Every day brings a new story about AI, from great hype about its promise to abject fear of its perils. It’s as though a science fiction fantasy has come to life. But are we poised at the edge of utopia or dystopia?
It’s too soon to tell but there are certainly strong believers on each side. Ninety-two percent of business leaders have made plans to significantly invest in AI, while nearly half of Americans believe AI will ultimately attack humanity.
It’s no wonder AI evokes science fiction. Science fiction has been predicting AI since 1816 when Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein warned us of the dangers of creating artificial beings. For many, science fiction represents AI’s cautionary tale: humanity’s inevitable destruction at the hands of the technology it creates.
But not all science fiction follows this trope. Here are three powerful science fiction stories, each written well before the appearance of contemporary GenAI, that offer prescient insights on the most pressing questions of artificial intelligence and the complexity of human experience. They remind us that, despite technology’s seemingly endless powers, there are some things only humans can do.
When Algorithms Meet Culture: Ken Liu and Shelly Li, “Saving Face” (2011)
One of the most repeated promises of generative AI is that it will take on routine transactional tasks, freeing humans to attend to strategy and innovation. In some contexts, extracting the routine is harder than it seems. In Ken Liu and Shelly Li’s story “Saving Face,” two bots negotiate an international contract for the sale of scrap metal, carefully calculating economic indicators to produce a statistically fair outcome. The seller, Bruce, is a middle aged man with a deep seated distrust of the Chinese based on prior lost jobs and forgone business. The buyer is a young Chinese woman whose struggle for acceptance in American business leaves her weary and wary. The bots offer them deals that look fair on paper but, as Bruce remarks, don’t “feel” fair based on their respective life experiences. Slowly the bots come to realize that the human variables (or what the bots call “noise variables”) are significant obstacles to calculating a deal that will satisfy both parties.
Written as a mini-play, the whimsical story questions the universality of fairness, shining a light on embodied culture and its effect on even the most rational or logical parts of work. The bots can’t do the deal without their human counterparts because its outcomes must navigate intangible beliefs, entrenched feelings and deeply personal concerns. Numbers alone won’t work. “Saving Face” is a powerful reminder that even the most transactional tasks are imbued with complex human emotions, cultural implications and sometimes opaque sacrifices. What’s fair for some is unacceptable to others; “just the facts” will only go so far when we put our hearts and souls into our life's work.
When Machines Learn To Feel: Kurt Vonnegut, “EPICAC” (1950)
In a mash up between Cyrano de Bergerac and Frankenstein, Kurt Vonnegut’s “EPICAC” is a large super computer that provides romantic poetry to help a mathematician win the girl of his dreams. EPICAC is a shockingly relevant precursor of today’s LLMs, built to develop a Cold War edge over a Soviet foe but with a talent for solving any problem, including affairs of the heart. As EPICAC learns more about love, marriage and the object of the narrator's affections, he develops his own feelings. Generating the poems that win the girl, he struggles to understand his own place in the world, questioning what humans have that he does not. Ultimately he architects his own destruction, leaving behind 500 poems and a clue to his evolving feelings: “fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve. That is the only problem I want to solve. I can't go on this way."
Vonnegut’s story is a touching and trenchant tale about the lives and feelings of others we barely acknowledge, and the role technology plays in human connection. Penned not long after the death of roughly 85 million soldiers and civilians in World War II, Vonnegut’s story acknowledges the untold destructive power of technology. What is our ethical responsibility to each other as we create continually more sophisticated machines? And what care do we owe to the machines that do our bidding? Over 70 years later, as AI grows closer to becoming sentient every day, when does it become more than a machine? “EPICAC” challenges readers to not only imagine a future at the intersection of man and machine, but to consider what shapes and define humanity in a world where technology thinks and feels as humans do.
Creating Vs. Generating: Jack McDevitt, “Henry James, This One’s For You” (2005)
A hungry publisher receives a phenomenal book submission and rushes to sign its new young author in Jack McDevitt’s story, “Henry James, This One’s For You.” With the deal inked and an advance paid for three more novels, the publisher is startled to learn that the book was written by an AI named Max. When he probes Max’s creator and putative author, Edward, he discovers that the books take only weeks to write, needing more time for printing a single copy than creating. Immediately, he understands Max’s existential threat to the publishing industry, and the complete devaluation of the human literary canon. As they stand on the street after a celebratory cocktail, the publisher pushes Edward and his laptop under an oncoming bus, saving the literary world from certain destruction.
“Henry James, This One’s For You” explores the creative ability of AI and its potential to undermine what we hold dear: human ingenuity and artistic accomplishment. McDevitt presages the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike over AI’s threat to screenwriting and the ethical problems of profiting from presenting digital products as human work. But the story also reminds us that shooting the messenger won’t protect us from having to reshape our understanding of knowledge and culture in the face of new forms of intelligence. We can’t push technology under the bus any more than we could stop the industrial revolution when it irrevocably changed the pace and quality of human life. Instead we must work together to manage the process, to decide as a society where we want to preserve the human voice and where we are willing to accept digital facsimiles.
Humans have been on a quest to create artificial intelligence since early antiquity. Like the proverbial dog that catches the car, we’ve created something so strong that we aren’t yet sure what it is and what to do with it. But our literary history suggests that we know more than we think we do. These science fiction stories remind us that AI is a human invention but it doesn’t have to be a human replacement. Utopia or dystopia? Ultimately the choice is ours.
First published in Forbes.com.
