Close All Tabs - Language, Landscapes and Robot Minds with Annalee Newitz | Dream Machines

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

San Francisco has been at the center of successive waves of technological and cultural change —  from the literal Gold Rush days to the current gold rush-like AI boom. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to author, longtime San Francisco resident, and “chronicler of other minds” Annalee Newitz about the difference between this boom and previous ones, the pleasures and dangers of anthropomorphizing tech tools, and whether or not AI is embodied.  Guest: Annalee Newitz, journalist and author of Automatic Noodle and other books Read the Transcript here Credits: Produced by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Derek Lartaud, mixed by Brendan Willard, executive produced by Jen Chien.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

from KQED. Support for KQED podcast comes from San Francisco Opera. This fall, dive into a world of political intrigue with Simone Bocanegra and Mary Queen of Scots. Discover a life of Parisian luxury in Monon and laugh along with the marriage of Figuero. Learn more at sfopra.com. Support for KQED podcast comes from Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts, inviting students on a journey of ideas culminating in a Stanford graduate degree. An info session will be held on August 20th, MLA.standford.edu.

Hey, it's Morgan, reminding you that we have this cool new podcast series guesting in our feed, running all month. It's called Dream Machines, and it's a podcast about AI. Here it is. I'm Alexis Madrigal. I'm Robin Sloan. And this is KQED's Dream Machines, a podcast about AI. How it works. what it means.

How it feels. Yeah, how it feels. And importantly, it's rooted here in San Francisco. So the name of this podcast, Dream Machines, shout out Ted Nelson. Shout out Zanadu. Shout out Zanadu, which

his great dream, still out there. Yeah, and Ted Nelson, of course, is this great thinker, computer systems thinker from way back. Living on a houseboat in Salisito, I can live in to this day. Right in Zines. And one of them had the title,

all computer lib, computer liberation, dream machines. And we've always loved dream machines. Yeah. Especially because it seems to incorporate these two things, right? Dream machines, both as these actual AI systems and the way that they sort of work, and in particular the fact that they can hallucinate and generate these different types of sequences.

Well, you know, this is kind of pre the current boom, but we're talking in this 10-year period, a lot of these models, the image-generating models and even the language models, I mean, their output would be like, up psychedelic. And it would just be like a face filled with corgis. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like anything overrepresented on YouTube was overrepresented in the dreams of the machine. Yeah. So the, yeah, the dream is strong in this machine. Yeah. But also the dream of San Francisco and, you know, the broader Bay Area as the place that is this incredible mechanism for bringing these audacious dreams forward, whether or not you kind of

want them to, whether or not you think they're a good idea or bad idea, just incontrovertibly going back in time, this is the way. place, semi-conductors all the way through. The PC, you know, all the different components of the PC are happening here. The internet, of course, social media, the great horrors of social media, as well as, like, all the Uber for Everything companies, like each one of these things has these roots in this area. And it is one of those times where you're like, was it just the gold rush? Did the gold rush somehow imbues some magic dust in this place?

I mean, you've written so much about this and sort of studied this history, like the machine. in this dream machine. Like, what kind of machine is it? Is it a money machine? Is it a organizational machine? I mean, I feel like we're going to ask this over and over in this podcast, in some sense, you know, what is AI? It's kind of subset of what is technology. And you can answer it in so many different ways, right?

We can provide the answer we're providing here, which is the actual technological development. What were the architectures? What was the data? What was the programming? How did that all look? But you could also look at it, like, on a finance level, right? What were the investment infrastructures and government policies that went into feeding the machine? You could also look at it on a cultural level, right?

And many people have done this too. It was hippies plus semiconductors equals Apple somehow. You know what I mean? Or military industrial complex. And that coming and meeting this whole set of characters and libertarians, all of those things, I think, are different answers to the sort of like why San Francisco, what is technology? And eventually, as we'll get to in this podcast, like, what is AI in all these different companies? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. How does AI play out across all these dimensions?

San Francisco, though, is for us and maybe uniquely for us and for our conversations. It is such an important part of it because it's just remarkable that it's here again. So for, you know, our first conversation, we wanted to find, like, the ultimate San Francisco. The avatar of San Francisco. Who can speak, who can speak, you know, about this place in the long run. and across all these dimensions we're talking about, you know, cultural and economic and, you know, technical and everything else. And that would be Annalie Newitz, of course, a nonfiction writer who really in their nonfiction works on this kind of civilizational scale thinking, you know, as long term as the long now foundation, you know, which is, of course, also here in San Francisco, really in fiction, most recently, you know, automatic noodle is creating dream machines, is creating these kind of other minds. one of the reasons that we wanted Annali on the show, I think we both agree that, like, among

fiction writers, there's nobody better, probably, certainly, at imagining and then sort of puppeteering other minds. You know, it could be an animal, it could be a machine, it could be a robot. There are a lot of robots. Some very, like, sensual robots in Annalie's books. And, like, what a, what a voice to have applied to these questions, which kind of have to do with, like, a new kind of mind in this world. And I do think Annali is a figure that is just so San Francisco in this like mix of being tech forward, being politics forward, being wild and free along dimensions. Other people in other regions of country maybe have never even imagined. Thinking creatively and critically about the future, right, as those two things together.

So basically, without further ado, here is our interview with Annalie New. It's the first on Dream Machines. One of the questions that I think we've been asking ourselves is why San Francisco over and over for these booms? I mean, the Bay Area broadly, but also San Francisco quite specifically in this case, and certainly over the last 20 years, what do you think? Like, what do you make of it? Yeah, like, because it's easy to say, you know, you want to say, oh, it's a boom town. That's the nature of it. But you're like, okay, you've told me nothing.

What is your, you know, over all these years, what's your read of that tendency, that power? Yeah, it is true that this is a town of boom and bust, but more than that, it's a town of booms motivated by engineering breakthroughs. And we've always had in the Bay Area, if you include things like Silicon Valley in the kind of greater Bay Area, we've always had innovators and industrialists coming together. And one of the things I think that's so interesting about San Francisco is this weird alchemy of oftentimes very conservative. you know, proto oligarchs of industry, you know, whether it's the railway tycoons of the late 19th century or people like Peter Thiel now or Sam Altman now, you have these people who are just dumping money into the economy and they're not interested in the public good, really. I mean, or they have sort of a thin scrim of care for the public good. They just want to make money. But they're dumping that money into a city that's full of, of radicals and subversives, people who've been kicked out of every decent city in the country, you know, people who are too queer for their families, two leftist for their political parties. And they come together, they meet that money, and then something freaking weird happens.

That's San Francisco. And I think that's why San Francisco has such weird politics, too. You know, you'd think we'd be a city that would be like Arcata up north, you know, like that we'd have an all-green city council, we'd be run by socialists. But no, we're a city where the socialists somehow are hanging out with these industrialists. Right, right, right. So, Annalie, I know your origin story and, you know, I have read a lot of your wired.com articles and other things and following in your trail once I arrived here. I am curious, as you have watched this city change so much through these different areas, but particularly this kind of like AI boom, which is like, you know, trillion-dollar companies suddenly like implanting into San Francisco.

Like, how has that changed the city for you? And do you think that's changed the way that you write about the city or write about technology? It 100% it has. I think one of the big differences between the AI boom and say the dot-com boom, which was the turn of the century, is that there's a real. nealism to this tech boom. I felt like during the dot-com boom, yes, it was bonkers and there was way too much money, but there was a kind of exuberance and delight and silliness to it, whereas I feel like the AI boom is associated with politics like the network state or, you know, very regressive

sort of Peter Thiel style, let's return to monarchy type politics. And so the politics are very reactionary and very anti-democratic. And that has really shifted my understanding of San Francisco, which I always thought of as a very anarchic, freewheeling, happy town that maybe was a little too rich, always a little too rich, but also kind of spent money freely on sex and drugs. And now I feel like what I want to reflect in my writing about the city is this dark turn toward a kind of self-denial and anti-heedinism and pro-authoritarianism. And so the city is a darker place, but ironically, it's made me want to write happier, cozier, more friendly stories about it to encourage people to remember,

you know, you can have some fun and you don't need a lot of money to do it, and the city could be beautiful. We've talked about this quite a bit that among, your many virtues and great strengths as a writer, you are perhaps the foremost chronicler or imaginer of other minds, including machine minds. It's really both. I definitely got the inspiration. I get the inspiration for my non-human characters from the world around me and from the machines I interact with. And I am a ruthless anthropomorphizer. And I do make fun of myself for this. And I realize that it's kind of of a character flaw, especially if you write about science. But I can't help but see the personhood

in everything, including machines, although not so much in chat, GBT. Maybe we'll talk about that later. Yeah, we need to get to that. Yeah. But I do, like, this microphone, I could easily have compassion for this microphone. Like, how many times has it been breathed on? And like, what's it thinking about that? Like, does it have opinions about different smells that it encounters? And, you know, what's it going to do about it. So I think that's part of what happens to me is that I'll be writing a story that's fact-based and evidence-based

and a part of my brain is like, oh, but what if this was alive? Like, what would it be thinking right now? Because that's, what is human consciousness but like this thin little layer around a bunch of just survival imperative? Support for KQED podcast comes from San Francisco Opera. This fall, dive into a world of political intrigue with Simone Bocanegra and Mary Queen of Scots.

Discover a life of Perugian luxury in Monon and laugh along with the marriage of Figuero. Learn more at sphopra.com. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts, inviting students on a journey of ideas, culminating in a Stanford graduate degree. An info session will be held on August 20th, MLA.companford.com. D.U. Why don't you briefly set up the world of automatic noodle and we'll use that to kind of think about some of these robots that you've created? Yeah, it's the first book I've ever written that was set in San Francisco. And it's about what happens in California after the state has won a war of independence against the United States. So it's set five years after the war has been won.

So things are being rebuilt and resettled. And one of the things that's happened in the wake of the war is that some of the robots who were used in the fighting have been given limited civil rights in the nation of California. And that's partly because the nation of California thinks of itself is very futuristic and wants to kind of be the first nation that joins the UN having these kinds of rights for sentient AI. But also it's because it's kind of undeniable that some of these robots are people. And so my main characters are four robots who have. have these limited rights. They can, they're free to work but not to own property. They are free to associate with each other, but not form unions. And so they're struggling with a lot of the same things

that many people in the states have struggled with and now in the nation of California. So they decide through kind of skirting the laws that they will open a noodle restaurant to survive. And the book is really about them learning to get a little. along with their human neighbors, cope with robophobia, and kind of find a home together in the new San Francisco. I just started writing the sequel. Oh. Yeah. So you're going to find out a lot about California politics in the sequel. This is going to be another sort of slim. Yeah, it's going to be another novella.

So it's called Noodle Union. So that gives you a hint of what I might be thinking. I mean, there's so many ways we can get into this. But I would say primacy. primarily first as a writer, as someone who's thinking about minds and voices and characters, do you look at this new creature before us with curiosity, with interest? Can you imagine a language model on the pages of an Annalie novel? Or just how does it all strike you? I am super curious about it. I'm very curious about humans' reactions to it as well and seeing how many other anthropomorphizers are out there.

and people are feeling anxious about whether these are people that we're building, whether they're just tools that will destroy our lives as people. What do we do with them ethically? I think all of that stuff is super interesting. And I'm glad we're thinking about it, even though I am not convinced that the LLMs we have now are people. We absolutely should be thinking about what the heck happens if it turns out that they are. because, as I've said many times, the business model of most of these LLM companies is to build people and then buy and sell them. So we're trying to reinvent slavery. Well, we're not, but captains of industry are.

They love slavery. Oh, those guys are so crazy about it. But what I would say is that when you're thinking about LLMs or you're thinking about AI, what we're calling AI more broadly, they do have bodies. We think of them as disembodied, but here we are in the middle of huge debates over data centers. Data centers are the bodies of these creatures, of these programs and algorithms and models. So it's very late capitalism to have something whose body is remote and can't be seen, and then you're interacting with it as something that appears to be out of thin air. A bright, friendly, chirpy presence.

Right. Right. And so all of the secondary effects that that thing is having on people's lives and the environment is somewhere else, usually somewhere that is a have-not state or a have-not region. And so it's very colonial. And many people have written about this about the kind of colonial model of AI. And so I'm very, I'm always interested in reminding people all of this stuff is embodied. There's no such thing as an AI that's like, here in the air, floating. around as my first boss at the Bay Guardian said, like, oh, the Internet, it's in the air. No, it's actually not, dude. It's in a server farm. Right, right, though, except that the thing itself, the voice, whatever it is, in a sense, I would argue it doesn't care that it's in the data center. It matters a lot that it is, but it doesn't care.

What it cares is that it's in language. I mean, it's terrain, its landscape. You know, if you think of the robots of your novel, they're, you know, hiking up hills and skating down the other side, the landscape, the literal environment of all these language models is language itself. And of course, it, though? It absolutely is. And the— Don't you think its landscape is circuitry and the wires it travels through and the ether that it travels through that it's part of a radio wave and it's part of like an electrical current?

Like, it has a physical embodiment. Stop denying that it has a body, Robin. I should have, I shouldn't know it than try to outplay Annalie Nuis. You know, it's just a normal physical body like the vast microizal match that connects all trees in a forest. See, you understand. Outplayed again. Listen, you're the one that wrote about sentient sourdough bread. So you started it.

Right. Fair enough. Fair enough. Do you think that this boom that's been driven by this technology, do you think it's different in scale or kinder character from the San Francisco boom? before. Do you think it's kind of just of a piece? How does it strike you as a long-time chronicler? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think it's the same.

So if it's gold, if it's microchips, if it's models, LLMs, it's all kind of the same thing. Because what ends up happening here in San Francisco is we get just crazy investment in huge levels of investment. Like I think $200 billion have been spent investing. in AI in San Francisco alone over the last six years. So it's like half the money that's gone into it in the world. Yeah. Yeah.

Imagine if we put even part of that money into say, I don't know, public transit or a smart grid, which actually is AI. A smart grid is AI. Like, why don't we invest in that? So I think that is the part that's very San Francisco. Like, we're just going to put billions and billions of dollars into this thing that, we don't really know what it is. It's like a tulip or maybe it's gold or maybe it's some other things.

thing, you know, and it's not, yeah, it's definitely in character for this city. I've just say I find it a little more thrilling than the couple previous booms. I do, you know, the kind of Uber for Everything boom was really kind of sad in a labor, like, exploitation, hustle kind of situation. And then, you know, before that you had social media, which Robert and I have talked about as being maybe one of the great Oxbow lakes and technological history. Like, eventually people will move on in some crucial ways. In fact, they kind of already have, at least from that kind of Mark Zuckerberg's social network

kind of sense of social media. Like, that's gone for most people now. And yet, you know, San Francisco was the heart and soul of that and the Bay Area. This one, I guess I find it interesting because I am really interested both in language and consciousness, and it seems to be just like driving like stakes through kind of cherished ideas that maybe,

I had about these things, like that you couldn't get this kind of, like, linguistic performance without a conscious thing there. And it just turns out actually that does work. And I think the slippage between what you might expect and what actually happened is, like, way more interesting than if you say, what if we got rid of taxi medallions and anyone could drive around and pick you up? Like, that you could kind of, like, imagine. It's just kind of like a ground game, like logistics operations thing.

And this has some mystery at the center of it where even the people working on it don't totally get it. I mean, that's a, you've put your finger on an important distinction there, and that is a difference. It's organic. It's a technology that, I don't know if it's fair to say for the first time, is kind of as much organic as engineered or technical. But sort of like an organism,

it's how those things on the multi-scale things work to generate the thing. is still that's kind of part, it's kind of mysterious. So that part of it, I find, like, very interesting. And at the same time, it's also occurring against this, like, socioeconomic and political backdrop that is so much more grim than when you first arrived in San Francisco in the 1990s, which was, you know, the survey data bears it out. It's not just our vibes. Like, people basically thought the world was getting better, you know?

And that is not across the political spectrum how people feel in 2026 as we're staring down whatever is happening inside these models. Is the mystery compelling to you, Annali? Or are you kind of like, no, I'll, I'm okay. I'm okay. I mean, I think that I know what you mean by the mystery. It's that we have this technology where you'll talk to a developer and they're like, actually we put in these inputs, we get some outputs.

We don't fully understand, you know, what's happening in between. I mean, people say that about Microsoft products all the time, too. You know what I mean? And they're like, oh, this product is so big. Thousands of engineers contributed to it. No one person understands Windows. Like that ship has sailed. No one person understands a video game, like a premier video game.

Because, again, thousands of people have contributed to it. So, you know, calling it a mystery. Sure, it's a mystery. But the other thing about that is, as you guys were talking, and I think we all fall into this because we're writers and we deal in language and we're like, But language is like the coolest, most awesome thing that makes us human. And like that's what we have like over all of the other, you know, animals, right? Like we're an animal, but we're special because we have language, right?

What if it turns out language is just kind of nothing big? You know, like what if it's just like, oh, the reason why LLMs can do this so easily is because it turns out language is no big deal. And it's actually not what makes us cool. What makes us cool is something else. That would be one of the great kind of recalibrations of all of history, actually. I would, I welcome it. Yeah. Especially written language.

Because think about how bullshit written language really is. Like, as somebody who I write a lot. Hold on. I'm going to, McMillan, we have a new strap line for it to print across the front of all of Annalie Nuitz's novels. Just get the audiobook people. But, you know, we think of written language as being this, it was this amazing technology. It has a mystery at the heart of it because often. Sometimes you can come across language without knowing where it came from, right?

And you're like, who wrote this? What even is this? Linear A, still trying to figure it out, right? And I write a lot about archaeology in my science journalism life. And it really is the case that ancient civilizations that left writing behind are often harder to understand than ones that did not. And the reason why is because we get so tricked by the language and we're like, oh, well, this culture was just all about King Jaya Varmin.

Like, yeah, like, that's all they thought about all the time. And it's like, no. One strike that they found in the same. One scribe. It was like, yeah, it was like the king had the money and the power to make people write stuff. But then there's all these other people that we're not even thinking about because we get so enchanted by this one piece of writing that we have. Or like in Rome where it's like the only people writing are like the guys with power. And they're saying all kinds of nasty stuff about, you know, freed slaves and sex workers.

And it's like, but we don't know. like what the truth was. So the writing often hides the truth is what I'm saying. So writing is cool. I love it. I'm so grateful for it. It's something I am good at. But like maybe it's just kind of, you know, yet another. The fact that it can reproduce those patterns of our language to you doesn't, does not impress you as much as it might some other people. I think it, well, I think like I said, maybe that's the recalibration is maybe we need to say like maybe it's not impressive. Maybe it shows us that actually writing wasn't really that cool of an invention in the first place. And we can, we love writing, keep writing, but like let's keep going.

Yeah, but let's talk about some other better inventions. Like the noodle. Like cooking. It turns out that cooking might actually be a better invention than writing. You know, I have to say, I have to say, sometimes I feel like our conversations about this. And it comes back to humanness and the things that we love and sort of are proud of, you know, almost a species level. and they feel like these bulwarks, and then you set them up, and they do kind of get challenged or even knocked down.

In my novel Sourdough, I make a big deal about the egg test, and these amazing, agile robot arms, and they can do all these great things, but they cannot crack an egg, you know, with the grace of a human cook, just knocking it with one hand. There is a robot arm company down in Palo Alto. They got these new robot arms. Now I don't...

CEO emails. I don't know if they read sourdough. I don't know if they read sourdough, but they've got some really slick new demos, and they are cracking some eggs. And I would tell you, sincerely, I found it kind of both delightful and disturbing because I thought about that so much. And I did. I sort of believed in it. And I think that's one of the challenges of this time. You know, this has been happening for the last 10 years with these technologies.

There have been these really easy ways to say, yeah, yeah, nice. But it can't X. And then it X's. Yeah. How do we think about that? I mean, I'm also curious about this, Emily. I would say, like, in your fiction, you come across to me as, like, pro-robot. Like, you would like to have robots here in this room with us,

and you could, like, interact and hang out with them. Oh, yeah. And they're running the streets of San Francisco. But how do we get from here to there minus, I don't know, some trillions of dollars worth of investment into LLMs and other things? Like, is there a preferred route? of AI development for you that would somehow go around some of these kind of economic and political issues that you're thinking about? That's such a good question. It is a really good question. I think that one possibility is that we think about this as an economic problem. Like, there's

way too much money going into the development of LLMs. And we've seen the results, which is that it's getting stuffed into every product, into every service, places where we don't want it, where we don't need it. where it's actually hindering productivity rather than bolstering it. And so that's a very bad side effect of this huge amount of investment. I don't think we should invest no money in it. I've heard lots of accounts that Anthropics products really do help with the development process and software. I heard a lot of people crying about that, like, oh, all the things I was trained to do,

I don't have to do anymore. But at the same time, it's exciting. It is a tool. It's like a calculator would have been back in the 19th century. You know, it's like, oh, this can help us get to a certain point, and then now we can develop on top of it. I would love to see more involvement of the humanities and social sciences in the development of LLMs. What if we poured some of that AI money into universities where we study the human impacts of this? Because all of these companies are claiming we're going to build humans, but we're not going to consult the humanity.

which is literally the study of humans and culture? It's like how do you make humans? How do you make people without understanding society? And I'm sorry, but, you know, software development, love it. It's great. It's not the study of culture and society. I do think that a lot of the people who work in this field, who now are scattered throughout the streets of San Francisco,

more or less think like humans suck at figuring stuff out. That, like, the way to do it is to just, just like plow and all the information into the machine and have it find the patterns of like, what is human? Well, this thing is going to figure it out. We're just going to keep feeding it every word ever put out by humans, every video, every uploaded by humans. Every podcast.

Every podcast. And then out at the other end, they're just going to say, what is a human, you know? And something will emerge. Some pattern will be there. And I, like, that's to me the sort of bounce on effect of this for the city of San Francisco. is we're now like, there's tons of people here who are now, like, think in the terms of these large language models and think in in the terms of AI. And I'm not sure what that's going to do. You know, the term of art for that in the industry and in academia is the bitter lesson.

It's called, it's literally called the bitter lesson of data, which also sounds like the title of a good novel that I would read. Yeah, bitter lesson. I would read that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. So, yeah, people are walking around basically bitter lesson-pilled. And it's like, we're not going to reason our way to- We're not going to figure anything out.

We're just going to, yeah. Totally. Yeah. It's very nihilistic. And it is very anti-human. You know, I think that it's as much a reflection of contemporary politics as it is of any kind of technology. And again, all of the money going into this technology is a political choice, right? You know, saying that this is the primary technology that's going to drive our understanding of ourselves.

That's, again, a political choice. The technology is just going along doing, you know, sentence completion or whatever. It really is, as Emily and Bender has said, a stochastic parrot. It's just, you know, it's a horoscope or something. But the idea that we'll shovel all of this data into a machine and get answers about people or about society, I think is a symptom of a culture where we're moving toward authoritarianism, where the idea is that, like, Like some single centralized entity will figure everything out and make decisions for us. And then we don't have to worry about what actual people say that they want because the machine says, well, what you need is X. Asking the machine what humans are is a way of avoiding democracy, avoiding voting, asking the actual humans who they are, right?

We don't want to hear from them. They don't know. And it's like, actually, it turns out we know best what's good for us. and our voices should be heard, not filtered through a machine, through a model that distorts what we mean, actually just talk to us, ask us what we want. Like, I just want, you know, like trans people to be free. And, you know, I just want to, like, have public transit that works, you know. And you're not going to get an AI to explain that to anyone. You have to do it at the voting booth.

You have to do it in the streets, you know. Hearing you describe that, it kind of creates a paradox. It's really, it's a very vivid paradox of this titanic effort. I mean, sort of a construction effort, a infrastructural effort, a financial effort, driven, at least in part by exhaustion. And sort of a, yeah, a community, a society saying, I give up, we can't figure this out. We're not going to try anymore. Let's just build a machine god that can do it for us. So what is, what's the next five years look like right here in San Francisco?

Forget the world. Just think about this. We're in the hot crucible of this of this weird new thing. Just crash out? Yeah. What do you think it looks like, Annalie? That's the first question. And then we'll finally close out with what should we do.

But what do you think? What do you think is just ahead of us now? I mean, there's a couple of pathways. I mean, there's many pathways. This is a city that loves to burn itself down. We are right near a massive earthquake fault. Like, things, bad things could happen. We could be on fire.

We could be recovering from, you know, all kinds of. The hopeful scenarios? I'm just saying, like, did you ask for hopeful scenarios? No, no, no, I wasn't. I was just curious. So I think we're going to see a backlash to that investment model. We're also going to see, and Robin, you and I were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, and a backlash against just the Internet, like information and language that we receive from places that we think of as kind of polluted by AI slop.

I hear a lot of people talking about cozy technology. How do you create the feeling of coziness that was torn away from us when Twitter turned into X, right? So I think we're going to see new kinds of community spaces, for example, like local economy, which Alexis you've worked on so hard in Oakland. And I just think is absolutely a model of the future. And we're going to see more and more of that. We're going to see more new types of community gatherings in older spaces like bars or libraries or schools and more focus on authenticity being associated with something being physical. But I think that we are associating people just talking to each other and writing things down with human connection versus like if you do it on the internet, you never know if an AI wrote it. Did a person write it? But if I give you a zine that's all like scribble. and weird, and I've cut things up. You're like, that's definitely Annalie.

I mean, I do think you're right, though, Annalie. I think that there's a bonus that's now accruing to the physical world and anything that is, I mean, the problem is the words now can be printed from an AI. So it's like, but just like real actual three-dimensional IRL real-time interaction suddenly has a bonus that it didn't have before, which is you know you're not interacting with AI slop of any kind. Wait, before we let you go, do you want to tell us about your new book just before you're... Oh, yeah. Do you want to do that? Yeah. So I'm working on two things right now.

One is I have a new book coming out in October, which is called A Wall is also a road. And it is about a cellular slime mold who is a grad student. Plastic. And the other thing I'm working on is I'm helping to reboot the magazine Starlog as a print publication. As discussed. No AI slop, nothing. It will be only print. And that's coming in November.

So I'm very excited. Amazing. So much to look forward to. Yeah. Annalie Newitz, the great chronicler of other minds. Thanks for bringing your real minds. The icon of San Francisco. Yeah.

What a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. The fandom is very mutual. Annalie Newitz. Thank you so much. Thanks for the book and the future books and everything else. Thanks so much for having me.

KQED's Dream Machines is. made by humans and hosted by me, Robin Sloan and Alexis Madrigal. Our series is produced by Anianci Diaz-Cortez and Derek Larto. Sound design by Brendan Willard. Jen Chien is the executive producer and Ethan Tovin-Linzy, our editor-in-chief. Support for the production of Dream Machines comes from the Christian and Shaw family, Dorothy Marsh, and other generous KQED members. Special thanks to Chris Egusa, Annie Fruit, Paul Lancour, Vivianne, Vivian Moran. Rales, Zaldi Serrano, Xteen Tinozo, Hazel Tesoro, and Alex Tran.

And of course, thank you to the Close All Tabs team for letting us visit their feet this month. You can find Dream Machines right here on the Close All Tabs feed every Monday in the month of August. If you'd rather watch than listen, the video podcast will be up on YouTube. Search KQED News or go to YouTube.com slash at KQED News. And Close All Taps will be back on Wednesday with a brand new episode. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star One, you keep more of your money.

Star One Credit Union in your best interest. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts, inviting students on a journey of ideas culminating in a Stanford graduate degree. An info session will be held on August 20th, MLA.Sstandford.edu.