With the increased interest in artificial intelligence, this week’s Futures story is a timely look at what artificial life may be like — and how it might behave. In The puppet, his first story for Futures, Michael Adam Robson offers a fresh perspective on the idea of reality. He kindly offered to expand on the thought processes behind his story here on the blog. As ever, you really ought to read the story first, otherwise you might find your view of reality infected by spoilers …

Writing The puppet

With the singularity fast approaching, I find myself speculating about how biological and artificial intelligence will coexist in the future. It seems to me the most likely outcome is that biology will continue to be replaced by technology in one way or another, until it disappears entirely.

Maybe the decline of biology isn’t such a terrifying prospect, maybe it’s just the next natural step in our evolution. The long, blind process of natural selection has got us this far, but to go any further we’ll have to take control of that process, to transcend the mistakes of biology and engineer something better.

I know I shouldn’t care if my descendants are flesh and blood, or plastic and wiring, but being a biological organism (for the most part), I don’t find the idea of a machine-dominated world very palatable. I try to imagine other possibilities, other futures where humanity as I know it might be able to compete.

One possibility is that artificial life won’t be in competition with us, because it’s just not interested in the same things we are. Perhaps it will be more software than hardware, and so will be content to live in a virtual world, leaving the management of what we think of as the real world to us.

This may leave us feeling superior, but what makes the real world better than a simulation?  What is the difference, really, between reality and perception?

Drug research is the topic tackled in this week’s Futures story. Written by Steve Zisson, Treatment naive takes an unusual approach to clinical trials. Steve, who has spent a lot of his time writing about clinical research, kindly took some time out to explain what inspired him to write the piece. Warning, the below contains spoilers, so read the story first!

Writing Treatment naive

This short story evolved from my experiences reporting on how to make the clinical-research process more efficient from my time as a writer and eventually editorial director of Boston-based clinical trials publisher CenterWatch, and then as president of medical education publisher, Carlat Publishing.

Clinical research is challenging and one of the intractable problems is finding enough patients for clinical trials. Indeed, an entire industry has sprung up to help pharmaceutical companies improve patient recruitment for clinical trials. It is a very competitive business.

So, as a speculative fiction writer, I foresaw a day when researchers would run out of volunteer patients needed to test drug candidates in clinical trials. So how would desperate researchers go about finding a new population of volunteers?

Time travel might help, I thought, particularly to periods in history before there were many, or any, medications. But as a science-fiction writer and reader, I had a problem because I’m not an especially big fan of time-travel stories and, in fact, have assiduously avoided writing any time-travel yarns. In this case, I got over my reluctance in order to peer into the future of clinical research.

This week’s Futures story marks the debut in our pages of Emily Eckart. In The left hands of lovers, Emily explores the sometimes fraught relationship between humans and robots. She very kindly agreed to provide an insight into what inspired this tale. You can read more of her fiction at her website and you can keep up-to-date with her activities via Twitter.

 Writing The left hands of lovers

My job at Harvard Kennedy School Library has exposed me to several interesting books on politics and warfare that I otherwise would not have read. One in particular stayed with me: Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century by P. W. Singer, which deals with the use of robots on the battlefield.

Advances in robotics have resulted in machines that can detonate IEDs or land mines. This might seem like an obvious good, one that can prevent needless death.

But there’s a problem: humans anthropomorphize everything. Soldiers grow attached to the machines that save their lives, attributing emotions and the capacity for friendship to their robots. Singer writes about how intense the feeling of attachment can become: “When one robot was knocked out of action in Iraq, an EOD soldier ran fifty meters, all the while being shot at by an enemy machine gun, to ‘rescue it.’ ”

A further phenomenon was also intriguing. Studies of artificial intelligence have suggested that soldiers complete missions more effectively when interacting with a robot that has a friendly, relatable personality.  But this too can become problematic, increasing the risk of attachment. As Singer commented, “[T]he military may want robots with ‘a slightly aversive personality.’  In other words, robots that are social, but just annoying enough so that fellow soldiers won’t feel bad when they get blown up.”

What’s going through the mind of a soldier who risks his life for a machine — the very machine that was created for the purpose of sparing him? What if his robot is too friendly and likeable, setting him up for failure? These are the questions I set out to explore in The Left Hands of Lovers.

Christoph Weber makes his debut in Futures this week with his story The descent of man. Based in Reno, Nevada, Christoph is an arborist and his tale has a decidedly tree-like flavour. He very kindly made some time to explain what inspired him. Warning, this blog post contains spoilers, so read the story first!

Writing The descent of man

This summer I was on a team of arborists hired to remove an enormous apple tree whose rotted, hollow trunk had become home to a honeybee colony. While preserving the colony for relocation (and avoiding anaphylaxis), I began to think about colony collapse disorder (CCD) and how we might respond to honeybee extinction.

My first thought was that we could try to de-extinct the lost honeybees. However, if attempts to address (and even identify) the causes of CCD continue to fail, it’s likely that any de-extincted bees would perish if brought back to the same environment that killed their predecessors. Barring huge leaps in robotics, that leaves us with hand-pollination. This is the current reality of apple production in part of China.

Even in China’s cheap labour economy, hand-pollination is extremely time-consuming and expensive. If it became widespread in other countries, it could make many foods unaffordable. It occurred to me that this is a scenario for which some might actually propose slavery as a solution. Hungry people, after all, are not squeamish people (source: the Donner Party).

In addition, climate projections for the coming century anticipate drought for the American southwest but increased precipitation for the north, which would make the north the heart of future agriculture. The stage is set for a geographical reversal of the American Civil War.

Since I first learned that some geneticists think it could be possible to de-extinct Neanderthals, my mind has been occupied by these mysterious fellow hominins (Neanderthals, not geneticists). This possibility raises many questions, but as they are discussed in depth elsewhere, I will mention only the one explored in this story: what kind of place would Neanderthals have in our world?

We could bring them back to be objects of study (although informed consent might be tricky). They had immune systems distinct from ours, so studying them might save lives. But we cannot just lock them in labs, can we? Could they integrate into society? On a minor level, their pre-agriculture digestive systems would have problems with modern food (hey, they could try the Palaeo diet!). They also would probably not have resistance to virulent modern diseases that developed after their extinction. We might address that problem through medicine, but the question remains: what kind of a place could our world offer them?

To be clear, I think any team attempting to de-extinct Neanderthals would do so in a way it deemed ethical. Enslavement to feed anatomically modern humans would probably not be the goal.

But this is the experimental chamber of science fiction, where we can fast-forward time and give people terrible stressors to see how they respond. What happens after Neanderthals are brought back, when climate change and CCD cause economic instability and food insecurity? I suspect that some people would suggest putting Neanderthals to work as a way to keep food prices down. They’re not our species, after all. We’ve used all manner of beasts to grow our food — why should these animals be any different?

Before you say the descent of man to such depravity is unlikely, think about how many people have made judgements about human worth based on minor variations such as skin pigmentation. Now look at a Neanderthal skull. The differences are between us and them are more than skin-deep.

But why are the Neanderthals in trees? For a few reasons. First, this story idea germinated under a giant apple tree. Second, the extant species of great apes are all more arboreal than us. By making Neanderthals ‘a bit more like the rest of Hominidae’, I think their enslavement is more believable. There were Americans, after all, who tried to justify slavery by ‘proving’ that blacks were more ‘ape-like’ than whites.

Third, the evolutionary anthropologist in me (warning: he’s an amateur known to speculate wildly) thinks it is plausible that Neanderthals really were better climbers than anatomically modern humans. They were poor endurance runners, lacked throwing weapons and had robust builds with high caloric requirements. These and additional findings have led others to suggest that they were ambush hunters. For this story I speculated on a specific method: in wooded habitats, they may have hidden in tree blinds above high-traffic game areas and descended on prey.

Although I’m not suggesting that Neanderthals brachiated from tree to tree, I am speculating that climbing may have been more important to Neanderthal survival than to the survival of anatomically modern humans. If that were true, it seems likely that Neanderthals would have been at least slightly better climbers.

I wrote the original story in an excited flurry that ballooned to 6,000 words, and this post is also starting to swell, so I’ll wrap it up. The science of de-extinction is exciting, and could be a useful complement to conservation in combating truly tragic rates of extinction. However, there are some crucial questions that should be answered before bringing back any species. The one explored in The descent of man is: do we have a place for them?

In the case of Neanderthals, I think not. But it’s not up to me. It will be the decision of many people, who I hope have been frequently engaged in dialogue about this question. And that is why I hope Neanderthals haunt you.

Writing from the seclusion of the University of Rural England, John Gilbey has been a regular contributor to Futures since 2005. His first story, It never rains in VR, appeared in the first Futures anthology — published by Tor and available in both e-book form and in dead-tree format. His more recent tale, Corrective action, can be found in the new anthology of Futures stories, Futures 2, which is also published by Tor and available as an e-book. Many of John’s stories offer a vision of what happens when science fiction infiltrates the world of academic research, and his latest story, Infraction, finds John investigating an intriguing problem at another research facility. It kicks off 2015 for Futures in Nature in fine style (if you’ve not yet read the first Futures for 2015 in Nature Physics, then you should also call in to see George Zebrowski’s Passersby). You can catch up with John via his Twitter feed and you can find more of his Futures tales from the links at the end of Infraction (including an intriguing vision of what 2062 might look like). John has very kindly agreed to offer some insight behind his latest story:

Writing Infraction

I have worked in the research and higher education community for most of my — fragmented and fairly weird — career. As a result, I’ve visited many fascinating research sites and met some extraordinary people.

Counting them up recently, I came up with a number of places of interest that was well into three figures. As a writer, this gives me a mass of raw material to work with. The arcane processes of the various organizations, the ways people react to one another, the particular eccentricities of how the place operates all provide a rich texture that can be mined at will.

The high number also means that I can meld tiny aspects of people and places so that they are demonstrably not actual folk or real facilities — so avoiding pointing the finger at any one group of individuals.

So, how about Infraction?  Centres that handle Big Science are particularly interesting to me — fantastically expensive research tools and infrastructures, highly specialized roles and experiments that take the whole environment well out of the ordinary run of organizations.

Infraction is based on a number of these places — and security is, necessarily, a common thread to all of them. Two in particular spring to mind. At the first, I realized that the facility was guarded by armed security — and then I further realized that I had left my passport at the hotel. A tense conversation ensued, before I dug out of my wallet the library card from my home university. After some tooth-sucking this was accepted as ‘Government Issued Photo ID’ by the senior man at the gate — which later gave my Director of Information Services cause to fall nearly off his chair with laughter.

The following day, at an equally important location I was waved through the gate by a relaxed, smiling guy who didn’t even ask my name. Despite the difference in approach, the site was just as secure — as I was in the passenger seat of a badged car driven by a well-known staff member.

So, places differ — people also. But themes emerge and can be captured in support of a tale of possible, or at least potential, Futures.

I hope you enjoy Infraction, but all feedback — good or bad — is very welcome.