Matt Adcock (@cleric20)
meets T R Napper (@TRNapper)
With his latest book 'This Machine Kills Billionaires' hot off the press, I got to ask the man himself some questions... Check my review of the book here
Matt: Was This Machine Kills Billionaires born from righteous political anger or ???
T R: Strangely enough I don’t think it was anger, although I can see how a reader might wonder. Obviously, the seed of the story came from current events – oligarchy, dizzying technological progress, and the fusion of the two. But this duo are also core concerns of cyberpunk, and in that way, something I’ve written about throughout my career.
Matt: Huldo is being taught ethics by people who ultimately want to own, regulate and monetise it. How should / can we control something potentially godlike?
T R: Well we can’t. That’s the whole problem.
Matt: The book commits the dangerous act of making the reader occasionally think, “Well, perhaps the murder machine has a point.” How much fun was it pushing us across that moral line before making us realise where we were standing?
T R: I’m glad that was your reaction, and I’m glad it made you think. While I have very strong political and ethical convictions, I’m not much interested in beating the reader over the head with them. The most engaging stories, for me, have a certain ambiguity at their heart, and force the reader to think for themselves.
The thing is, I was pushing myself across that line. I was taking a certain type of moral imperative to its limit, and seeing where I ended up. It’s fair to say there was a certain vicarious pleasure in writing the demise of several (fictional) odious billionaires – but by the same token, the story forces you to think about the difficult questions even this poses. Something that seems quite simple is actually fiendishly complex.
Matt: Cyberpunk has always been suspicious of corporations, but the real world now appears to be competing aggressively with the genre. Is it getting harder to write dystopian satire?
T R: I don’t think it’s harder to be writing dystopias, because the permutations and evolutions of dystopia are myriad, and they are a fascinating territory to explore. We are living in a timeline that sees us slowing sliding into dystopia, where inch by inch day by day we give up more of ourselves and our autonomy. We’re sleep walking into this future, and I think art is one place we can effectively call this out.
As for satire, this is certainly harder. How many times have you gone onto social media and wondered if a headline is from The Onion, or a deliberate troll, or real life?
Distinguishing the real, in general, is becoming much more difficult, I should add. Videos, pictures, text – indeed objective reality – has been shattered and so many are living in their own shards.
Matt: You’re brilliant at showing that technology rarely destroys everybody equally. The wealthy get immortality, optimisation and private bunkers; everyone else gets an app informing them they’ve been replaced. Can cyberpunk represent against the uber rich?
T R: Thank you. I mean William Gibson said it: the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. One of the things I’ve felt important in cyberpunk is to explore what the future does to us, and how specific groups of people experience the future differently.
As a character says in one of the bonus short stories contained in the collection: ‘If you were poor, you suffered the future shock. Your whole world turned upside down. But for the rich, the future was just a news item. Never a shock, not even an inconvenience.’
Cyberpunk can certainly call this out, and place it in narrative form, so I suppose that in this sense it can represent. But what changes? I’m not sure, mate, but by god we need to maintain our rage.
Matt: Huldo can examine morality at a scale and speed humans cannot, but it learns its values from humans, which seems less like education and more like deliberately infecting a new intelligence. Did writing it make you more or less hopeful about AGI?
T R: The vision I have here is of the best possible AGI. It would’ve been easy to show a malicious one, or chromium skeletons with glowing red eyes. But I thought it far more interesting to show a new god that is, at its core, a deeply moral being. The book, I hope, shows the flaws in allowing even the most benevolent of tyrants to gain absolute power. No one being should hold this much power, and yet Silicon Valley and its equivalents across the globe are desperately trying to create the singularity.
The question of god (in the form of an AGI) forces us – among other things – to consider free will, because here is a god that might deny a choice it doesn’t agree with. A new god, any god, that can actively manifest its will in reality, is terrifying.
LLMs won’t gain these powers. They are a dead end in terms of the development of AGI. I tend to think it is further away than some currently claim (I still believe true AGI is decades away, at minimum, and do not believe such a creation will ever be self-aware).
Matt: Imagine Huldo has read your complete back catalogue and is now conducting your ethical performance review. Does T. R. Napper survive and what incriminating evidence does the machine find first?
T R: Oh Huldo would barely glance at me. I was a humanitarian aid worker for a decade, and I’ve working in the disability sector for the last seven years, in addition to my writing. I work also work with military personnel suffering PTSD, in an arts therapy program.
I’m one of those chumps who’s never motivated by money. A fool who’s never sought to enrich himself at the expense of others. Whatever my numerous flaws, none are of the psychopathic CEO/Dictator strain that would draw the attention of Huldo.
I’m small fry, and Huldo is only interested in the whales.
Matt: The stories are angry, but they are not nihilistic. Community, loyalty and small acts of care keep surviving in the wreckage. Do you consciously need that thread of humanity in your work, or does it fight its way in despite your best dystopian efforts?
T R: I’ve always argued that cyberpunk is a humanist literature. So I don’t think I have to do it consciously as such, as I always start from the human. I’m always interested in the human cost of this dizzying technological progress, the consequences of the reckless greed of the ruling class.
My approach, in a way, begins from community, dignity, loyalty, and love, and if it’s angry it’s because I’m angry at what is happening to us, and if it is bleak, it is because our most plausible futures are looking quite bleak.
Our humanity is worth fighting for. That is the essence of cyberpunk.
Grab your copies of T R Napper's books and find out more about him here
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