A longtime science and technology journalist who served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo and io9, Annalee Newitz has made a living out of thinking and writing about the future. (A bit of bias: Gizmodo was the first news site that I became obsessed with as a geeky, snarky teenager.) For as much as they are, in their words, “steeped in what people are obsessed with in terms of technology,” with several sci-fi books, they’re also a compelling historian with books about cities, psyops, and the end of the world.
Their latest, Automatic Noodle, is a sci-fi novella set in a near-future San Francisco recovering from a brutal civil war that led to California’s secession. Four misfit robots built for wartime productivity try to find their footing in this future where they’re afforded some humanity but are still othered and at the risk of losing their independence. Their plan? Open up a noodle shop in a ghost kitchen.
This is a warm, funny, and humanistic story set in a not-too-distant version of our city that speaks to the moment when everything is mediated through apps, dominated by algorithms, and all of us crave connection and noodles.
I met Newitz at Noe Cafe on Sanchez Street, and we spent a sunny afternoon chatting about the humanity of robots, the false logic of AI boosters, and the history of noodles.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Automatic Noodle is set in the near future — 2064. A lot of the technologies that exist right now, like Crypto or review bombing on Yelp or the blockchain being everything, are how this world runs in 2064. How much did you feel like borrowing from current times and how much of it was speculative?
Obviously because I'm in San Francisco and because I've spent my whole career writing about tech and science, I'm kind of steeped in what people are obsessed with in terms of technology, but especially the technology that people think of as futuristic. That's one of the things that's both cool and shitty about Silicon Valley: It is full of futurists and if you're developing technology, you are trying to imagine, how will this hold up in 20 years?
The things that people are obsessed with right now are blockchain technologies, even though many aspects of that have been debunked, like NFTs. But also AI is obviously hugely influential. It's funding lots of people's lives here in this neighborhood where we're sitting right now. The idea of online platforms for buying and selling for small entrepreneurs and local vendors. Those are kind of the three things that were in my mind as technologies that I could see sticking around.
I was trying to extrapolate, but also to kind of push back on a lot of the story that you hear from Silicon Valley because particularly with AI, there's a very specific science fiction story that CEOs and founders are telling. That's a story of a dangerous technology that will steal human jobs and take over the world and utterly transform us.
The robots in Automatic Noodle are given civil rights in as much as they are able to provide labor and little else; their personhood is non-existent even though they have a capacity to feel. Where did this idea that we need to afford robots humanity come from?
We don't have robots that are like this in our world, so it is purely a metaphor. And the question really is, well, what did I want to do with that metaphor?
If we take Silicon Valley at its word and what they're trying to do is develop new people, actual new forms of human-equivalent beings, then the question becomes, okay, well if we're inventing new humans, how do we treat them? These are new arrivals to our nations, new arrivals to our communities. It became pretty clear to me that one place to look for answers to those questions is how do we treat immigrants? How do we treat people who just arrived in this country? Right now — I mean, the United States has always treated immigrants like shit. California especially. There've been different flavors of how immigrants have been marginalized in everything from the Chinese Exclusion Act to anti-miscegenation laws, to the ways in which unions that were primarily Filipino unions or Mexican unions were broken.
There’s many, many ways in which the state tries to crush the aspirations of immigrants even while claiming that we're a nation of immigrants. I really wanted to capture that hypocrisy, that idea that what we want more than anything is to create these humans, these artificial humans. We want them so badly, but as soon as we have them, we don't want them to have any rights.
You write about food really well. It's interesting — one of the few things that really distinguishes these robots from the humans is that they can't taste the food.
Well, Cayenne can taste and has sort of very advanced perceptions for that.
There's one scene where they go to the Richmond noodle shop and they hear the thwap-thwap-thwap of the noodles until it reaches this sort of perfect equilibrium. Were there any food writers or any food movies or TV shows that you personally took in?
I watch a lot of Chinese food content on YouTube, and so there's this great show. I can't remember what it's called. The translation is something like Regional Taste, but it's a YouTube series from China and it just spotlights different regions in China. I just spent a lot of time watching videos of people making biang biang noodles, learning about the history of how wheat entered the cuisine, but also just learning about the aesthetics of Chinese cuisine.
Jennifer 8. Lee wrote this really amazing book called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. It's probably about 15 years old now, and she used to be a tech journalist at the New York Times, which is how I knew her, and then she just went off and was obsessed with writing about American Chinese food. It's a really amazing book.
She grew up Chinese American, so she wasn't in China. She didn't have a real connection to China other than her parents, and so her favorite foods were like you know, sweet and sour pork, General Tso's chicken, so she's like, "Where the fuck is General Tso's chicken from?" Like, is there a General Tso? Like, what the hell? So, she goes on this quest and goes to China. It’s about what is authentic, what does it mean to be enjoying this Americanized version of your own culture? That was part of what I think I brought to the story was that feeling of, what does it mean to grow up in California with all of these diasporic people making amazing food. It was really fun for me to have these robots kind of struggling with these questions. It's like, well, how do we make authentic noodles when we're not even we're not even humans. They are people but they're not humans.
The big conversation in AI right now is AGI. These super-intelligences that we cannot control, and it just feels like marketing gobbledygook. I resent it. There’s also the anti-AI sentiment that this technology should just not exist at all. Throughout the book, I got the sense that you are somewhere outside of this.
There's the people, like the people in the Freelancers Union with me, who are reasonably against what AI companies are doing with content. I have extreme empathy for that and I definitely agree that we should be suing the shit out of these companies. We should be boycotting them. We should be coming up with regulations to prevent them from harvesting our work. That conversation is easy.
As for the doomers — and the, let's call them optimists — who are predicting super intelligence, I have the same thing to say to both of them, which is like, I don't really think it's going to happen.
I think it's extremely unlikely that we're going to develop a human equivalent kind of intelligence anytime soon. But, I mean, if we do, let's say they're right, then I want stories like Automatic Noodle out there so that we can be prepared to treat this new kind of human, the new kind of person with dignity and with respect and, you know, give them rights, invite them to join the union.
A lot of the tension in the book is slowly watching the robots’ rating decline, running the risk that their business would be disappeared from this algorithm that we subject every restaurant or every business to. It just felt wild to me that even robots feel that same anxiety.
If you depend on platform capitalism, the algorithm can determine your visibility. The idea that you would search for noodles on Grando Sando, which is kind of the Grubhub [equivalent in the book], and that they wouldn't pop up if you searched for noodles, that's death. They’re trying to be a ghost kitchen, initially, so there's no walk-in traffic, so the only way they're searchable is by the app.
While I was working on the book, I talked to some restaurant critics like Esther Tseng. She was like, "Yeah, this is a huge thing that people worry about in the restaurant world."
As an author, Goodreads reviewbombing is a huge issue and there was a phase which continues where like any queer author gets review bombed on Goodreads. People just come in even before your book has an ARC [advanced reading copy], and they'll just come in.
Reviewbombing can literally can destroy your life and people do commit suicide when they lose all their money, or when they lose social standing in their community. It's just such an interesting phenomenon that people will say, "Oh, review bombing. It doesn't really mean anything."
This is a book that's all about war and recovering from war and the lingering effects of war. And so review bombing is part of what these bots are going to have to deal with their whole lives probably. I mean we all are, right?
