Greetings, Future Tensers,
Who’s responsible if a robot murders its owner? That’s the central question posed by “Mika Model,” a new short story by Paolo Bacigalupi that we’re excited to have published for our new Future Tense Fiction project, a joint effort with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Also part of our Futurography unit on killer artificial intelligence, Bacigalupi’s story begins when an advanced sex robot turns itself over to the police for decapitating its owner. From there, a complex set of issues emerge that suggest the real danger of A.I. may not be what they’ll do to us but the ways we’ll relate to them.
Ryan Calo, an expert in robotics law, begins to unpack some of those questions in an essay responding to Bacigalupi’s story. Calo notes that it’s best not to anthropomorphize robots, even as he acknowledges that it’s sometimes impossible not to. Such slippages can only make it more difficult to assign blame. While interviewing A.I. researcher Stuart Russell last week, I learned that living with the computers of the future may mean living with such uncertainties. As Russell suggested to me, struggling with the values we impose on computers may mean coming to terms with what we value ourselves, a premise that’s also at the heart of Bacigalupi’s tale.
Here are some of the other stories that we read while contemplating how much the FBI paid to hack a phone:
- Mechanical doping: Apparently some professional cyclists are installing tiny motors in their bikes to win races. Because performance-enhancing drugs aren’t enough.
- Educational technology: Phones certainly seem like a distraction in the classroom, but one app may actually help students stay focused and meet their goals.
- Social networking: Has Facebook peaked? Will Oremus explores how the site is changing, becoming a platform for news and other information, rather than one for personal details.
- Cybersecurity: A database containing personal records for 87 million Mexican voters found its way online. That’s a lot of personal records!
Updating my firmware,
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
