What a Novel About an AI Documenting the Last Human Says About Our Real Dystopia
CYBER
VICE
4 • 645 Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
The unreliable narrator of After World, the new novel from author Debbie Urbanski, is an AI tasked with writing a book about Sen, the last human on Earth. In this world, humanity is done. The world is moving on without us and Sen was born for a purpose: to watch the planet change itself without humanity. After World is a story about artificial intelligence, climate change, and what we can hope to leave behind for our children in a doomed future.
On today’s episode of Cyber, Emily and Matthew sit down with Urbanski to discuss all of it.
Stories discussed in this episode:
The original short story: An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On today's episode of Cyber, we're here to talk about the new novel Afterworld. |
| 0:04.5 | It's the first novel from author Debbie Urbanski, who's here to talk to us today. |
| 0:09.4 | It is narrated by an AI called Story Worker who's tasked with telling the story of |
| 0:16.6 | Senanon, who is the last human on Earth. |
| 0:20.2 | This AI is trained on the novels of the 21st century. |
| 0:25.6 | And as this storyworker starts to learn more about Sen and about her life, there seems to be |
| 0:33.5 | something human coming out of this AI. I won't get too far into the book and spoiling it all for you. |
| 0:41.4 | That'll be for the second half of this episode. But you should absolutely read this book. |
| 0:45.9 | And we're going to talk a little bit at the beginning of this episode about more broad topics |
| 0:50.7 | that Afterworld brings up, including AI, fear, and climate. So enjoy. |
| 1:05.0 | TAM, it's got the code it's going to launch. |
| 1:09.8 | It's a unit system. I know this. It's a unit system. |
| 1:12.2 | I know this. |
| 1:14.2 | It's how all the files of the old park. |
| 1:16.4 | It tells her everything. |
| 1:18.1 | Sir, he's uploading the virus. |
| 1:20.9 | Eagle one. |
| 1:21.7 | The package is being delivered. |
| 1:39.1 | I think I wanted to start this conversation off by, this was so sad. |
| 1:52.9 | I feel like I was telling Matt about this as I was starting to read the book and I was like, you know, the first like 40, 50 pages, I'm like, damn. |
| 2:04.3 | This is some really heavy stuff. Like, I'm really upset right now. Like, this is, this is hard. This is, there's so much that, you know, the characters are dealing with in this book. And then that sadness turned into a, okay, but I need to know |
| 2:12.3 | what happens now. Like, there's so much going on in the universe of this book. There's so much going on within this world. |
... |
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