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Daniel H. Wilson's latest novel Amped is the story of a world where electronic implants can make people so much better, stronger, faster than before that the rest of the population begins to view amplified people, or "amps," as a threat. The hero, Owen Gray, had a neural implant installed after an accident left him with severe brain damage. But he's still hounded just like those who received implants in order to give them an advantage at school and on the job. He escapes from his home in Pittsburgh and heads out to a trailer park in Oklahoma, where he's been told he can find the one man who can help him harness his implant's full potential.
Wilson, the author of last year's bestselling thriller Robopocalypse (which Steven Spielberg is turning into a movie), holds a doctorate in robotics from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. In addition to Amped, he has written several books of humorous nonfiction and a middle grade novel for kids, A Boy and His Bot, about a secret robot world hidden under a sacred Native American site. He lives in Portland, Oregon and is the father of a little girl.
On Monday on GeekDad I wrote a review of Amped. I also got the chance last month to talk with Wilson about his novels and the science behind them. Here's what he had to say (you can listen to an audio excerpt of our interview below):
GeekMom: Your books all have an Oklahoma connection. How did you come to put robots and Native Americans together? It sounds like they're almost different ends of the human experience.
Daniel H. Wilson: You write about what you know. It makes everything easier, and also more truthful. In this case, I grew up in Oklahoma, and I grew up in the Cherokee Nation and I'm a member of the Cherokee Tribe. Oddly enough, I know a lot about robots and Oklahoma, and so that's what comes out in my writing.
There's this heroic vision of Native Americans as being tied into nature, very organic and spiritual and human in a way that really robots offer a great contrast to. Robots have almost the opposite connotation. They're inorganic, they're logical and they're "other." I do get a lot of traction out of that contrast.
GM: How much of the technology in Amped is available now?
DW: I absolutely believe that a lot of the issues raised in Amped about technology migrating into our bodies are issues that we're really going to deal with soon. Within the next 10 years, and maybe sooner. Maybe a lot sooner.
In my books the technology that I choose to talk about has to serve the themes. What that means is that I end up having to cut out a lot of cool technology that would be really fun to describe and play with, but which would just confuse everybody. So in Amped, I focus on neural implants. Electrode arrays that get placed on the surface of your brain, under your scalp, that collect information about electrically what's happening between your neurons. And they can also stimulate electrical activity to your neurons in order to create an outcome.
That technology is here already. It's also being used medically right now to help people. There are deep-brain stimulators for people that have Parkinson's disease. It's basically like a pacemaker for your brain that reduces tremors and things like that. For certain types of epilepsy, there are neural implants that can basically sense when your brain is entering into a seizure and deliver stimulation to your brain to try to snap it out of having a seizure.
When I was consulting with brain researchers, I found a guy here in Portland at Oregon Health and Science University who has done real trials with patients to actually open up people's heads and put these things inside. To talk to him really blew my mind. I thought I was taking a lot of liberties and being really crazy with this stuff that the amps can do in the book, and in fact he was saying to me, "Oh, this is actually very conservative. These are things that are quite possible."
Instead of having an implant that recognizes when you're about to have a seizure, you could have something that recognizes when you're recreating the same motor movement over and over again, like when you're swinging a tennis racquet and trying to get the perfect swing. And then you can have it deliver a little bit of site-specific extra stimulation to basically help burn that neural pathway into your brain faster. So it can help you learn faster once it recognizes what neurons you're trying to strengthen through repeated study or physical activity.
This stuff is real, this stuff is really coming. So thematically, what I was really interested in was this notion that we're all a collection of independent processes. There's some part that recognizes speech, another part that makes sure you don’t get hit by a bus. It all comes together to be "us." When you start handing off processes to a machine, at what point does it change who you are, and at what point does it make you more or less culpable for the actions that you take? As Owen sinks deeper into using his amp, and giving more and more of himself to it, I think he gets closer and closer to his true desires and his true morality. And that to me was really fascinating, to have someone trust themselves to go deeper and deeper and really find out whether they're good or evil.
GM: Is there anything really wild in there? Or is it all grounded in reality?
DW: I left out anything having to do with genetics, because it was just too complicated to have too many technologies active at once. So really the main unrealistic aspect of Amped is that it's too simplistic. The fact that there's only one way to make people smarter is unrealistic. In the future there'll be all sorts of technologies, biology- and genetics-type stuff, and also robotics-type stuff.
The other thing is that the implant has a maintenance port, and that was necessary so I could have a situation where people could easily discriminate against each other, because you can just see the port on the temple. Having the port allows you to get data off it, but a lot of that can be done wirelessly.
GM: You have a little bit of politics in Robopocalypse, but the politics seem to be much more in the forefront in Amped.
DW: As a society, I think we express our cultural mores through our politics. We're trying constantly to figure out what's OK and what's not OK. And it's hard, because our society is constantly buffeted by gale force winds of technology. Things are always changing.
For me, I would come back to thinking about this in very concrete terms. I have a daughter who's two. What happens if she goes to elementary school and I realize that every kid has had an amp implant and she's the dumbest kind in her class? What do you do? That would make me feel very scared. I could totally see trying to get legislation passed to make sure that would never happen. Then again, if my kid needed glasses, I would be happy to provide her with that technology. So how much is fear of the unknown, and how much has some moral foundation?
But they're not easy questions. People are really going to have to deal with it in the future.
GM: Do you think that's a choice you would make? If you had money and the option to make your two-year-old daughter brighter than everybody else?
DW: You're asking if I would upgrade my own daughter. The answer is, it depends. What a lot of people think is that it's going to be the rich people who get this stuff. And I think that's 180 degrees backwards. Rich people have lots of advantages for their kids. They can have tutors, they can go to great schools. They have laptops and all sorts of technological devices. The deck is stacked so much in their favor, that if you asked them if they would open up their kid's head and have an experimental device put in there, well, hell, no, why would you? You're already in the lead. You wouldn't need to take any risks.
I think where this technology is going to show up, is where it's showing up right now, which is with people who have serious problems that need to be corrected. If you're having epileptic seizures, that's debilitating. You know what, it's worth it. Cut my head open, fix me. Give me a regular life. As that technology stabilizes, we'll start to see people with severe ADHD, or severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that will be the first to adopt this technology.
I really think the technology is going to show up with the people who need it most and who have the most to gain. It won't go directly to wealthy people, because they have too much to lose. That's how it happens in Amped, and that's how I think it will play out. I could be totally wrong.
You can also listen to an excerpt from my interview with Daniel Wilson about his novel Amped.
