Hello everybody and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and today we're thinking about the future.

Implicitly of course we think about the future a lot on this podcast and elsewhere, but today we're being a bit more upfront about it.

There are people who describe themselves and are described by the outside world as professional futurists, whose job it is to predict what will happen down the road.

But there's this other genre, which is also very successful called science fiction.

Writing fictional narratives that are often set in the future, not necessarily trying to predict exactly what will happen, but at least to imagine different possible futures.

This helps us think about how we should approach the future as well as how we should approach the present.

When I was a kid I was a big science fiction fan, mostly reading novels but also watching TV and movies.

But I can tell you from reading more recent science fiction that the level of sophistication has gone way up.

Both the literary quality and also the scientific quality of modern science fiction is as high as it's ever been.

In fact on today's podcast I put forward the hypothesis that modern science fiction writers are in some sense the last great generalists.

Because not only do you have to understand a lot about science, you also have to understand a lot about humanity, so you need to understand sociology and psychology.

And you need to be able to write, you need to be able to tell a good story to invoke a vivid world to invent interesting and colorful characters.

So our guest today, Anneli Nuitz is absolutely one of those generalists, someone who can think in interesting ways about a wide variety of things.

Anneli got her PhD in English and American studies from Berkeley, but then she became a writer specializing in science and technology.

She was the founder of the famous blog IO9. She was then the editor in chief of Gismoto and she's right now the editor at large at ours Technica, where she has a very wide variety of experience writing about both individual technological breakthroughs and also the background science behind these breakthroughs.

Recently Anneli has decided to turn that experience to writing science fiction. She and science fiction writer Charlie Jane Anders actually co-host their own podcast, which recently started.

It's called Our Opinions Are Correct, on which Charlie Jane and Anneli discuss the meaning of science fiction. I encourage you to check that out.

And in her recent novel called Autonomous, Anneli deals with the biochemistry of pharmaceuticals, the ethics of robotics and artificial intelligence.

And my favorite, the economics of what it means to have a right to work. She talks about slavery and indenture and people trying to work in different parts of the world.

We take for granted the idea that we're allowed to work, but maybe in the future that won't be the case.

This is the kind of speculative scenario that science fiction is perfectly made for.

So on the podcast we'll talk about science, technology, science fiction, the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction, and how we should think about what the future has in store.

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