalance between a wealthy nation and a poor nation, both in terms of their military might as well as just access to healthcare or plentiful food?
Suarez: Well, that certainly is part of it. Although I would say that a billionaire in a third world nation lives very much like a billionaire elsewhere. I mean they create an enclave, and they have satellite uplinks and they have jets and things like that. So, yes, the great majority of people in underdeveloped countries would live a much more technologically backward life, although it’s a mix. Again, they might skip the hardwire telephone networks that we have. I’ve never been to Africa, but a number of people that I talked to who have been to various places in Africa talk about how great the cell service is. And here I am in a first-world nation having to seek a hill top to talk to you on the cellphone.
I think technology is spreading and I think one’s experience of technology is going to relate increasingly to class, not so much to country. There are areas in parts of this country that look very technologically backward and abandoned by society in general. I wouldn’t say that they resemble the third world exactly, but they are not experiencing technology and its advantages like the rest of the country.
Source: TechCrunch
