Robert Neuwirth: 'I wanted it to be plausible as a machine thinking'

Fictionable

In this Winter series of podcasts we've heard from Linda Mannheim, Richard Smyth and Ariel Marken Jack. This time we welcome Robert Neuwirth and his short story The Disambiguation.

Neuwirth tells us how his story started from a couple of one-liners that were driving him crazy and wound up stuffed full of computer code.

We anthropomorphise the machines that surround us, he says, so we keep expecting "artificial intelligences to be human. But they're not. They're inhuman."

While he tries to keep his fiction separate from his career as a journalist, where he's been reporting on informal economies and shanty towns for more than twenty years, there's obviously some "bleed through".

"The world is a non-narrative place," he explains. "There are stories we can tell and those stories have a kind of narrative, but there are always fractures in the narrative and places where your complacent narrative blows up."

Next time we'll be talking heroes and villains with Liam Hogan.

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