#35 Robot Futures with Annalee Newitz

It’s the age of AI. Robots are getting smarter and learning to do our jobs at an alarming rate. And the question no one seems to be able to answer is: Will robots replace us all and rule the world? Or will we find a way to work in harmonious productivity? That question might be missing the point, says Berkeley grad Annalee Newitz. An award-winning science journalist, fiction writer, and podcast host, Newitz talks about why the debate in AI may be misguided and how sci-fi can be a tool, not merely as escapism, but as a means of imagining our way to a better future.

Further reading: 

• Annalee Newitz’s latest sci-fi novella, Automatic Noodle: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250357465/automaticnoodle/ 
• “Amazon unveils latest warehouse robot as tech giants continue AI layoffs”: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/amazon-robot-proteus-warehouse-ai-layoffs.html 

This episode was written and hosted by Leah Worthington and produced by Coby McDonald. 

Special thanks to Pat Joseph, Nathalia Alcantara, and Annalee Newitz. Art by Michiko Toki and original music by Mogli Maureal. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Transcript

Transcript: 

LEAH WORTHINGTON: Early this June, Amazon made a big announcement. Starting next year, it will start deploying AI-powered robots that will respond to language instead of code. Meaning, workers can speak directly to the bots like any other coworker. 

As Scott Dresser, the vice president of Amazon Robotics, put it: “You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing.”

Amazon has also insisted that they are “creating new jobs alongside these technologies” and that the robots are designed to support, not replace human workers. But many are skeptical, calling the machines “our new robot overlords” and citing the potentially profound impact on blue-collar workers under Amazon’s plan to automate 75 percent of its operations.

So, which is it? Will robots replace us all and rule the world? Or will we find a way to work in harmonious productivity? 

But… what if arguing over whether intelligent robots will be good or bad for humanity is missing the point?  

That question is central to the work of Annalee Newitz, an award-winning science journalist, fiction writer, and podcast host. Annalee’s latest sci-fi novella, Automatic Noodle, explores a near-future San Francisco where a plucky, rag-tag group of sentient robots struggle to fit into society. 

ANNALEE NEWITZ: What I've found is that nearly every ethical question that's being raised about AI really is something that we want to be talking about with humans. If at some point. we do develop AGI, we are going to treat it just as badly as we treat humans until we fix ourselves.

[MUSIC IN]

LEAH: This is The Edge, produced by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association. I’m your host, Leah Worthington. In today’s episode, I’m thrilled to welcome Annalee Newitz, who has a Ph.D. in English and American studies from UC Berkeley. Annalee talked to me about why the debate in AI may be misguided and how sci-fi can be a tool, not merely as escapism, but as a means of imagining our way to a better future.

[MUSIC OUT]

LEAH: Good morning! So good to have you here.

ANNALEE: Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me. 

LEAH: One thing I've been curious about is what you grew up reading.

ANNALEE: A lot of the same stuff that I read now, actually, which is kind of funny. When I was a kid, I was really interested in science, and also mythology, so it's funny that now I write about science and archaeology. My parents were both teachers, and so they took me to the library all the time, and it was at the library where I first encountered science fiction. Some really wonderful librarian had just set up this display right in between the kids section and the adult section. It was just a little shelf that said “science fiction” on it, and I was like, “Well, I like science! What is this science fiction thing?” And I checked out one of the books—it was an anthology edited by Robert Silverberg called Mutants. I just thought it was mind-blowing because it seemed like it was based in real science, but then it was so weird and kind of disturbing—the visions that the authors had for the future or for alternate histories. I think that’s what set me on my path was reading a combination of science books and history books and science fiction. 

LEAH: It’s kind of amazing to be able to pinpoint the exact moment in which you became aware of the genre of science fiction.

ANNALEE: It made a big impression on me, obviously.

LEAH: So, at what point did you start to write it?

ANNALEE: I really didn't do any kind of long-form narrative nonfiction or fiction until the aughts. I was working as a journalist, and before that I had worked as an academic, and so I didn't really give myself permission to write science fiction until I'd really established myself doing other things. I think probably because I had been exposed to the idea that science fiction not as elevated as perhaps other forms of inquiry and analysis. And I had to kind of get over myself and realize that that's total bullshit and accept that you can actually tell a really vital story in any genre. And it doesn’t matter if it’s literary fiction or if it’s poststructural criticism or science fiction.

LEAH: I wonder, though, coming from the perspective of a journalist, whether it requires some… some amount of letting go, because I like to write about science, and I can imagine trying to create a fictionalized world, and getting really trapped by, oh, but that's not quite accurate, or, like, the science has to be perfect, it has to be grounded in… in some, you know, solid, unquestioned truth, and just getting sort of trapped by that.

ANNALEE: It is something that I think about a lot, because when I did sit down to write my first novel, as I said, I had been a science journalist for over a decade, and what I did was I just started out by interviewing a bunch of scientists and roboticists and asking them what would be plausible. I also, in that first book, it's set in a kind of medium-range future, it's about, like, 130 years in our future. And, the social and political world is different, and so I interviewed an economist friend of mine about, like, what might be realistic ways that people's rights would be taken away, and it was, it kind of blew my mind, because I hadn't really thought about the fact that, like, a lot of the rights that we enjoy in the United States are just wild and completely unprecedented historically, and he was like, yeah, I mean, you don't have to have the right to, like, live anywhere, you don't have to have the right to, own yourself, you know, all these different things. I mean, I knew about that, right, because I grew up in the States and I understand slavery, but I didn't think about the fact that, like, you know, just the freedom of movement, freedom of mobility between classes, all that stuff, is really kind of an aberration historically, and so I just took all those rights away from my characters, and it felt very—

LEAH: See what happens.

ANNALEE: Yeah, what happens is that, you know, you get a world where capitalism has reinstated indentured servitude, because that's the most, that's the best way to be productive, and it's an optimization technique, and I mean, you can already see the kind of edges of that thinking right now in the United States and elsewhere in the world. So yeah, I had a lot of fun, kind of, taking a realistic scenario, based on historical data, based on scientific insights, and then spinning up a story about a sentient robot who's, like, struggling with, how he's been, enslaved, but also he's puzzled about his gender. So there's, like, a lot of, a lot of issues that this robot is struggling with. And, so, yeah, I like, I guess what I would say is that at this point, I like being able to switch back and forth between telling the truth in a way that is, as evidence-based as possible, with fact-checking and all the good things that we have in journalism, and then letting go of that and saying, alright, now I control everything in the story. It's based in fact, but I am steering it, unabashedly in the direction that I want, and no one is gonna be sad because I'm not claiming it’s real.

LEAH: There's a freedom there, for sure.

ANNALEE: There's a freedom, and I also think that one of the things that's really disturbing about authoritarianism and fascism—the way we're experiencing it now in the United States—is that, we're encouraged to think that there's no distinction between fiction and nonfiction. And I think that giving the reader a very clear cue, this is fiction versus nonfiction, is intellectually really important. Like, that we all need to be reminding ourselves that the boundary between fiction and nonfiction exists. It can actually be quite a hard boundary. Of course, there's things that exist in a gray area, like propaganda, but when you live in an era like we do, where almost everything we see in the media is propaganda, or is tinged by propaganda, or is, like, propaganda adjacent, it's really important to remind ourselves that the vast majority of narrative is either fiction or nonfiction. 

LEAH: I was reading a little about your book that talks about the weaponization of storytelling and of narrative in our history, and so there's both the story that's being told, and then also the way that story is being told, or how it's being presented to society, and I'm interested how you think about that as a storyteller.

ANNALEE: I mean, I think that different kinds of messages live better in different kinds of stories, you know, so there's some stories I think you can tell in fiction that you really can't tell in nonfiction and vice versa. So, you know, as someone who does science journalism and writes a lot about history as well, like, I have a very strong sense that, you know, if you want to really teach people about where humanity has been, and like, what we know about the universe, or what we know about our ecosystems, it has to be nonfiction. 

I think that, for me, what fiction is really good for is helping us see how science and politics can affect us personally. You know, it allows you to tell stories that aren't just about extrapolating the science, but extrapolating how communities of people will respond to it. And that's why it's really important to me to think about the social science side of my stories as well, like, what kind of rights we have, or what the economy is doing, because, you know, that's part of our, that needs to be part of what we imagine when we kind of come up with scenarios that aren't real. Because, you know, science fiction is, it's like a sandbox, you know? We can test out ideas, we can play around, we have a lot more freedom and safety to accuse people of things, or to, to forgive them, or to, you know, imagine how they would respond to a world of high-tech enslavement. 

LEAH: To talk a little about your latest novella, Automatic Noodle, I'm curious what you feel like are the ideas that you are testing out in writing it. It seems like a lot of what you write is, as you were saying, you know, kind of an answer to a what-if, or an exploration of a what-if. What are the scenarios and questions that were in the sandbox with you in this story?

ANNALEE: I started working on it right after I had finished, my book Stories Are Weapons, which is a nonfiction book that's a history of psychological warfare and culture war in the United States, so I was very depressed after that, and I was thinking a lot about how people manipulate each other with propaganda and stories, and I wanted to think about a world where the characters are recovering from war, not in the middle of a war and not at the start of a war, because I felt, so this is kind of the vibes part. This is the thing in fiction, is like, you can have a lot of vibes. You can in nonfiction too, but, like, fiction, you can just, like, be like, it all started with vibes.

LEAH: I'm putting that on a t-shirt.

ANNALEE: Exactly. It all started with vibes. And the vibe was, like I want to imagine, a world that's complex, where things are not perfect, but, like, people are working on rebuilding their connections to each other. And I also was, of course, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so I'm surrounded by propaganda about AI. So, I'd been thinking a lot about the advertisements for AI, the kinds of things that CEOs of AI companies, like Sam Altman, are saying about their products. And there is a science fiction story that a lot of these people tell, and it's about how they're going to invent artificial general intelligence, meaning something that's a human equivalent consciousness, and that they're going to harness it to, you know, save the economy, save the world, invent new things that we could never imagine. And I think that that’s, speaking as in my nonfiction voice here, I think that that’s very unlikely. I do not think that with the tools they’re using now that AGI is going to emerge from large language models, if it would ever emerge. And if it were to emerge, I don’t know that we would recognize it.

So what I wanted to do in this book was say, “Alright, let's take these guys seriously. Let's say they are able to invent AGI.” And my question is, what would really happen if they invented something like that? Because they—the story that you hear from, like, the Altman-type guys is, like, this thing would be our god, it would be the thing that would lead us out of this terrible situation. At the same time, they also say, this would be our commodity, this would be our product, this would be a thing that we would own and sell to governments, to businesses. So, how do you square that circle? Like, on one hand, this is a slave. It's a sentient being that you've created that you are going to buy and sell. On the other hand, you're describing it as a god, which is something kind of scary and has to be contained because a lot of the stories that these guys tell have to do with, like, how do you restrain a god from turning us all into paperclips?

LEAH: Quick interjection, for anyone who doesn’t know… Annalee is referencing this famous thought experiment known as the Paperclip Maximizer. The premise is that there’s a super-intelligent AI whose only goal is to maximize the number of paperclips—all moral, ethical, environmental concerns aside. And of course the fear is that, with no human values, this AI would do literally anything to achieve its singular goal—including turning the entire planet into a paperclip factory…and turning people into raw materials. You can see where this is going.

ANNALEE: Which is literally the dumbest science-fiction story ever, by the way. Like, if that were actually a Twilight Zone episode you would be like, ughhhh. Anyway, not gonna happen.

So…I set about creating characters who are exactly that. They are robots who have been built by corporations, they have human equivalent intelligence, they have social relationships and emotions and desires, and they're just like people. They are people. And because they fight in a war, this is a novella that's set after California wins a war of independence against the United States, and so a subset of these, AGIs have fought in this war and are given kind of limited civil rights by the California government. And so that's kind of what I wanted to think about. Like, that was my sandbox, was like, okay, we have these people who were invented to be slaves, who have been given a tiny amount now that they've fought in a war and protected some of these guys who invented them and enslaved them. And where do they stand in this new nation? What will they be allowed to do? And what will it feel like to be them? And so, I was trying to imagine robot consciousness, robot embodiment, but also imagine—which doesn't require very much imagining, but to think about—what does it mean to be a citizen and not a citizen at the same time? And how do you, how do you rebuild your life when your government doesn't even fully acknowledge that you're a person? These robots can't vote. They're allowed to work, but they can't join unions. They have all these… it's very sort of, it's… I was thinking a lot about things like Jim Crow, I was thinking about how California treated Chinese and Japanese immigrants who were working on railroads back in the late 19th century and also working in farms and things like that. 

LEAH: In the novella, it's like, we're in San Francisco, within the Bay Area, within California, this ostensibly, historically progressive place that is really reckoning with these latent, unchallenged… perceptions or ideas of who is a person and who belongs and who's part of the community and who deserves to have access to not just rights—not just big rights, like the right to exist—but also smaller rights, like the right to make hand-pulled noodles.

ANNALEE: The right to own a business, or yeah, be part of a union, or something like that, yeah. Absolutely, and I mean, part of the point that I was trying to make in this book, too, as a lifelong Californian, is that California, you know, it's a blue state, but its history is full of really horrific, racist policies. And, I mean, it was a state that was literally founded on the idea that anyone who was Indigenous, who was off of their designated rancherias or reservations, could be shot and killed. And that's part of, like, literally one of the very first State of the State addresses, you know, from the California governor. And, so this is a state that is liberal in some ways, but very, very much you know, reactionary in other ways. There's a lot of, especially right now, a lot of I think misguided optimism about the idea that CalExit could be a thing and that we could have a war of independence, and then we'd all be free, because we'd be in California. And I think that if that did happen, California is kind of a microcosm of the U.S, and you would still have these really reactionary forces in California at odds with, you know, places like San Francisco, or parts of San Francisco because, of course, even San Francisco, there's tons of conservatives, but they just aren't in the majority, necessarily. They aren't the majority of voters. And also, there's all different ways of being conservative, too. But, yeah, so I wanted to kind of remind readers that California is dealing with a lot of the same problems that the rest of the country is, but we've, we've kind of put that to the side in our thinking because we'd rather forget.

LEAH: I'm curious—I know you're also a historian and you really like research—how much research went into this novella, and what you've learned about robot rights and what is possible and what we're working towards and what is being debated in terms of robot rights, and how they can or should or might integrate or not into this, you know, near future society.

ANNALEE: Yeah, I mean, people, of course, who are working in Silicon Valley are kind of in the realm of science fiction when it comes to imagining what's going to happen with AGI, so there's this sort of basic division between, you know, people who think that AI is going to be way too dangerous and will destroy humanity, and therefore it also must either be destroyed or enslaved to such a great extent that it has no ability to assert its own will, right? If it ever had a will. And then I think there's, you know, the other side, which is, you know, it's inevitable, we should build it because it could help us, you know, it's a tool that we could use to, you know, whatever, pull ahead of China, or it's a tool that we could use to solve problems that we can't solve on our own. I think both of those, again, are kind of science fictional propositions, because they're both speculating about something that doesn't exist and that we actually have no idea how it would exist, and what it would look like. 

I mean, if we were to develop human equivalent intelligence in a corporation that owned it, like I said, I think the inevitable outcome would be we've just created a new group of slaves, and I don't see anyone—there are ethicists who are very concerned about that. But again, I think what AI, what the debates over AI really ask us to think about is, how are we treating each other? How are we treating humans right now? Because the fact is, we don't have AGI, we don't know what it would be like if we had AGI. We don't know how to make AGI. We have some guys who are getting billions of dollars to develop a fantasy. But in the meantime, we are horribly mistreating immigrants, we continue to deprive Indigenous people of their rights, we continue to have Jim Crow-like laws, we're rolling back protections for women who want abortions. Like, there's all these things that we're doing to each other to take away rights that we have.

So, I think that oftentimes these debates over AI are a way of displacing debates that we really want to be having about how we treat humans. And so we kind of use those debates to think through what would be okay to do to humans. Would it be okay if we raised humans in a box and enslaved them, and bought and sold them? What I've found is that nearly every ethical question that's being raised about AI really is something that we want to be talking about with humans. And, you know, if at some point we do develop AGI, we are going to treat it just as badly as we treat humans until we fix ourselves. You know we have to first figure out how to treat each other.

LEAH: So do you think it's important to have the conversation around what rules and regulations and rights should we apply or should pertain to AGI? Or do you think that that is either putting the cart before the horse or just a distraction from a different conversation around human rights?

ANNALEE: I think it's a distraction from a conversation around worker rights because whenever we talk about, what are we going to do with AI, it's always in the context of a workplace. It's always in the context of, should it be allowed to replace workers? How much should workers be using it? How should it enter into legal debates, scientific debates? How should it be part of politics and propaganda? So, when we think about regulatory schemes for AI, all of that should be centered on, how do we treat human workers?

I think we need consumer protections, I think we need worker rights, I think we need worker protections. I think we need regulations on how AI—because right now, what we call AI is mostly LLMs, right?—so there have to be regulations on how LLMs are incorporating human data, right? Whether it's surveillance data, or copyrighted materials or data from the state, medical data, so those are the kinds of things I think we need to be thinking about. We have to make sure that humans are safe and protected, so that as we introduce this new technology, we're certain that we're doing it in order to make people's lives better. 

LEAH: And I should just point out for those who don’t know that LLMs are Large Language Models like ChatGPT or Gemini. 

LEAH: So, Annalee, could you tell me a little bit about how the dynamics of worker rights and regulations and dynamics play out in the context of the noodle shop—and why you chose a noodle shop as the setting for this story in the first place?

ANNALEE: Well, partly it was the vibes. I wanted to feel happy. I love biang biang noodles. I eat them when I can. I watch lots of videos of people making them. So part of it was just purely serving myself.

LEAH: Literally. Emotionally.

ANNALEE: Yeah, emotional sustenance. But I wanted to set the story in a small business because it is the case lots of times that as we're rebuilding after something really horrific—whether it’s an earthquake or a war—small businesses are the first to recover and serve the community. And so it made sense to me that that would be a place where community could gather and where community was needed. And also it's a very common business for immigrants to set up, and these robots are new citizens so they occupy the role of immigrants. But I also wanted to have the chance to think about, what would it be like if you had spent your entire life enslaved or told what you could do all the time—which is basically slavery—and then you discovered that you had a new kind of freedom? How would you reimagine your labor? And like a big part of the action in the story, to the extent you can call it action, is these robots just trying to figure out what jobs make them happy. And what does it feel like to do a job and feel satisfied by it? Instead of just feel like, oh I got that done, and now it’s over. One of the robots in particular, Stay Behind, has been working as a soldier during the war, and he was built to be a soldier, and he's never even thought about, what would a job that was fun be? He’s just been in the business of killing and not being killed. And so he finally—this isn't really a spoiler—he finally starts to realize that he loves interior decorating. He’s helping to paint the restaurant and he starts, without even thinking about it, he's like, ohh let's have streamers, ooh let's do curtains. It's this beautiful moment where he thought that all he was good for was killing people, and he realizes that, actually, he's really good with curtains and balloons. A big thought experiment, I think, in that book is, if you could have a job that made you feel happy, what would it be?

LEAH: There almost feels like a tiny hint of work abolitionist spirit there.

ANNALEE: It's more like abolishing late-stage capitalism, in a way, because they love working. There's nothing bad about work. The problem is when work is coercive. That's why it's a really liberating moment for them and also for us as readers and me writing it. It’s like, okay, let’s try to inch our way towards that. This is not a utopian book. There's lots of bad scary stuff. It has a happy ending, but we know that the world is still a mess, they're still recovering from this horrible war, the United States could re-invade any time. But, at the same time, they have found a little place of peacefulness and a community that is real—supportive mutual aid community. And so their work feels good. It’s hard. But I think they are enjoying it. When they're not being, you know, tormented by robo-phobes. They're just living, living a life, making something that's undeniably nice. You know, you can’t turn biang biang noodles into a missile. 

LEAH: There's an interesting tension there, though, with the noodles specifically, because they're making a product one, that they don't consume and can't necessarily enjoy as robots, and two, that is famously, historically handmade, hand-pulled. And when we think of hands, we tend to think of human hands. So, I'm curious about that tension and the question of what do they have claim to making something that is so kind of rooted in the human experience.

ANNALEE: Yeah, they agonize over that a lot. They have a lot of conversations in the book basically asking, are we appropriating human culture? I feel like they’re experiencing what a lot of people in diaspora experience where they’re like, what is my culture? As someone who grew up in California, I was surrounded by people who were in diaspora from various things. I was raised Jewish, so technically I'm in diaspora from a couple thousand years ago. Still diaspora, I guess, still counts. And I think part of what you do when you're in that environment, and you're surrounded by a bunch of cultures that aren't your own, or even the culture that's supposedly yours also feels really distant, and you don’t necessarily feel a connection with this thing that you’re told that you are,  that's the moment when you start to take comfort and draw culture from what is around you. I feel like the robots are going through that as well. They're figuring out, how do we make and participate in a culture that isn't really ours, but still feels like ours? Because they were raised by humans, and so human culture is the only culture they've ever known. And they grapple with that a lot. They talk about representations of robots in human culture and how humans have terrible robot representation. 

LEAH: Do you think that this is a reality that, should we have more sentient robots and AGI in the future, they will have to grapple with? This sort of creating their own culture and trying to assimilate or integrate—or not—into the human culture that they've been conceived into?

ANNALEE: Yeah, I think if they're raised by humans, they will feel a kinship with us, we will feel a kinship with them, too, and that it will always be that kind of uneasy relationship that you have between groups that are very different that are still inhabiting the same place. And I hope that if humans ever do invent some kind of artificial intelligence that we welcome them, and we treat them as people, and that we don't try to monetize them or put them in a box and sell them to somebody to be used as a weapon. Unfortunately, I don't trust that we won't do that. So I suppose, if in some fantasy timeline, robots like these existed, I'd be working with them in the robot resistance. I think they would have human allies, and we would try to protect them from being abused. And other humans would be trying to abuse them, and it would be just like the whole history of California all over again. 

LEAH: It must have been fun to conceive of these bots. I mean, each one of them is so unique, not just in personality, but in the literal form. 

ANNALEE: I've done robot characters before. It's a big part of my imagination, I think about it a lot. And for this book, I had been reading a lot about soft robots and next-generation robots that aren't necessarily what you would expect, like, that have pneumatics in them or they're not running on an engine, they're running using other kinds of systems. All of these robots—except for Stay Behind who's a humanoid robot—all of the are based on actual robots that are either in production in labs or have actually been deployed. Hands is a robot who is just arms attached to a trunk. And any glance at any factory that has robots in it, you'll see a lot of the robots are just arms. There are octopus robots, like Cayenne, the character who has taste sensors. There are robots with taste sensors. And Sweetie, who's a robot who has three legs with wheels on the bottom, I was inspired to create her because I read a paper by this group in Europe who created a three-wheeled robot to do deliveries in a city.

LEAH: I felt in reading your novella that there's this optimistic idea that robots may be able to envision things we couldn't because they're not limited by human societal perceptions of how things have to be. Like, for example, why not swap out body parts? If I feel like the body that I have isn’t working for me, why do I have to feel constrained with what I was born with, why can’t that change that? There seems to be a little bit of a big nod to queer identity and gender dysmorphia and the way that we are allowed to or not exist in the world. On the other hand, are we creating robots in our own image, and will they be limited by the very baggage that we've been carrying around and have suffused them with?

ANNALEE: I think both. Again, if we were to have robots that were like these, absolutely, they would be rebelling against human standards of embodiment, and at the same time, they would be anxious about it, and some of them wouldn't want to. Some of them would be like, “No, we need to be respectable bots. We should make ourselves look like white people, and we should make ourselves as little robotic as possible—you know, don't have any metal showing, try never to use your Wi-Fi in your brain while you're at work.” Again, this is why it's a very interesting metaphor for people because, of course, there are lots of human beings who want to change their bodies to fit who they feel that they are, and there's laws preventing them from doing it. Like, you’re not allowed to say, in some states, if you're under 25 or under 18, you're not allowed to be trans, basically. And that's, like, a really simple, basic modification. Like all I want to do is instead of be a girl, be a boy. Simplest. But the robots are like, “But I want another arm. I would like to have a tail. I would like wings. I would like suction cups on my feet.” That is something I love about the robots—it lets us ask those questions about why we think that this human morphology is so great. I mean, it causes backaches. You know, why not have wheels instead of feet? And three legs instead of two would be great—better balance. I wouldn't necessarily say optimistic, but I'm very hopeful. All of my books, ultimately, are very hopeful, because in the end, I think people are basically just trying to get by. I do have a view that if we're kind of left to our own devices, the way these bots are in the story, that we kind of default to a baseline of wanting to help each other out, to form our own communities, unmolested, and just be allowed to just live. 

LEAH: I think I could chat with you all day. This has been so much fun.

ANNALEE: Yeah, it was so nice to meet you.

LEAH: You too. 

ANNALEE: And it’s always fun to talk about that stuff. 

[MUSIC IN]

LEAH: This is The Edge, brought to you by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association. I’m Leah Worthington. This episode was produced by Coby McDonald, with support from Pat Joseph and Nathalia Alcantara. Special thanks to Annalee Newitz. Original music by Mogli Maureal. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

[MUSIC OUT]