‘We might see new types of sexuality emerge’

The first South Asian to be nominated for the Nebula award for best novel talks about her fictional worlds

1 What was the immediate inspiration for Machinehood?

I wrote this novel in 2017 and 2018, based on an (unpublished) short story about human body enhancement. It grew thematically into a story about artificial intelligence, automation, and labour because those topics were coming up increasingly often in my engineering and technology circles. The two main characters, Welga Ramirez in the US and Nithya Balachandran in India, were inspired by my personal experiences, especially with culturally blended families.

2 Machinehood talks about the absence of any notion of a right to privacy, amid the extreme digitisation of human lives, and about how “machine rights” need to be defined. How do you envision the transformation in the political rhetoric of rights and citizenship, in the future?

This is a very tricky problem, especially regarding artificial intelligence and robotics, because we have nebulous definitions of sentience, and we’re constantly moving the goal posts for when an AI might be considered self-aware. I think we’ll first see the legalities worked out in the context of responsibility, especially for damage or negligence by a robot, and subsequently for damage or right to repair of a robot (and I’m including selfdriving cars here). Humans have a tendency to value things (including other people) with whom they have strong relationships. Once they form emotional attachments to devices, especially as those devices start looking and acting more human, it’s going to be hard for them to sever those relationships. At that point, I think we’ll start to see more of a movement to give greater autonomy and rights to intelligent machines.

3 Your fictional worlds are replete with gender-non-conforming characters. Do you feel that gender as a social construct will be rendered redundant in a scenario where machines coexist with human life, as is proposed in the novel?

The space that gender occupies is undergoing a lot of change right now. I think biotech as well as AI will intersect with this space in really interesting ways in the coming decades. I don’t expect gender to become redundant anytime soon, though, given how deeply ingrained it is with human society.

I suspect that the varieties of gender will continue to proliferate, and that we might even see new types of gender and sexuality emerge in relation to selfaware machines as well as to humans who gain more biotech in their bodies. I prefer to think of gender as a spectrum rather than a collection of discrete categories, and technology is as likely to add new dimensions as it is to take them away.