Episode 46: Transcript
Our Opinions Are Correct
Episode: 46: Four Technologies That Nobody Realizes Will Change the Future
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, a science fiction writer who thinks a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:10] nd I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:15] In today's episode we're going to talk about four technologies that nobody realizes will change the future. Everybody always goes on about like starships and light speed and artificial intelligences and giant wombats with like laser eyes. But nobody ever talks about some of the less obvious technologies that are actually right in front of us that could make a huge difference in the 21st century. So let's get started.
[00:00:42] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:09] So Annalee told me about a potentially world-changing innovation that nobody is really talking about.
Annalee: [00:01:14] Okay, well I'm going to start with one that's kinda easy, which is the artificial womb. And this is not something that nobody is talking about, but it is something that's kind of neglected. And for something that's so important to humanity, it's kind of surprising how far behind science really is on making one.
[00:01:36] So I'm going to play a clip right now from Emily Partridge, who is one of the doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who worked on creating what was largely hailed as the first artificial womb a couple of years ago. It's basically a plastic bag, which they call the Biobag, which doctors used to keep a baby sheep alive for about a month when it had already developed partway in its mother's womb. And it was an amazing proof of concept. The lamb came out and it was cute and fluffy. So this is what she has to say about the question of whether this Biobag could be used to create a full artificial womb.
Emily: [00:02:13] We're asked that question a lot and the answer is unequivocably no. The early events in gestation really absolutely require a mom and a uterus. And any sort of postulation about carrying a pregnancy from embryogenesis through to the development of a fully formed fetus really is in the realm of science fiction right now.
[00:02:34] Our intention is to intervene for those babies, which are born far too soon, but would have been resuscitated. So a 23 to 24 week gestation infant is one that consensus of intensivists would feel ethically obligated to resuscitate. And to bridge those infants to a later stage of development when their chances for survival are basically 100%.
Annalee: [00:02:59] So you hear her immediately say, this is the realm of science fiction. What she and her colleagues created at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was really intended for preemies. It's for babies that are born too early who need to develop their lungs and other organs, and it's much better for them to develop in amniotic fluid. And that's what this Biobag provides. The baby, whatever it is, human or baby sheep continues developing in this environment that's very womb-like. So we still aren't really very close at all to having something like what we see in Lois McMaster Bujold’s novels, her Vorkosigan Saga, which centers around civilizations that have developed what she calls a uterine replicators. And these are just basically artificial wombs that all of the women use or all of the people who are capable of reproduction use except on planets that are still really patriarchal.
[00:03:57] And so for Bujold, it’s a feminist technology. It's something that liberates women from having to carry children. And it also allows them to choose when they're going to have children. And so one of the things that develops over the course of the series is this idea that you can kind of bank your eggs and bank some sperm and just kind of decant them and make them into babies when you're ready.
[00:04:22] So again, this is something that we're starting to see a little bit of today. This idea that if you're a woman you can bank your eggs and use them later. But the jury is still out on whether that's actually a very effective method of preserving your eggs. We're still not really sure if that's a great way to do it.
[00:04:39] And then we have other stories about artificial wombs too.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:43] Right, and I remember in the 20th century you used to hear the phrase test tube baby used all the time as like a proxy for dystopia. Like it was something that was inherently viewed as like scary and awful. Where does that come from?
Annalee: [00:04:54] Right, and of course the test tube baby is just artificial insemination, basically.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:57] Right.
Annalee: [00:04:57] It's just a fertilizing the egg outside the womb and then implanting it in the woman. But it raises the specter of this idea of designer babies, you know, babies that you would tinker with their genome and make them superior in some way or give them the color hair that the parents want. That's certainly not within our scientific ability now. We certainly couldn't do it in the ‘70s when we had our first test tube babies and we can't do it now either.
[00:05:27] But we do have a lot of fears about this idea that the government or a corporation would control our destiny by doing that. It goes back to Brave New World where you have test tube babies who are kind of manufactured laboring class people and manufactured upper-class people. Their genetics are tinkered with. They're raised in a certain kind of environment while they're babies and then when they're become adults, they naturally want to do either manual labor or intellectual labor because they've just completely constructed.
[00:05:58] But then there's a lot of other artificial wombs that we see in more contemporary science fiction. Like in the Matrix movies. I was thinking a little bit about, very similar to the Matrix movies, the Borg in Star Trek. We do briefly see their ship and how they raise babies and it's very similar to The Matrix where it's these infants that are being implanted with technology. They're not being raised in a happy, healthy family, or what we think of as a happy, healthy family. They're just being put into a metal vat.
[00:06:30] And there's something about that that really frightens us. And what I would say is that the artificial womb is an idea that has become a lot more than just a technology in science fiction. On one hand there's this idea that it would be kind of like the pill where it would liberate women from this one aspect of reproduction and it would allow women to have a lot more freedom.
[00:06:57] But then there's this other idea that artificial wombs will lead to this dystopia, like you said, where it'll be manufactured babies, it’ll be like a Gattaca-type situation. And I think that that's because we tend to confuse child making. So just the act of reproduction, like actually building a human out of genetic material. We confuse that with the act of child rearing, which is something that is also traditionally assigned to women in most countries and is obviously a lot more work than just gestating and giving birth to a baby.
[00:07:38] I mean it's something that takes decades to do. It's incredibly labor intensive and involves everything from changing diapers to driving kids to their soccer practice. It's really tough and I think what we fear is that, you know, in a Brave New World-type scenario, the government takes over that too and kind of manufacturers our children to be these mindless drones.
[00:08:02] The thing that bugs me about the lack of representation of artificial wombs in science fiction is that because we don't see a lot of examples of this technology, we're just allowed to continue confusing those two things. We're allowed to confuse the labor of child rearing with the labor of labor, you know, giving birth.
[00:08:23] And I think there's obviously a few exceptions. There's a fantastic book by Anne Charnock called Dreams Before the Start of Time, which is basically a meditation on how artificial wombs will change families and change dating and change the way we relate to each other. She deals with everything from what happens if you have a baby that's being made in an artificial womb, but both parents die. Because it's possible, of course, in this scenario to have a mom die before childbirth, right? So the kid is born an orphan. And so that's one of the mini stories that she tells, a sort of, what does that mean? Like how does this technology create these new kind of classes of orphan?
[00:09:06] There's a lot of other ways that this is going to change our culture and that we need to be exploring them in science fiction. And the fact that we're not exploring them means that we're going to wind up getting a technology that we haven't really thought through very much. And it's a technology that I pretty much guarantee most people with uteruses would like. So Charlie Jane tell us about another kind of technology that could really change the future that we never think about.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:35] So I'm pretty obsessed with the idea of the toilet of the future, which I think is a thing that you know, a lot of people are actually working on, but you don't see it in science fiction very much and you don't hear that much about it in kind of the popular discourse. I think that it's a thing that people in science and technology are excited about, but it doesn't get mentioned in pop culture very much and it's not on most people's minds.
[00:09:58] But there is one famous scene from science fiction where a science fiction icon has to deal with a futuristic toilet. And this is this moment from Demolition Man starting Sylvester Stallone.
Demolition Man Clip: [00:10:07] The place where you're supposed to have the toilet paper, you've got this little shelf with three seashells on it.
He doesn't know how to use the three seashells.
I can see how that could be confusing.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:22] That of course was the famous three seashells scene from Demolition Man, where basically Sylvester Stallone is confounded by the future toilet that he is attempting to use. And it's not really clear what happened. He went in there, he couldn't figure out the three seashells and then did he just not wipe his butt? Did he figure out some other means of wiping his butt? Like it's never addressed again? Like there's never a scene.
Annalee: [00:10:22] Yeah, we never even—I always kind of assumed it was some sort of bidet, but like maybe—
Charlie Jane: [00:10:51] I don’t know.
Annalee: [00:10:51] —it’s something way weirder.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:52] I think it's supposed to be something incredibly weird and like we never really know. I actually wrote a story recently about future toilets. So I spent a lot of time researching this and I think that there's a lot of things that we'd like to see from a future toilet. In particular, people talk about future toilets that will analyze your waste on the spot in situ so that it'll tell you, for example, if your microbiome is healthy or not. Like it will look at everything in your stool and say, well, you need to be eating more vegetables or you need to take these vitamins or perhaps you need a some kind of transplant.
[00:11:27] We're learning more and more about the microbiome all the time. And it's increasingly obvious that the health of people as a whole is tied up with the health of those organisms living in your guts, your gut flora. And so I think that there's a lot of interest now in toilets that would actually look at your microbiome and give you some tips on how to be better.
[00:11:45] There’s also a lot of ideas about toilets that will pair with your phone or other device and kind of load your toilet settings so that it's like you like the seat to be at this height or this level of firmness or you know, you like this kind of music playing while you use the toilet. You like this kind of lighting. Is it at night you—
Annalee: [00:12:03] So it's a smart toilet?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:04] It’s a smart toilet. There actually are smart toilets coming on the market and there's basically two strands to what people are working on in terms of the future toilet. One is the high end which is the kind of luxury toilet, which I think is a thing that people in Japan have had some form of for a long time but not outside of Japan as much. And that's a toilet that will pair with your smartphone and do cool things and like you know, be hands free and allow you to do your business without having to have much inconvenience and also might help with your health.
Annalee: [00:12:36] Yeah, those are like, it heats up the seat and it has an automatic bidet and you can set it to be whatever setting you want on the bidet. So it's really, it's sort of old toilet technology, but…
Charlie Jane: [00:12:46] I was going to get to actually what replaces the bidet function, which is something more fancy now. The new generation of these has something called the cleaning wand that basically cleans you off using five different settings and then the cleaning wand is sterilized with water and ultraviolet light and various other things so that the next time you use it it's sterile.
[00:13:12] So that there's the high end toilets which have a lot of fancy functionality and will tell you interesting things about yourself. But there's also just a need for new toilet technology in parts of the world where people don't have as much access to the kinds of sanitation that we take for granted.
[00:13:25] Bill Gates has been really trying to fund research into future toilets that will specifically help people in those areas. The Gates Foundation basically has a document where they say no innovation in 200 years has saved more lives than the toilet. But, and this is a direct quote, “2.6 billion people still don’t have a safe, affordable way to poop.”
[00:13:45] And Bill Gates is so passionate about this, he not only sponsored the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge starting in 2011 but also in 2018 Bill Gates got on stage at a conference and held up a jar of human feces to talk about all of the pathogens that could be in that jar that he was holding and the need for more sanitation.
Annalee: [00:14:05] I just love thinking about Bill Gates holding up a giant jar of poop. You know, like, he's a guy I think of as, as introducing us to computers that many people thought of as poop. And so I feel like it's just a, it's like it all comes together somehow.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:21] You know, many of us liked our PCs at one point. I don't know.
Annalee: [00:14:24] Hey, I've been a user of windows for probably my whole life.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:29] Right. Anyway, so generally the Holy Grail of future toilets is processing at the source. So you no longer need these expensive and cumbersome sewer systems. You can just basically process the waste in situ. I keep saying in situ this time for some reason it just maybe because of the pun of seat and in situ? Anyway, you can process the waste in situ have better sanitation and less disease, but also the end result of processing it onsite is that you perhaps can generate fertilizer by separating out the nitrogen and ammonia. Or you can create some kind of fuel that can be used for cooking or for powering something.
[00:15:08] There's a lot of different ways that you can turn human waste into useful products and also remove bacteria and make it sterile or at least safe to handle. So there's a lot of people working on this and there's sort of a… it's a mixture of the high end and low end that I was talking about. Like there is an AI based toilet that was just unveiled by the Japanese company Lixil that will use LEDs and a camera to analyze your feces according to, and I'm not making this up, the Bristol Stool Form Scale, which looks at the size and shape of the feces to like basically categorize it.
[00:15:41] And I think that's more high end, but there are also a lot of ventures that will do toilets that will hopefully be affordable around the world that will basically turn your poop into fuel and use solar energy so that you don't have to have energy to begin with to start this process.
[00:15:58] There's a trial at Cal Tech, there's a new venture called Homebiogas. There's a bunch of things going on that are trying to, you know, make this happen.
Annalee: [00:16:07] There's a novel by a Japanese author called Itoh, it's called Harmony and there's a huge subplot in the novel about smart toilets and how oppressive they are because it's a very authoritarian culture and the toilets are gathering data on your poop and reporting back to some kind of centralized authority. And people are not supposed to be eating fattening foods. They're not supposed to be smoking or drinking. And so anytime that you commit any kind of infraction, the toilet will report you and—
Charlie Jane: [00:16:43] Your toilet is narcing you.
Annalee: [00:16:44] Your toilet will be narcing on you. And of course different characters have ways of getting around the system, but it's, of course it makes sense that this is a Japanese novel too because that's, as you said, this is a country that's had smart toilets for a long time. But it's also this idea of like you have to conform on the outside and conform on the inside.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:02] Oh my gosh.
Annalee: [00:17:02] And so I can see how this kind of scenario could easily become dystopian cause who has all your poop data?
Charlie Jane: [00:17:08] Dystoiletpian
Annalee: [00:17:11] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:11] So, we’re going to take a quick break and then when we come back, we're going to talk about two more emerging technologies that could change everything, everything, everything.
[00:17:19] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:34] So Annalee, please tell us about another underrated technology that could change everything.
Annalee: [00:17:40] So one of the things that I do when I try to project into the future about tech is to look back into history and see what kinds of tech really changed the world. And some of the technologies we know were instrumental in bringing us the modern world are, first of all, the sewing machine, which was one of the very first electrified appliances. It absolutely changed the game for women and anyone who needed clothing. Women, of course, being the ones who were typically sewing the clothing and all humans and a few dogs wearing the clothing and maybe a few lucky guinea pigs or whatever.
[00:18:20] So there's sewing machines, there's washing machines, there's vacuum cleaners. All of these technologies really transformed life in the United States and in many other countries. And they're all what I would class together as domestic technologies. These are technologies aimed at home care and they're principally, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries used by women. And they are the most unromantic technologies. They are never included in science fiction unless it's as a joke.
[00:18:55] And the one place that we do see this kind of technology showing up is when we have domestic robots. And I just want to play a quick clip from The Jetsons where the mom in the family who is too busy shopping to do home care and cooking goes out to buy a domestic robot.
Jetsons Clip: [00:19:17] Rosie!
Coming, sir. Here I am, sir. Yes, sir.
The old girl’s still eager, isn’t she? But of course very H-O-M-E-L-Y.
I may be homely buster, but I’m S-M-A-R-T, smart.
I like her and I’ll take her.
Annalee: [00:19:44] So immediately, of course, the joke is that this robot is ugly and all of the robots that she looks at, because of course she looks at a bunch of different robots before she picks Rosie are some kind of female stereotype. You know, there's the sort of slutty French robot, there's the, scoldy grandma robot, and then Rosie is the kind of, I'm not actually sure what stereotype. I think she's supposed to be like the sassy fat mom robot.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:11] She’s the sassy robot.
Annalee: [00:20:13] She’s sassy. And like, actually, to be fair, I was really worried because I have not watched a lot of the Jetsons as an adult. And I was like, is this supposed to be a mammy robot? But no, I think she's supposed to be an older white lady robot.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:24] I think so. She's like, she’s Aunt Bee, kind of.
Annalee: [00:20:29] Yeah, right, exactly. So not that there aren't other examples of science fiction that has basically mammy robots, but this is not particularly one of them. But it's interesting because women have been associated with robots since the dawn of science fiction film, Metropolis being one of the earliest examples of a robot on film. And of course it's a demonic woman who's inspiring an uprising among the workers.
[00:20:55] And there's this longstanding wish to have what Marshall McLuhan called the mechanical bride. The robot that does all the things that male-dominated culture thinks that women should do like fucking them cleaning their homes, taking care of them, bringing them food… Giving them the girlfriend experience, giving them comfort, back rubs, love, and affection. These are all the things that we kind of assign to these robots. And so, in science fiction, whenever the kind of specter of domestic labor comes up, usually the answer is, well we have a robot that does that cleaning. We really, like in shows like Star Trek, for example. We don't ever see anyone really cleaning up. There's occasional reference to, in the lower decks there's people who cut hair and like we have a sonic shower that shakes all the dust off your clothes or—
Charlie Jane: [00:21:51] Or something, I don’t know.
Annalee: [00:21:53] Or like, there’s nanites that are cleaning the rugs. We never know how… We know about the fuel that runs the spaceship. We know about the entire setup for driving the ship down to some pretty granular details. We know about their medical technology, but we don't know about this technology that is actually important to preventing them from dying because if you don't maintain the cleanliness of your environment, you get, you know, diseases and other problems develop too.
[00:22:24] So I think that one place we have to look in the future is what are going to be the technologies that change the way we live in domestic spaces. And so an easy answer would be something like how does the Roomba change it? The Roomba is really just like a super bad version of Rosie. It's just the beginning of a domestic robot.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:43] It's a self-driving vacuum cleaner, but it's not particularly astute.
Annalee: [00:22:49] It's basically a beta version of something that might come next. And I think we also have to think about areas where we are replacing human domestic labor with robots. I think that there are many companies that are imagining a future where you don't have janitors for example, or you don't have hospital workers who do the, cleaning up the barf type stuff, which are different hospitals refer to those people as different things. But they're basically there to clean the patients, to clean the environment.
[00:23:27] And so it's an interesting area to think about because the more we have domestic technologies, the more it changes our labor force. It changes our relationship to our domestic spaces and it also changes the role of women even more than it's already been changed. Depending on where you live, of course. Women have different roles in different countries, but I think all of those kinds of ripple effects come out of things like something as simple as like a new kind of washing machine or a new way to get clothing.
[00:23:59] What if we start having really sophisticated, some version of a 3D printer that will just make clothing for us, which I think is sort of the dream of Star Trek. Where do they get all those uniforms? I have to assume it's some kind of 3D printer that just sews it on them every day or something.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:14] Well, in TNG it's the replicator. But I think in the original series, we don't know.
Annalee: [00:24:18] We don't know. And I mean, but the point is that there's some idea that there'll be some replicator-like thing will that will produce these objects for us. And I think the one place where this isn't under imagined or domestic labor isn't under imagined is food. I think science fiction is just full of representations of how we will make and consume food in the future.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:39] Right.
Annalee: [00:24:39] But rarely, and that's, there's a whole bunch of reasons for that and we'll deal with that in another episode. But domestic labor of cleaning and maintenance and the production of clothing and domestic tools like pots and pans, where does that come from? Almost never dealt with in science fiction at all. Can you think of any examples?
Charlie Jane: [00:24:58] Not a lot and I'm curious as to whether it's going to be robots or whether it might be some kind of genetically engineered kind of organism that just goes around sucking up all the dirt and germs or whatever.
Annalee: [00:25:10] Yeah, I mean, and there are now many people who are working on coming up with bacteria that could, for example, eat an oil spill.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:18] Right.
Annalee: [00:25:18] That's a very realistic possibility, or that could convert garbage into fuel. So, and of course, again, we already have bacteria that do convert a lot of our waste into fuel or into fertilizer. So yeah, I think that these technologies could be biological. I think that they could be robots. And we're going to have to really think hard about, again, how this affects our relationships with each other as workers and as people living in domestic spaces. Because are we trying to just usher in a world where we abuse robots instead of abusing women or abusing the domestic help?
[00:25:57] And, as we approach real AI, that becomes more and more problematic. Or are we thinking about making our homes into something more like an ecosystem that's self-cleansing, like you said, that's full of bacteria and other materials that kind of keep themselves clean but in the process make our houses feel much dirtier.
[00:26:18] So that's a really interesting thing to think about too because of course there's now a whole body of research that shows our hyper-focus on making our homes super clean and super sanitized is getting rid of good bacteria that we need and causing allergies and causing all kinds of problems for people who live in these cities where everybody's using decontaminants on every surface.
[00:26:44] And so one possibility is that a healthier living space would not be clean in the way we think of clean. That it would be kind of like living in a really clean forest. You know, that we'd have some Moss in there and maybe it would not be … every surface would not be sterilized.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:03] I would like to live in a moss house. I think that'd be kind of fun.
Annalee: [00:27:05] I do too. I like the idea of having like grass on the floor or maybe soil on the floor, and, I mean there's, there's no reason why we can't just be a little bit dirty as long as it's kind of clean dirt, you know? But then I don't know. I might be an outlier.
[00:27:22] Okay. Charlie Jane, tell us about another technology that could change everything.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:26] Right. So our final technology is public transportation.
Annalee: [00:27:30] Yay!
Charlie Jane: [00:27:30] Which, you know, I love public transportation. I've just been spending some time in LA where there is actually good public transportation, but there's this kind of, everything is engineered for cars. Everything is kind of, cars are privileged in all the urban planning. And it's actually hard to walk in some parts of LA and everybody kind of looks at you funny if you say that you took the bus somewhere.
[00:27:52] Yeah. And so I think that public transportation is an area where we're going to make some huge technological strides and there's not enough talk about it and there's not enough attention paid to the potential benefits of cities that are kind of more organized around public transit.
[00:28:08] And there is… science fiction does have some stuff. There's moving sidewalks in science fiction, there's Heinlein's rolling roads in in that one story. There's super advanced trains and super advanced buses and high-speed trains. And there's… Charles Stross has this one novel where there's buses where you have to bid for a seat on the bus and then if you bid enough you can change the destination of the bus and all the other passengers are just sad.
Annalee: [00:28:36] The worst kind of crowd funding crossed with ride share.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:40] Yeah. And then there's obviously teleportation and things like that, but you don't see enough kind of speculation about the next level of public transportation science fiction or in public discourse. There is this one scene from Hot Tub Time Machine 2, which I actually loved this scene, where the characters encounter a smart car.
HTTM2 Clip: [00:28:59] No, it's a smart car. It's self-driving.
What? That's awesome.
Now see, this is that future shit I'm talking about. How much that set you back?
You guys are hilarious. I don't own it. I mean, no one does. You need a car. One shows up.
Really?
You're a wonderful car and I appreciate you.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:18] And I love that. Basically part of what's cool about the smart car is that nobody owns it. It just kind of shows up if you need a car. There's no mention of having to pay to use it. It's just that it shows up if you need a car and it's publicly owned. And I sort of get the sense that other people might be riding in the car, it might be a shared ride and that the car, basically what you have to do in order to use the car is be nice to it like it has, it has an AI that responds positively to people being friendly. And it also, there's a whole thing where it's like scanning the faces of the people who want to get in the car and like pulling up information about them and stuff.
Annalee: [00:29:51] So that's the dark side.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:53] I mean, the dark side is the surveillance.
Annalee: [00:29:54] Yeah, built-in facial recognition? I mean, yeah, which is kind of a big deal.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:00] But that was like the one scene that I really liked in Hot Tub Time Machine 2. There have been experiments in real life with like self-driving minibuses that can take a number of passengers to a custom destination. Sort of like the Lyft/Uber shared ride thing, but fancier, electric, autonomous. One of the versions of public transportation that you hear about is sort of the pod car where basically it's a thing that either runs on rails or on roads where it's kind of semi-individual but you might be sharing it with other people and you can program a destination and it's not just like buses and trains now.
[00:30:35] But I think that there's a lot of potential for different approaches to public transit. Pop culture, though, is full of kind of warnings about public transit going wrong. Everything from Spiderman 2 to Incredibles to just a bunch of other sequels.
Annalee: [00:30:49] Sequels just hate public transit.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:52] Sequels just hate public transit. There's a lot of movies and TV shows where there's like some new cutting edge train system that's being unveiled for the very first time and then something goes horribly wrong and a bunch of people are about to die, but somebody has to stop the training in time. That's like every time you see a high-tech train or transit system…
Annalee: [00:31:10] Well, and also, the movie Speed, which is about a bus.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:12] It's about a bus, which is gonna blow up or whatever.
Annalee: [00:31:15] It’s a demonic, terrible public transit.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:17] Right, or Silver Streak, if you're going to get like a deep cut.
Annalee: [00:31:20] Yeah. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: Annalee: [00:31:20] And you know, there's this famous moment from the Simpsons where we get like a theme song for monorails.
Simpsons Clip: [00:31:27] [The Monorail song from The Simpsons plays] Throw up your hands and raise your voice! Monorail! What’s it called? Monorail! Once again! Monorail!
Charlie Jane: [00:31:36] And that’s, you know, that episode is also about like the dangers of like investing willy-nilly in public transit systems instead of fixing the roads, which are what's important because that's what cars go on.
Annalee: [00:31:47] One of the things I was thinking about as you were talking is that the ultimate science fiction invention that people are always snarking about how we don't have is jet packs. And jet packs are the anti-public transit. It's your personal jet pack. It's not even like a car where you could maybe share it with one or two or three other people. It's… and of course it's running on some kind of horrible combustion engine, right? Because it's a jet. So it's polluting, it's individual, and it's the worst.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:16] It is.
Annalee: [00:32:17] So why do we have this fantasy of this jet pack but not of a super bus, or a, like, awesome train or…
Charlie Jane: [00:32:23] Yeah, it's a really good question. And you know, it's the same thing with flying cars. People are always like, where's my flying car? And in fact, whenever people talk about the public… the future of transit in cities, there's always like, oh, but we'll have flying cars, we'll have like VTOL taxis. We’ll have some kind of autonomous flying vehicle that'll take you individually and maybe one or two of your friends around.
[00:32:44] And it's partly, I think, just because the golden age or the kind of classic age of science fiction was when we also fell in love with the car. And with the idea of, as we talked about in the rugged individualism episode, like, I'm out here on the road on my own, I'm going wherever I feel like. I don't have to share my ride with anybody. And that is the jet pack fantasy is, you're on your own, you can just go wherever you feel like.
[00:33:06] And it's, it's self-directed and it's kind of self-centered but it's also just really, really bad for the environment. And dangerous. Flying cars, as many, many people have pointed out, flying cars are a terrible idea because the airspace would become a clogged with these things. You'd have traffic jams in the air and you'd have accidents in the air. It would be just bad all around.
[00:33:29] There's also people who talk about the future of public transit or the future of transit in cities being like just some form of self-driving cars or some form of electric cars possibly going through a tunnel or a hyperloop or a, I don't know what, but cars. And like I think any vision of the future of transit that like privileges cars is actually retro-futuristic.
Annalee: [00:33:49] It's really true. I was thinking about how when I was a kid, I grew up right near Disneyland and of course Tomorrowland was one of my favorite places to go. And that included rides with rocket ships and things like Space Mountain, which feels very retro now. But it also had a ride called Autopia, which was all about getting in a stinky, stinky car and driving around on this track. And you know, that was the 1950s vision of tomorrow was cars and rockets.
[00:34:18] I'm curious about how you imagine a future that's been transformed by public transit. What’s an idea? Do you have any kind of science fiction that you're thinking of or your own idea?
Charlie Jane: [00:34:31] I just think of the ideal future city as being one where cars are kind of relegated to the sidelines and perhaps used for situations where people have disabilities and need to get closer to their destination or you know, a few other use cases. And for the most part everything is walkways and transit ways and the cities are just nicer and greener and more pedestrian friendly and more, just you can walk around and discover awesome stuff and you don't have everything built around these noisy, dangerous machines, kind of rushing around willy nilly, crashing into stuff all over the place.
Annalee: [00:35:06] And I think part of the idea there would be if you stopped investing in car infrastructure, you could invest more in public transit infrastructure, whether that's buses or trains. And so they would come often enough that they would be more convenient than a car. I think one of the reasons why people are leery of taking public transit other than the fact that they don't like being around other people is that, oh, I have to wait half an hour for the bus, which is a bummer, you know?
[00:35:34] That's actually a huge barrier to entry if you have to wait that long for a bus. But if you were guaranteed that the bus would come between five and 10 minutes every single time, you would obviously want to take the bus or take the train. And as you said, it makes the city more pedestrian friendly because all traffic is being relegated to just a few types of transit and they're going to have their own lane and it's going to be one lane or maybe two lanes at the most. And then all the rest of that can be sidewalk or places for bicycles or scooters or whatever other kind of individualistic wheeled vehicle you want to have.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:11] Right. And I think part of what's hard about this is that a lot of the solutions that actually work best are not as sexy as a jet pack or a flying car. It's more buses, it's more … better train systems that are smarter. It's a lot of the innovations that we're really looking towards here are things like just having better algorithms to make sure that buses come often enough. Bus routes that serve the most amount of people most efficiently.
[00:36:38] And using the data we have and machine learning to come up with smarter bus systems so that more people can be served better and not looking down on things like scooters and e-bikes and other kinds of personal transportation that are more kind of nimble and less environmentally damaging than cars and just stuff like that.
[00:36:56] And the thing that you mentioned of like having accurate information about when the next bus or train is coming is a thing that we now have in San Francisco that a lot of other cities still don't have. That is just great. It's makes life so much easier because you can make plans. You can be like, okay, I know I have to be there at this time because the bus is coming then and you can plan around it and just budget that time that you might be waiting for the bus, the extra five minutes.
Annalee: [00:37:18] I can use my Next Bus app pretty much anywhere in California, actually. I used it in LA as well as in San Francisco.
[00:37:25] But I think too, to kind of wrap this up, I think what really unites all the technologies we've been talking about here is that they are not particularly sexy. They're not things that will, you know, launch us into space. They aren't things that—
Charlie Jane: [00:37:40] Toilets might. If you have a toilet that generates enough fuel. Anyway, sorry, go on.
Annalee: [00:37:44] That's true. And that's actually a great thing to bring up because you know, these are technologies that will have knock on effects. They'll have indirect effects in the same way that something like a washing machine has really indirect effects. You know, it frees up labor time. It winds up, meaning that the people who might otherwise be washing clothes can, invent the next kind of unobtainium. The next matter-energy conversion device. And it's really hard to quantify that stuff. It's really hard to say how much having a better toilet will improve life in Nigeria for example. Like we can't say, oh yes, here's a chart right here. Like, if you could bring this into a rural area in Nigeria, suddenly you would have a GDP that changed at this accelerated level.
[00:38:35] it's the same thing with stuff like public transit where it's just, it doesn't sound fun. Nobody's like, I want to take a bus to Mars, they want to take a cyber truck where they're the only person driving. And I think we have to get away from this idea that futuristic technologies need to be all razzle dazzle and need to change our lives at an individual level and we have to start thinking about social effects.
[00:39:11] And same thing with domestic technologies. Those have social effects. They're not going to make you stronger, necessarily or get you a better job. They might.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:21] They might, they might actually make measurable improvements in your life.
Annalee: [00:39:26] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:27] And you know, a lot of people would be alive if we didn't have so many cars. A lot of people would not be dead who might actually contribute something.
Annalee: [00:39:32] Yeah. And a lot of people would be contributing more if they didn't have to engage in domestic labor and people could have more fulfilling jobs or they could have jobs, running the technology instead of being the technology. And so I think, again, this is kind of a lesson for people who are interested in the future of technology, is to look in the places where we kind of do the most labor that isn't really acknowledged. For example, in the areas of child rearing and childbirth or cleaning the house or driving the bus. And it's … or going to the bathroom. I don't know if I'd call that labor—
Charlie Jane: [00:40:13] It’s not exactly the same.
Annalee: [00:40:14] It's not the same. I mean, I think the toilet is, well anyway, it's a whole interesting thing in and of itself because I think the similarities between the toilet and the artificial womb are that they're both kind of taboo areas.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:25] Right and toilets … having sewer systems is incredibly… There’s a lot of labor and a lot of maintenance and a lot of stuff that goes into having sewer systems and you still have sewers that vent into the ocean. It's not great.
Annalee: [00:40:39] Here in San Francisco, our sewer system is what's called a combined source system, which means it's for both sewage and water runoff. So if you have a really rainy day, that's why you start to smell poop in the street.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:52] Yay.
Annalee: [00:40:52] Because yeah, there's like a lot of poop flowing through along with the rainwater.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:57] Nice.
Annalee: [00:40:58] And I think that that's what's so great about the toilet idea is that it's really, it's so disruptive because it means completely redesigning our infrastructure. Like if you have a toilet that can process poop in situ as you—
Charlie Jane: [00:41:13] In situ.
Annalee: [00:41:13] —as you enjoy saying, then you don't need the same kinds of sewer systems. And so, again, this is goes back to the knock-on effects, right? These are technologies that are like keystone technologies that change a whole bunch of stuff around them.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:30] Thank you so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us on the internet at ouropinionsarecorrect.com.
[00:41:36] We're on Twitter at @OOACpod and you can find us in every place that good podcasts are found. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts or any other site, please leave us a review. It helps a lot in terms of people finding us. We have a Patreon at Patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect and we appreciate any support you can give us.
[00:41:55] Thanks so much to our incredible heroic producer, Veronica Simonetti at Women's Audio Mission and thanks to Chris Palmer for the music and thanks again to you for listening.
Annalee: [00:42:06] Yeah, thanks for listening to us talk about toilets for a really long time.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:08] For a long time.
Annalee: [00:42:09] Yeah, and like, you know, the toilet is the future, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:42:12] It is. Smell you later.
Annalee: [00:42:14] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:42:14] Bye!
[00:42:14] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.