Asking the Wrong Questions

The 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland is now only a week away, and today the convention programme has been published. It is, unsurprisingly, chock full of fascinating stuff that has already got me gritting my teeth and wishing I could be in two or three places at once. The excellence of the programme is also the reason I found myself unable to say no to any of the events I was offered, which is why my Glasgow programme is the busiest I've ever had. First up, my book Track Changes: Selected Reviews will go on sale on August 8th (eagle-eyed blog visitors may have noticed the dedicated book page on the blog title bar). We will be having a launch event for the book at Worldcon on Friday the 9th. If you're around, I'd love to see you there. Friday, August 9th, 11:30           Book Launch: Track Changes by Abigail Nussbaum Argyll 3, In Person Abigail Nussbaum is a Hugo Award-winning critic and author of the blog Asking the Wrong Questions -- and now, author ...

After another long hiatus, my series A Political History of the Future returns at Lawyers, Guns & Money with a discussion of how science fiction has depicted artificial life in general, and AI in particular. This is a companion piece to a post that ran at LGM last month, in which I discussed not only my skepticism towards the growing technological field of "AI", but my dismay at the way that science fiction has been used to launder a technology that cannot do what it claims to do.  In today's article, I look at the long tradition in science fiction of imagining artificial life as a way of working through anxieties about scientific progress. As our understanding of what computers can and can't do has changed, science fiction came up with the AI, a supposedly all-powerful being onto which we project our needs, fears, and anxieties. An AI is something we make, but it's supposed to be better and wiser than us—in War Games (1983), it is the computer, not the hum...