When Ray Nayler began writing his science-fiction novel about a repressive regime powered by artificial intelligence, he didn’t expect the story to be as timely as it turned out to be. He really wishes it wasn’t.
“This is not a world that I think we should want to live in, and I would love it if it is a world that we completely avoid, and if the book seems in 10 to 20 years to be extraordinarily naive in its predictions,” Nayler says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.
Nayler’s new novel, “Where the Axe Is Buried,” draws upon his experience working on international development in Russia and other former Soviet republics for the Peace Corps and the U.S. Foreign Service. “I added it up, and I’ve spent over a decade in authoritarian states,” he says. “And so I have, fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of experience with this problem.”
Nayler’s first novel, “The Mountain in the Sea,” capitalized on what scientists have learned about octopus intelligence. His latest tale touches on some well-known tricks of the authoritarian trade — such as social credit systems that keep track of civic behavior, digital surveillance systems, facial recognition software, forced-labor camps and restrictions on freedom of movement.
Perhaps the scariest thing about those tricks is that, in the real world, dictators around the world are sharing them.
“They’re teaching one another how to do things,” Nayler says. “They’re selling technologies to spy on their citizens to one another. They are strengthening their connections. They’re learning from each other at an accelerated rate, and so they’re becoming more and more resilient to protest and change — things that used to take down states.”
In many authoritarian states, AI is becoming a key technology.
“Data is being consolidated,” Nayler says. “The things that can be known about you are increasing, and with AI, you’ll see this happen even more. There’s this funneling of choice-making that’s going on, where they’re trying to push people to make certain kinds of choices that are beneficial to certain kinds of structures. And those can be structures of power.”
In Nayler’s book, many governments around the world have surrendered their authority to AI. “You have these ‘prime ministers’ who are essentially AI minds, designed to do the hard decision-making that human politicians were supposedly unwilling to do,” Nayler says.
Some of the technologies described in the book are a few steps ahead of reality. For example, there’s a type of fabric that can serve as digital camouflage, to make a spy seem invisible or to make a face unreadable by AI-enhanced surveillance cameras. There’s also a technique called “choiceprint,” which can track you by making connections between surveillance data and your expected routines — for example, what kind of energy drink you’d buy at a convenience store.
Nayler’s farthest-out fictional technologies have to do with the brain. A researcher in exile comes up with a device that can read the human brain connectome so precisely that it can display dreamlike visions of a person’s mental state. The device can also be used to manipulate a person’s mind to make choices without that person being aware of it.
That fictional twist was inspired by experiments in neuroscience. “Do people actually reach into our heads and change how we think about the world all the time without us knowing? And then do we go and justify those changes with some other kind of cover narrative? I mean, we’ve seen in split-brain experiments, one of which is described in the novel, that people do this,” Nayler says.
An even farther-out idea has to do with the book’s fictional dictator.
“You have a president in the authoritarian state in the book who’s downloading his consciousness into successive bodies to stay in power, and also to stage coups against his own government, so that he can reinforce that government by saying, ‘Oh, well, we made these mistakes, but now we’re going to fix them for you,'” Nayler says. “And the population is kind of in on it. They know this is happening, but it allows for some kind of safety valve.”
That concept comes close to the truth for long-serving authoritarians such as China’s Xi Jinping (13 years in power), Hungary’s Viktor Orban (15 years straight), Russia’s Vladimir Putin (in power, off and on, for 25 years) and Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko (31 years). Closer to home, President Donald Trump is talking about ways to seek a third term in the White House even though that’s clearly unconstitutional.
“If you want to stay in power, never give up any power to anyone,” Nayler says. “And as long as you are willing to be completely ruthless in this way, you can never lose power. No matter how much people protest, just kill them. Kill as many of them as you need to. Throw them in prison. Dehumanize them. Push them out. Do whatever it takes, but never give up power.”
How do you fight an autocracy that uses tech as a weapon? That question is what prompted Nayler to write “Where the Axe Is Buried.”
“Confronted with that kind of system, I wanted to see if I could write a book that investigated how, given all of those things, you might fight anyway against that, and what that fight might look like from this sort of ‘everyperson’ perspective.”
Just don’t expect the novel to provide a foolproof method for addressing the angst over authoritarianism.
“I hope that people close the book thinking not ‘Ray thinks X about this, and he thinks this is what is to be done,’ but thinking, ‘What do I do? What is the answer?'” Nayler said. “And then go and maybe talk to someone else about it.”
Cosmic Log Used Book Club
Science fiction offers plenty of long-told tales about authoritarianism and surveillance, with George Orwell’s “1984” leading the list. Nayler sees parallels between “1984” and his own book. “Like ‘1984,’ it’s intended as a sort of a cautionary tale, and also like a mirror on our present moment,” he says.
Other works in the genre include “Minority Report,” which started out as a Philip K. Dick novella and was turned into a Tom Cruise movie; and “The Matrix,” the cyberpunk movie franchise that casts intelligent machines as the villains. (For what it’s worth, Nayler explains in the podcast why he doesn’t think AI agents will turn into evil overlords.)
When it comes to the future of AI, Nayler recommends checking out one of his short stories, “Muallim,” which is free to read on his website.
“Muallim is this teacher AI robot … and at some point, someone asks Muallim directly, ‘Are you conscious?’ And Muallim says to them, ‘That is the wrong question. The question you should be asking yourselves is, am I useful to you as a society?'”
In the nonfiction category, Nayler recommends “Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future,” by Jer Thorp.
” I just thought it was a wonderful analysis of how this massive data set that has become more and more available to computational forces affects our lives, and how we can think about ways to better utilize it,” Nayler says. “It talks about things like data sovereignty, which is a concept that I absolutely love — this idea that there should be rules about how data is used, and one of the rules is that the data about the community has to be used for the benefit of that community.”
On the strength of that recommendation, we’re making “Living in Data” the latest selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club. For more than 20 years, the CLUB Club has been putting a spotlight on books with cosmic themes that have been around long enough to show up at your local library or secondhand book shop.
If you’re looking for a fictional tale about something completely different, Nayler has a recommendation for you as well: “Between Two Fires,” by Christopher Buehlman.
“I guess you would put it in the horror genre,” Nayler says. “It takes place in France during the Black Plague and the schism in the Catholic Church — you know, with the battle between the two popes, one in Avignon and the other in Rome. It is just so extraordinarily inventive that it feels to me a lot like science fiction.”
To learn more about Ray Nayler and his science-fiction stories, check out RayNayler.net. You might also want to look back at the Fiction Science interview we conducted with Nayler and neuroscientist Dominic Sivitilli in 2022 when the novelist touched on the subject of octopus intelligence in “The Mountain in the Sea.”
For still more about the intersection of technology and democracy, revisit our chat with Annalee Newitz and Oren Etzioni about the disinformation war, and our interview with George Zarkadakis about reinventing democracy in the age of intelligent machines.
My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.
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