Texas Book Festival 2017: Soonish:
A Funny Future of Technology

It’s not every day that you get to talk about killer robots at church.

Saturday, though, was that day at the Texas Book Festival.

Zach Weinersmith (how convenient is it that the award-winning cartoonist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal was able to give his talk on a Saturday morning?) took to the stage at First United Methodist Church to talk about Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. A collaboration with his wife Kelly, Soonish is an exploration of 10 new technologies that could change the world, leavened with comics about the implications – good and bad – of those technologies.

“It costs $10 to send an apple seed into space,” said Weinersmith, introducing his first topic. He outlined several ways to make access to space cheaper, from reusable rockets (a technology that has been partially realized since the book was published) to the space elevator, an incredibly long cable that would stretch from the Earth’s surface to an asteroid anchored far beyond geostationary Earth orbit. The only material both strong and light enough for such a structure would be a single, massive, painstakingly manufactured carbon molecule called a carbon nanotube.

It was a tantalizing taste of one of the book’s 10 chapters, and the audience was hooked. “Do you want me to do a Q&A, or do you want to hear about robots?” asked Weinersmith, finishing up the segment.

“Robots!” was the immediate and unanimous reply.

Soonish doesn’t get specifically into the field of artificial intelligence, explained Weinersmith, but he and his wife discovered a wide body of research about the way humans and robots interact when they were writing the book. In one study, a robot controlled by a researcher was able to get inside a locked dormitory simply by offering cookies to college students who were also on their way inside. In another, research subjects followed a robot providing emergency instructions even when it was obviously malfunctioning, directing them into closed rooms or away from obvious fire exits.

“Movies where we’re fighting the robots are way too flattering to humans,” said Weinersmith.

He then explained just how easy it would be for the robots to construct a cobalt bomb and exterminate all human life on the planet, a discussion that left most in the audience glad that Weinersmith was a cartoonist and not an evil mastermind.

Weinersmith wrapped up his talk with a brief Q&A session that provided a few illuminating insights into his creative process. "I read three to five books a week, when I’m being good,” he said, allowing that it was a bit more difficult when he was on the road promoting. “And whenever I’m stuck, I make sure to read something that’s difficult for me to understand.”

Kelly Weinersmith, Zach’s wife and co-author, couldn’t make the event. “I run all of my jokes past her before I draw the comics,” he said, smiling when asked about her. “Sometimes I think they’re great and she thinks they’re terrible. The days where I decide to go with them anyway are always good days,” he said, to audience laughter.