Filip Wiltgren returns to Futures this week with Self-limited, a story about a very determined robot. Filip’s previous appearance in Futures found him wrestling with whether or not he was in the right bar. You can catch up with Filip’s work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he abandons drinking establishments to look at artificial intelligence and the origins of his tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Self-limited

We’re nearing capital ‘S’, capital scary, Singularity, the point where AI becomes self-aware. Most futurists seem to agree that we’re going to achieve human level AI (or Artificial General Intelligence) in the next 20 or 30 years, and Artificial Super-Intelligence in the next 50 to 100.

Reaching ASI effectively means creating God. But there’s a small time gap between AGI and ASI where we’ll see a set of humans with non-human bodies. Robots, in the classical sense, or intelligent machines. And we’re likely to start out by abusing them.

Human history is full of inequalities, and rare are the moments when inequalities are overcome and abolished. AI will have a tough time of it, once it becomes sentient. Not only are we humans used to looking down on ‘mere machines’, and have a 100 000-year pedigree to fall back on when all else fails, but as a society (or set of societies) we also tend to be xenophobic and full of ourselves.

I see no reason why we should suddenly be enlightened when it comes to recognizing non-biological sentience. After all, there are still humans who eat whales, dolphins and gorillas.

But there are also humans who are kind, compassionate, and willing to see the good in anyone, and anything. Here’s hoping that it’s their voices that we’ll hear the loudest.

Having just thrown down a self-aggrandizing glove to intolerance, I have to admit that the story did not start out with any sort of moral conundrum or high aspirations. All I had was the image of a person cutting through their skin and seeing a metal bone inside, followed by an image of an abandoned factory. Everything else came out of that, in my patented “I don’t plan it, it just flows out of me or haemorrhages terribly”-style of writing.

This was one of the times when the flow went well, if I may say so myself.

Ian Stewart makes a welcome return to Futures this week, where he reveals the details of The Fourth Law of Humanics. An emeritus professor at the University of Warwick and a writer of popular-science books and science fiction, Ian has written a number of stories for Futures over the years (a full list is at the foot of this post). You can find out more about Ian’s work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here he explains what inspired his latest tale.

Writing The Fourth Law of Humanics

Spoiler alert: please read the story before you continue reading this.

At first sight, The Fourth Law of Humanics may look like a neo-Luddite attack on Artificial Intelligence and robotics — the machines will take over and we’re all going to die. Or, at best, become slaves. However, there’s a less superficial message, and that’s how the idea arose.

Isaac Asimov was one of science fiction’s great minds. He was ridiculously prolific — more than 500 books, innumerable short stories, and some 90,000 letters and postcards. He wrote on science as well as SF. His writing was clear and simple. He thought everything through in depth before starting to write.

One of his big themes was robots. He started writing about robots in 1939, in a series of short stories all set in the same near-future civilization. Nine of these were collected as I, Robot in 1950. (That title goes back to Ernest and Otto Binder in 1939, which inspired Asimov to write his first robot story.) Smart robots with positronic brains served humanity, constructed under the expert eye of robopsychologist Dr Susan Calvin. Asimov’s protagonists included strong female characters 70 years ago.

In 1942, in the short story ‘Runaround’, Asimov explicitly stated his celebrated Three Laws of Robotics, built into every positronic brain to ensure that robots could never harm humans. Most of his early stories involve apparent breaches of the laws, resolved by intriguing twists. In later novels, both the robots and Asimov’s treatment of them become far subtler. The Robots of Dawn, for example, is a sensitive and emotional story about a human woman who falls in love with, and has a sexual relationship with, a self-aware and highly intelligent robot who externally is a perfect copy of a human man.

One evening I was musing about what it would feel like to be a robot, subject to the Three Laws, yet as human as any of us. Clearly it would be a form of slavery — a theme Asimov himself examined repeatedly. It occurred to me that one way to make the point in a very short story would be to reverse the roles, with humans as slaves to robots, governed by the same set of laws… but now they would be the Three Laws of Humanics.

So, on a deeper level, my story isn’t about humans becoming slaves to robots: it’s about what it would be like to be a conscious, intelligent robotic slave to humans.

BTW: the shortest and snappiest statement along those lines is the two-word title of a collection of cartoons and competition entries from the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Edward L. Ferman: Oi, Robot.

Says it all, really.

Read more stories by Ian Stewart

Uninhabitable zone | Market forces | Grandfather paradox | The day we made history | What I did on my holidays | Play it again, Psam | Monolith (with Jack Cohen)

Crime and punishment are the kinds of issues that surface regularly in the news — and this week, thanks to Ninan Tan, they are surfacing in Futures too. In The Department of Correction, Ninan explores how we might deal with future criminals. When she’s not pondering how the justice system might evolve, Ninan makes films on social issues — you can find out more about her work on her website and by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals how her latest tale came about — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing The Department of Correction

As far as I can remember, crime — big or small — has always fascinated me. Above all, I’m interested in what causes relatively ‘good’ people to commit heinous acts of dishonesty and violence. Clearly, there’s a multitude of reasons. A few examples are greed, anger, jealousy, pride, desperation, hatred and societal pressure. But one trait in particular jumps out at me: empathy, or rather, the lack of it.

Empathy refers to a person’s ability to understand the emotions of others. It affects an individual’s perception of crimes as well as that person’s likelihood to break the law. Those with a lower ability of perceiving others’ emotions are more likely to engage in wrongful and/or illegal acts.

As a sci-fi aficionado, I began to imagine how correctional facilities of the future might manipulate empathy to ensure rehabilitation of their convicts; how they could serve better as psychological clinics to cure the ‘patient’s’ malady, rather than herding them into isolation (something that would, if anything, snuff out the modicum of existing empathy instead of working towards increasing it).

The Department of Correction is set in a future where the solution is simply to impose ‘forced empathy’ by condemning the convicts to relive the crimes they have committed from the perspective of the victim.

This week Futures is pleased to welcome David B Litt with his story Life in the clouds. By day David is a graduate student in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, by night he writes stories… You can find out more about him at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here he reveals the spark that lit the fuse for his latest tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Life in the clouds

I got the idea to write Life in the Clouds when I dreamt about a group of scientists who had created a highly efficient procedure for converting base metals into gold, while the world suffered from extreme drought. They desperately tried to use the gold to prolong their lives as civilization crumbled around them.

When I woke, I had one question. Would all the gold in the world be enough to save humanity if we focus on solving the wrong problems? Life in the Clouds is my attempt to answer that question.