In this week’s Futures, Tom Easton and Michael A Burstein tackle an unusual issue in artificial intelligence with their story Sofer Pete.  You can find out more about Michael’s activities at his website. Here Tom and Michael offer some insight into the origins of their latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Sofer Pete

Recently a friend brought our attention to a report of an industrial robot being used to copy the Torah. It noted that for several reasons the result would not be suitable for use. But we thought that that might not always be true. Artificial intelligence is advancing very rapidly, and it may not be long before our story is less fiction than news.

Judaism has had to deal with changes in society and technology for 2,000 years. Many Jewish science-fiction fans love to play with the questions of how Jewish law will deal with future technology, such as cloned meat or time machines. Assuming true artificial intelligence develops, the role of a robot in the Jewish world will also have to be determined.

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back Norman Spinrad as he explores the idea of consciousness and AI in the story Mr Singularity. Norman is no stranger to Futures — or indeed sci-fi — having appeared in our pages as long ago as 2000. His latest tale squares up to artificial intelligence and here he reveals the ideas that inspired it — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Mr Singularity

I’ve been interested in the difference between ‘artificial intelligence’ and consciousness for decades, long before Verne Vinge even thought about anything like the Singularity. In particular, I’m interested in the question of what consciousness is in physical terms.  Way back in the 1970s, Dona Sadock and I wrote an essay called ‘Psychesomics’, published in Analog, which centrally was about how consciousness — a non-physical subjective experience we all experience, indeed that is the ‘me’ that is what experiences anything — might arise from mass and energy.

We grossly underestimated how long it would take for a science we called psychesomics — the science of the relationship between the subjective experience of consciousness and the objective realm of mass and energy — to evolve and answer this question, figuring it would take a decade or so, when in fact, three decades later, it still hasn’t.

We did come up with our own theory, which still has not been proven or disproven.  Namely that consciousness is a holographic phenomenon, the interface between sensory input and internal information — sight, sound, smell, vision, touch, bodily sensations, cerebral biochemistry, hormonal messages, etc., data — and the physical processing ‘meatware’ of the brain and indeed the body entire.

This is one main reason why I believe that artificial intelligence is not artificial consciousness and probably can’t be.  And however ‘intelligent’ AIs may become, even to the point where they create more powerful AIs, which create more powerful AIs until the Singularity is supposedly reached, they are not consciousnesses, cannot be consciousnesses, but only clever emulations thereof.

Which is the ‘anti-Turing test’ that Mr Singularity fails.

This week Futures is delighted to welcome Sarah L Byrne with her story Green boughs will cover thee. Sarah is an editor and writer based in London,  and you can find out more about her work from her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, Sarah kindly reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Green boughs will cover thee

The title of this story was inspired by Handel’s aria Ombra mai fu — or, more precisely, its English-language version Slumber, dear maid.

It’s easy to assume that one is a translation of the other, but in fact the lyrics are very different: the Italian praises a beautiful and beloved tree, whereas the English seems to lament a girl’s death. Yet the imagery of the peaceful shade of the tree’s boughs is the same.

How odd, I always thought, that the same song could have two such different meanings.

But isn’t that the nature of perception — like an optical illusion, where you can look at the same picture from different angles, or in a different frame of mind, and see different things? Or — coming back to the story — consider how differently two people, a parent and child, for example, can remember the same events.

It’s amazing we manage to communicate with and understand each other at all — never mind with other species. But, through some miracle of empathy, we do exactly that.

Studies have shown that not only does interspecies social bonding exist — certainly with domesticated companion animals such as dogs — but that it mimics or ‘hijacks’ the same mechanisms that evolved for human interactions, particularly the parent–child bond. Even plants have been shown to respond to touch, and may communicate with each other by releasing volatile chemicals into the air, so — in fiction, at least — the possibilities don’t have to stop with animals.

It’s interesting to reflect how much science fiction — from contact with alien life to artificial intelligence at home — is at its core about that yearning to reach out and connect, to understand and be understood. This story tried to explore that.

Most of all, though, the story was about two of my beautiful rescue dogs, now both gone to their final resting places. The troubled, abused, difficult one who bonded with me so strongly, who needed me so much, who demanded all my love and got it. And the little, good, gentle one who never got the time and attention she deserved; who was so quiet and uncomplaining that no one realized how unwell she was until it was too late.

Forgive me, little girl.

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino with their thought-provoking story Proton. George is certainly no stranger to Futures, having appeared in the original run of stories back in 2000 as well as more recently with stories such as Sticky and Passersby. He teamed up with Charles in 2015 for Jiffy. Here they offer an insight into the creative process that produced their latest piece — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Proton

Charles Pellegrino and I have had a spirited discussion for many years now — producing to date a novel, The Killing Star (recently optioned for movies) and a short story, Oh, Miranda!, among others in progress — always surprising each other with provocative thought and disciplined writing, so much so that in the case of Proton we suspected, by 15 November 2016, that a few canny mathematicians might complete the more rigorous work of the story and publish it in Nature.

The idea of adding a twelfth space-time dimension to the eleven of ‘Brane theory’ popped up by analogy as Charles walked past a crumbling brick wall on the way to an off-Broadway comedy. After missing most of the play and discussing the geometry with me, it became possible to suspect that all of space and time could be seen, at its lowest quantum limits, as so intensely pixilated that even ‘spooky action at a distance’ seemed actually to work, a universe in which space-time dimensions become an absolute limit, perhaps as much so as the speed of light. We penned the story as might be visualized through a thought experiment with no mathematics. As for spooky action at a distance in a pixilated (super-memBrane) universe, we’re still betting that multiple people of a mathematical bent had the same insight at the same time and are still working out the equations.

Part of the inspiration for Proton, especially for our ending, came by way of Bertrand Russell’s final lines in his ABC of Relativity: “we know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power”. Here the implication for our technological prowess is that it may lead to revolutionary cosmic engineering.

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome back Bo Balder with her latest story I die a little. Based in Utrecht in the Netherlands, Bo has written numerous short stories — including Skin hunger for Futures — and her novel The Wan came out last year. You can find out more about her work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, Bo reveals what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing I die a little

I wrote the story of I die a little in a flash-fiction contest on a writer’s website. One of the prompts was to write about a character who is imprisoned — this could be a literal or metaphorical prison. Immediately, I flashed to a woman locked up in a plastic globe watching her kid.

That’s where the story started. I had decided in that first impression that they couldn’t speak together, so they had to use sign language. What would a mother and a child speak of when they find themselves on the other side of a barrier? Children leave home, mothers don’t want them to but they do, longing for time for themselves. But this was science fiction, obviously, they were on an alien planet. The son had chosen to stay, the mother to go. Drama on tap.

I will add that I have children in university myself, so maybe I was speaking from experience in a completely metaphorical way …