This week, Futures welcomes back Steven Fischer with his latest story Query, queue, repeat. When he last appeared in Futures, Steven introduced us to the First Fragmented Church of Entropy. This time, he presents a very different piece about technology. Here, Steven reveals the origins of this tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Query, queue, repeat

Human-level machine intelligence is coming. Don’t believe me? Ask Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk or any of the thousands of computer scientists surveyed over the past few decades.

Whether it’s ten, or twenty, or two-hundred years from now, Homo sapiens will create machines that can match and outthink us, and that’s a reality our species needs to face. What is uncertain, however, is what human-level artificial intelligence will mean for humans, and that question will be answered largely by our response to it.

Although androids with laser cannons and glowing red eyes make for exciting movies (and short stories, I hope), the reality of AI will be much more subtle. Machines have few reasons to compete with humans for physical resources such as water or crops, but competition between humans and AI is inevitable for far more important prizes such as jobs, and wealth, and in a broader sense, relevance.

As technology progresses and machine intelligence continues to grow, humans, as individuals and a whole, will have to choose how to respond. Will we resist the changes that AI entails and attempt to hold onto a world that is familiar, or will we adapt and evolve as our ancestors did, maybe even to the point that we intertwine our biology, not just our lives, with the machines we’ve learned to rely on?

While bombs-and-bullets war between humans and machines is a future that belongs squarely in the realm of science fiction, the political and social struggle around AI will be very real, and it’s time to start deciding which side you’ll be on.

Keeping fit is important — especially after your planet has been invaded — so it is helpful that this week Futures welcomes back Marissa Lingen with some pertinent advice for those donning their running shoes. In Running safety tips for humans, Marissa explains the potential pitfalls for the unwary jogger, making sure we can all enjoy a safe spot of exercise. Marissa’s wise words have been seen in Futures many times before, where she has shed light on issues as diverse as looking after multiple versions of yourself, coping with time travel and dealing with Maxwell’s Demon. You con find out more about Marissa’s work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals how her latest tale came about — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Running safety tips for humans

This story is what happens when I read the fluffy section of the newspaper. Most local papers have them: the section with TV listings, advice columns and ‘lifestyle’ articles. They’re willing to tell you what’s hot for autumn and how to wrangle dating websites and how you’re doing squats wrong and wearing the wrong bra size. (Seriously, hasn’t everybody seen enough of these articles that we’re all doing squats right and wearing the right bra size by now? Get on it, people.) Sometimes there are heartfelt personal essays or reviews of a restaurant where you might actually want to eat. But there’s a lot of chirpy, peppy nonsense also, some of it actually toxic. (The Internet has this also. Obviously. But for the Internet, you have to actually click on the clickbait, whereas the newspaper will considerately deliver it to your door, neatly packaged.)

I think that even after a cataclysm, humans will still have a deep-seated need to tell each other, “It’s fine, it’s all fine, and here’s what colour shoes go well with cataclysm.”

I also think that some of the poisonous social assumptions that underlay some of this advice would be very hard to shake, even with an apocalypse. Hence Running safety tips for humans.

Other Futures stories by Marissa Lingen

The most important thing | The many media hypothesis | Boundary waters | Maxwell’s Demon went down to Georgia | The stuff we don’t do | Unsolved logistical problems in time travel: spring semester | Entanglement | Quality control | Search strings | Alloy

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Caroline M. Yoachim with her story Shadow Station. When not wrestling with the idea of cryogenic suspension, Caroline can be found on her website or on her Twitter feed. Here she reveals what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Shadow Station

My stories often start from a writing prompt. Shadow Station was written for an online writing challenge, and the prompt for the story (which came from Vylar Kaftan) was: “Write about a drug, medicine, or medical treatment with an unusual property (four dimensional, sentient, invisible, etc.).” It got me thinking about the well-worn SF trope of people being cryogenically frozen in the hope of being awakened in the future when their illness could be cured.

Thawing someone who has been frozen can be problematic, so I started thinking about how people might try to use a stasis pod or stasis field to stop time instead. What would that look like, and what sorts of problems would they have to face? If time stops, there is no light/heat — essentially what you’ve got is a black hole. I really liked the image of person-shaped black holes, frozen in time, unmoving. That was the core idea that Shadow Station was written around.

This week’s Futures story Cold comforts comes from Graham Robert Scott, an English professor based at Texas Woman’s University. Here, Graham talks about how his tale came about — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Cold comforts

When the Indian Space Research Organization, operating on a shoestring budget and tight timetable, put a probe into orbit around Mars in 2014, it took roughly a dozen minutes for the signal of success to reach Earth. Light speed is cruel that way.

As we aim farther and farther from Earth, those lags in conversation between Earth and ship become more and more of an obstacle to success. Putting people on board to make snap decisions can help, but people are expensive, requiring food, water and support systems — all of which adds to the weight of the launch. People also require company. They’re more emotionally stable if they have companions, and they think better, too. A lone wolf with no one to bounce ideas off of is always, ironically, in danger of groupthink. Yet future explorations may, like India’s, be planned on shoestring budgets and unable to send large teams.

The advent of increasingly customizable pseudo-intelligent voice assistants like Siri and Alexa suggests a possible solution: What if explorers were launched in small numbers, but each carried a hard drive full of personalities? A single personality engine might have multiple profiles or roles it could play, based on actual people.

I was mulling this possibility recently when I sat down for what sci-fi screenwriter Jane Espenson calls a “writing sprint”, and what emerged was an early version of Cold comforts, which attempts to take the next step: Okay, given that solution, how might things go badly?