Narrative futures. How did the stories we tell shape how we think about the future, the present and the past?
What is speculation for? And how might we construct better narratives for a better future?
Narrative Futures is a podcast coming to you from Futures Thinking, a research network housed in the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities.
My name is Chelsea. Hey, I'm a doctoral researcher in the faculty of English here at the University of Oxford.
You're listening to the Fed episode of Narrative's Futures in conversation with Sami Shah.
We explore what it means to bring religious and secular worldviews together in speculative
fiction and discuss the possibility of our eventual subjugation to benign A.I. overlords.
This podcast is interactive, following the interview,
you'll be treated to to writing prompts designed by novelist and creative writing tutor extraordinaire Louis Greenberg.
We invite you to share your response to these with us via email at Futures Thinking at torch dot o x, dot ac dot UK.
We'll share these on the blog where you'll also be able to find the full transcript of each episode with links to the books,
writers and ideas that we discuss. As the world so radically changes,
we hope these conversations and ideas give you insight and inspiration to think about how else we might live and create collectively going forward.
Sami Shah is a radio broadcaster, Stand-Up comedian and author of The Boy of Fire and Earth,
which is about a young man's quest through a fictional Karachi filled with creatures from Pakistani and Muslim mythology.
He is also the author of A Migrant and the Islamic Republic of Australia.
And in a past, life was part of Pakistan's first English language improvised comedy troupe Blackfish, currently based in Melbourne, Australia.
Shah also contributed his critically acclaimed short story Reep to the short story collection,
The Djinn Falls in Love and other stories edited by Jared Suran and Mahvish Murad, who also feature in the next two episodes of this podcast.
What follows is an extract from Shaa story Reep in which myth and technology become intertwined
in a way that demands that we reconsider how we categorise the unknowable in the world.
So Reba's a story about a a a drone operating centre in America.
You know, because the drones that work in Afghanistan in all these places are basically based out of the US.
And so it's about a drone operating centre kind of viewing a village in Pakistan and watching for Taliban activity and everything.
And then somehow accidentally witnessing a child's possession by again and the subsequent of tearing apart of the village.
So the main characters in it are a grant who is one of the who is the protagonist?
He's a operator in America who works at the Air Force and runs drones.
And he's got a few other people. The analyst was a civilian and a few other people around him as well who work.
So when the story the bush I'm about to read to you is when they've just noticed because they
watched this village all the time and so they know the lives of the people in the village.
And now they've just noticed that one of the children of a family of 11 children,
that they know one of the children hasn't returned from school that day.
And that's a bit strange. So. What's happening out of the analysts asked.
Miriam isn't back with the other kids. And I think something's happened to her.
Grant said. The kids were all clustered around their father, pointing back the way they had come,
grant with eyes that could see further and a vantage point that allowed a wider view was already scanning alights landscape a grazing donkey.
Trees scrub. These became bright spots of light as grass cycled through to Infra-Red, picking up heat signatures.
Well, [INAUDIBLE]. Hope she's OK, said ANSTO. I don't know.
You get at, the analyst said it's not exactly a great place to be a little girl anyway.
Grant scanned one last time, then returned to the primary zone. The father, David, had set off to set up the father.
David had set off with his elder teacher and. Retracing their steps.
They've named all the people in the village themselves. So they've called the father of the little girl, David, and then called little girl Miriam.
They have no way of knowing the actual names. So the father, David, is set off with his elder three children until retracing their steps.
The rest had gone back inside. The excitement, it's Julie, been too much for Tommy.
The Taliban's bowels to contain.
And he was back in his house late, flaring out from under the edges of the wooden, our cheque of the wooden shack outhouse.
There's almost no activity worth noting for the remainder of the shift.
David and his sons were out of observable range and grant lord all of Tommy the Taliban entrances and exits.
Jefferys back ANSTO said Grant focussed the cameras, bringing interview a man pedalling across the desert.
Jeffrey was thin and wore giant spectacles. He didn't wear a turban around his head, but he went out like David and told me that Daniel did,
didn't know why, nor did they know much else about him. He had always lived alone and seldom left the house.
When you did leave, we went to the bazaar a few miles away, returning with just enough room for one.
He barely spoke to the others and we gave him a wide berth when possible. He's scared or anxious.
Is something for sure. Out of the analysts said, leaning over Grant and pointing at Geoffrey's face,
they could read emotion through thermal imaging had been trained to do so.
When the subject was experiencing heightened stresses, the blood moved differently to parts of the face.
The tip of the nose was the give away drawing growing brighter, an angry or embarrassed and darling when frightened or surprised.
Jeffries faces or as grey as the surrounding countryside. How long has he gone?
And asked. Grad consulted Shaun's notes. Seven hours and 13 minutes.
They get notes on everything so that eventually some nerd in the Pentagon would
use that to extrapolate where Jeffrey had gone and what he'd done while gone. He's been rolling around in mud.
It looks like Grand said. Then he zoomed him some more. No, that's not mud.
It's got a mild Hitzig, very mild. But it's their blood.
Arthur. Anna. Yeah. Grant. Huh? Said ANSTO.
There was Jeffrey Psyco furiously up to his hole, up to his home, skidding to a stop nose,
falling off at his front door unlocked and shoved the bike inside and drove in after the door slamming shut so hard grabbed could almost hear it.
Well, that's not [INAUDIBLE] suspicious at all, said Anna. The analyst Gatford Bitzer had been to it of data grow connective tissue.
Did David and the boys weren't back yet. That meant they hadn't found Miriam dried blood and no one else had seen Geoffrey indite himself.
No one on the ground, at least not Meems father. Probably not a mother.
None of a sibling is not even any of the neighbours. It was almost sunset in Pakistan.
The dull visibility was why they were on thermal imaging and had seen the mild heat emanating from the splat on his clothes.
The timing meant that anyone who was indoors was bringing the dummy. The darling would usually be at the mosque at this time.
But even he hadn't left his home, likely afraid of soiling himself and frustrating to allow guns switched to the side,
cameras searching the periphery in the distance, he picked up the fitting signature glos of David and his two sons heading back to Ft.
Rich in their posture. He was then returned home. David pausing to look back out over the desert before entering.
Too dark to keep searching. Granted, then, you know, reapers do for refuelling in two hours.
We can take a roundabout way home, see if we pick up anything, unless you consider this as commanding officer on deck.
It was within his purview to okay it. But he'd also have to explain any deviations in the flight plan higher up Granton to look up at him.
It's Miriam Grant said she's just a lucky girl. We watched her for months and spot her in a crowd if need be.
There's no crowd, said ANSTO. If she's out there, she's likely dead.
Which means she isn't giving off any heat. And so you do find her.
What then? Vanessa was right. There was no way of notifying anyone on the ground in that small village in rural Pakistan.
They didn't even know they were being watched from above. Grant was about to concede the point when one of the analysts said, what's that?
Grad turn to the back to the screens in the distance, the same direction the children went to school in.
David and the boys went searching for Miriam and Jeffrey had come back in panic from a single
flare of brilliant white glowed brightly like a blade of light slicing its way across the desert.
How far out is it and the analyst said Grant did some quick maths.
About four clicks heading towards a village. It's far. Stewart should make contact 90 minutes.
What is it? Nesto. His main screen was filled with the same visual display you'd get in a jet.
Hard. Except his views was it was oriented directly below the draw.
He kept glancing on a grand screen. The light allowed into an ivory pillar, still moving steadily.
I can't tell. Too bright to be vehicular. Not even if it had a gold furnace.
That much heat can only, I don't know. And at the end it was leaning over him.
Close the aperture. I think I see something she said. Grant, I've done a series of commands.
The screen darkened visibility dropping away.
The spectral starlight given off by wildlife scarring across the desert floor faded into uniform blackness.
Even the blades from the object of attention diminished until it was little more than low flame.
At its base was a child. It was still too far for Gran to be sure it was the same size as Miriam and have the same scrawny bill.
At first he thought she was crawling on her hands and knees. Then he realised that was an inaccurate description.
She was propelling herself only with her hands, legs stretched limp behind her, slithering from side to side as she looked forward.
It's worth it to the analyst, right? Yes, ma'am. See, Grant?
It is. I'm pretty sure how she's moving so fast. ANSTO said Grant spanning the cameras,
keep pace with her as they watch the girls better with rocks and across a narrow gully moving so far, she's almost leaping.
The heat emanated from within her. Emanating from within her was fierce. Even with visibility reduced to almost nil.
As she grew closer to home, they were able to discern details.
Her clothes were torn, ragged patches hanging on her frame and her legs were streaked with blood, the feet twisted almost entirely around.
Grant zoomed in on her face and from next to him, ANSTO said, Oh, Jesus.
It was definitely Miriam. Despite the distorted mouth, lips were pulled back in a green so wide it would split her cheeks.
Long teeth glowed inside. Her eyes were dark holes in her face. She was almost at her front door now snake picking up the dirt path to her home.
She stopped their legs, still stretched uselessly behind her. Then, as Grant and the others in the container watched, she turned her body sideways.
Did her head back up and stared straight at them. Pinpricks of light flared in the hollow gashes in her face with her eyes should have been white.
Bettles climbed out of each hollow and on the floor rolled across her face. Its fire grabbed heard himself say she [INAUDIBLE] looking at us.
And Esther was saying, Then the feed from Reep got out.
So that's it. That's great. Lovely. Thank you so much.
My pleasure. Yeah. Well, I don't know if it makes sense because I've got to dropped you into the middle of the story,
but Reep is the Reaper drone that surveys the village and.
Yeah. And what happens next? You'd have to you'd find out the world that you build in and read.
And and boy, fire and earth is is the world that we know.
But with this with this element of the mythical. Do you want to talk us through a little about why why you've chosen to write these stories this way?
Well, for me, it's it's because that's the kind of world I grew up in.
So I grew up in Pakistan, in Karachi and and being a Muslim country and being a South Asian Muslim country,
which has not just kind of Muslim mythology like Djinns and all of that involved in it,
but also more local flavour, like creatures like the picture Parian and the trail.
And so these are the boogie men, the boogie creatures. They get a bump go bump in the night that we grew up with, we knew we were told off.
But what happens in a Western country is when you grow up, you stop believing in those things, right?
You believe in rational world, the world you can see and touch.
But religion is so deeply wound into our lives that that that stuff is about religion is part of religious belief.
You know, if you are Muslim, you have to believe in the Koran, in in Allar,
in the Prophet Muhammad and also in the reality that gin's exist and interact with humans regularly.
Engines are, according to Islam, a creature made a fire that existed dimensioned parallel to ours that can enter damage.
And it will sometimes they're good, sometimes they're malicious. And Muslims believe that the devil is Ajin, not a fallen angel, for example.
So that's you know, that's the kind of things that that they will part of my life.
Like when I was growing up, we had stories and not even when I was growing up and I was an adult, you know,
we had stories that we believed that there's a sweet shop that has a the tree of deserts out every night,
which has gone by morning because the Jinnah's coming eat it. And because of the, you know, the gift to the gin's, the sweet shop does.
Well, there's you know, there there was stories about your dad,
so-and-so religious daughter got possessed by Ajin and that's why no one can marry her or so.
And so Unglue can speak to Gin's and see Gin's.
And he would you know, when we were around, he would sometimes say, you know, there's a gene in that corner of the room.
You can't see him, but he's there. But he's a good Gynt.
So that intersection of modernity and everyday mundane life and the supernatural is so common and so almost mundane in its own way.
If you're in those places of the world that I just felt like the stories I want to tell a stories which aren't,
you know, in a in any other kind, they might be gone magical realist, but or fantasy, but they're not.
When you're growing up there, the reality. Yeah, I think that's really that's really important.
The intersection of these worlds, I suppose. And the reality is that these are realities for people rather than rather than fantasies.
So when I when I'm thinking about you or your urban fantasy novel boire far enough.
One of the reviews notes that you are doing for Karachi, what Gaiman did for London in Neverwhere.
So and then previously you'd written I Migrante, about your experience being an immigrant and working as a journalist and now as a Stand-Up comic.
So you're quite genre fluid and you work across a lot of different kind of narrative strategies, I suppose.
Well, part of it is if you look at the buffone and I Migrante, they both have something going to secretly hidden it,
which is what your buffo or not is actually a story of Karachi.
It's got a bit of history of Karachi, but it's got it's about the city that I grew up in, a city that I still have a deep and abiding love for.
And I Migrante is an autobiography, but it's actually the social political history of Pakistan.
I like telling stories about geography, about police and then situating people in that place.
And so there is that common theme running through the work. But yeah, the same time I like writing.
And for me, I'm also a Stand-Up comedian. So I write Stand-Up comedy and I perform it regularly.
And the script I'm working on these days is a crime noir kind of story for someone.
And the next book I'm halfway through is a book about media in Australia and how it affects people's lives.
So I think what I like doing is and I know it's a problem because it might actually end up meaning that I am spread so
thin that no one ever actually ends up being let me become a success because I have too many to disparage a body work.
But I just like going with the story goes. And if a story wants to be told,
the story that wants to be told is a serious story or a genre fiction story or a science fiction story or a horror story or a crime noir story,
then that's a story I will tell.
I don't want to be limited in the stories I can do because the stories I read are the stories I enjoy aren't limited to one genre either.
You know, I read comics, I read science fiction, fantasy crime, autobiography history.
I read all those things. And so I want to be able to tell all those things as well.
Absolutely. I think it's the mark of a good reader and a good writer to be well versed in a variety of of genres.
And obviously like concepts of genre can be quite problematic, as you say,
if they're being spread too thin, because that's kind of what the market demands.
Right. Writers who are slightly pigeonholed so that there's no.
That's what I'm getting when I read Sami Shah. But when you read Sami Shah, you get lots of different narratives when you think about the future.
So, I mean, you it was announced late last year that you would be leaving ABC Melbourne and to write more.
So, yeah, you've mentioned that you're working on a Bernau crime novel.
Well, when you think about writing narratives for the future, what kind of narratives are you hoping to either write all read?
Well, when it comes as well, I guess they be futuristic fiction, science fiction and that kind of a thing,
and it's I'm actually in a strange place right now where I'm not enjoying that genre much
anymore because I feel like I already thought there's some still some books in it that I enjoy.
But the ones that are more recently that I've encountered just feel as if the future we were
predicting has been so wildly different from the future that we that we've result ended up with.
If you look at the books I read as a kid, which was set in the year 2020 and so on and so forth, none of them predicted cell phones.
None of them predicted coronavirus outbreaks. None of them predicted the Internet.
Humans were so in so many ways know other than maybe William Gibson here or there or bit Neal Stephenson.
So I like reading far flung stories.
Now, we just said thousands and thousands of years in the future.
You know something by and lucky, for example, of someone like that with her Imperial RATCH trilogy, because it's practically fantasy at that point.
It's so far flung that even I don't have to worry about the plausibility of it,
but the one I want to read, which I can't read because I haven't found it yet.
Which then makes me want to write it is something about. It's about the lives of people like me, Bruno, South Asians, the brown people.
They like it. You know, we we are there in these science fiction story.
And I started thinking about that a lot more recently, which is, you know,
if you look at the history of the world, you look at the current state of the world.
You know, it's built on the backs of brown people.
It's you know, it's basically if you go to from Saudi Arabia to London, every building is built by someone who is a brown immigrant.
Every finger food is delivered by a brown guy. You're you're in working the kitchens around the world.
If you speak Punjabi, if you're in America, you eat and you don't speak Hispanic,
you're not going to be able to work in a kitchen if you're in London or in Melbourne or in jail in Riyad and you don't speak or do or Hindi,
you're not going to be able to work in a kitchen. It's a completely changed world that way.
And then there's a demographic representation which is so sorely lacking. So I, I want to be able to tell that story.
I want to be able to tell the story of a. What happens with artificial intelligence, because I feel like we haven't fully understood where it goes,
what it does, how it could impact our lives, and we kind of blindly and blindly going forward with it.
But, you know, men better minds. And I've kind of touched on that. But I feel like the element that I can bring to it is the representational story.
Absolutely. Yeah. There's some interesting work being done at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge by Cancer Hall and Stephen Cave,
and they presented at a conference that I ran in October twenty nineteen about the whiteness of A.I.
That's right. And a lot of people have explored some of those elements in different researchers, which I've enjoyed.
For example, one of the things that I keep thinking about and I've spent a lot time actually thinking about this is, you know,
one of the areas where we don't see an implementation of A.I. and no one seems to be talking about the possibility of implementation.
To me, it seems so obvious is government terms of replacing government politicians,
et cetera, with A.I., because in the end, what do you need the government for?
You need a government to make sure the trains run on time to make sure the traffic lights work.
It's resource management. At its heart, a politician's job is resource management, making sure food gets here, money goes there, things like that.
All the policy decisions, that's stuff that can be done with an equation, that stuff that with within intuitive enough algorithm,
you could actually have all of those things done on a global level without ever worrying about the
the corruption and the ego and the politics and ideologies that human politics bring into it.
If the United Nations gets replaced by an A.I. that has an algorithms that its main purpose is resource management and it sees not enough food here,
too much food there, move food from here to there. Not enough roads are bad here.
Money over there. Move money from here that things like that. You know, employment, etc., etc.
These are all equations. Economists use them and mathematicians use them to study the world all the time.
But we have not taken to that next level of implementation.
And because we think that if we give hand it over to A.I., we're going to end up with the Terminator.
But I don't think the Terminator would be interested in getting us at all.
I think that would be too far below and too easy a problem to solve for the Terminator to bother with.
I really like the idea of. Yeah, of of a a beneficent global organising structure.
Yeah. What we presume in that right of course is that the algorithm is unbiased and that it will move food from here to there, whereas necessary.
But as is highlighted now,
the worlds both on the backs of brown people and yet those people are widely disenfranchised and impoverished by by these structures.
Right. So it becomes a question of who writes. The algorithms and how and why.
And what do we what do we feed into the algorithm? Right. Because our current systems are perhaps not the best data.
Yeah, absolutely, because I think look, I think with coronavirus, we've kind of seen,
even though we're not acknowledging the importance of an organisation like the World Health Organisation or the United Nations,
because it turns out that America are having a terrible healthcare system,
impacts the rest of the world, that New Zealand having a good healthcare system, saves places as well.
So obviously, at this point, the health of someone in a rural village in in in England has a direct connexion to the health of someone in Zaire,
to the health of someone in Perth. You know, around the world, we've got that thing because of globalisation, which means whether we like it or not,
a universal body that oversees, you know, basic human rights and and basic care is something that's more important now than ever before.
But, yes, you're right, Bill. How do you then go from there to implementing something that actually does function?
Because you've been Dotcom's through Silicon Valley. It'll be the same kind of things, everything as a Silicon Valley is being, which is, you know,
you go if you're a black man and you go in the bathroom and you try washing your hands,
the sensor doesn't read your hands because it only reads white hands. Yeah, Boyle.
I mean, he has done some really important work on how facial recognition is so racist and how it can't read.
I can't read Women of Colour. Yeah. There's there's some really important research being done on the ethics of A.I. But the way that we know,
the way that the corporates work with with A.I. tends to be this push towards the singularity, which is decades away, if not, you know, not centuries.
So, yeah, there is a big jump there.
It is that it's the it's the way for progress no matter what.
And there's that TV show on HBO called Silicon Valley. And, you know, it's it's a comedy and it's a comedy at that.
But there was an interesting interview I saw with Gruman Nanjiani, who is one of the actors on that,
because they are they got to hang out with a lot of Silicon Valley bigwigs and and
those big rigs of excitedly showing them all the projects that they're working on,
all the new up and coming stuff, which, you know, the Condra view of the world yet.
And and he said you'd be frightened of your mind if you knew what they're working on because they are not responsible.
They're entirely like children and very, very dangerous. And the ideas that they're doing around with it just aren't considering the repercussions of.
So, yeah, the advancements are happening because there's no regulation or the regulation is so easily to to skirt round.
These advancements are happening at a frightening pace.
But I also feel that they're just not happening in areas that are of interest because someone in Silicon
Valley won't think of how I can impact and improve the lives of a of the Democratic Republic of Congo,
you know, of the DRC, because that's just not something to give a damn about.
However, something like that could be a place that could benefit from certain tools, you know, just drones delivering food,
food supplements or food alternatives that don't require anything other than just add water and clean water.
And I think that all can be done using 3D printing, et cetera.
Absolutely. Yeah, I completely agree. I think, as you say, resource management is such an important potential outcome of this.
And yet what we're looking at is increases in global inequalities.
Right. So things have changed so much in the last few months.
So I can't talk about narratives of the present and how you think the narratives that we have at the moment might shape whatever comes next.
I think one of the things you're going to see is a lot of writers coming out with books set out in the future or
in the past because the present has become so chaotic that it's actually affected the books that we're working on.
I mean, I'm halfway through a novel that I've had to put on pause because coronavirus in isolation was not something I disappeared.
It was a novel set in present times. I have no incorporate that into the story. I just don't know how because I'm still experiencing it.
So I can't even look back on it and make any analysis.
I'm sure there are wonderful writers and extremely talented writers who are going to tell escalating stories about what's happening right now.
And they're writing those stories right now. But I think for a lot of us,
it's it's kind of taken us by surprise in that I know a few writers who I've spoken to said I've actually written less during this isolation period,
which you think would be a boon for us than I thought I would,
because it's just it's just confusing about how to fold this into a story, how to fall this into reality.
I mean, we don't know when such a time of flux suddenly that to make any predictions would be dangerous.
Absolutely. And there's there's also the element of this being a time of of inside this and inward looking.
Right. Huge amount of introspection about what kind of societies we are, which is actually a very typical quality of plague fiction.
If we think about Geovani but Cochairs Decameron, 10 people seclude themselves to talk about their society.
I mean, also to avoid the plague. Black death. But they. But.
But they're what they're doing is they're telling stories about the early
renaissance in Italy and what the society is like and kind of how to navigate it.
But it's quite hard, I think,
for people to mesh the two mesh stories about the kind of come from the past into the present because we have no idea what's going to happen next.
People might actually start seeking out more historical fiction,
historical novels and just books on general history and things overall, because it's and it's not to learn from the past either.
I think it's because that would become something that we can find comfort in is a time when, you know, Trump wasn't the president,
Boris Johnson was the prime minister, and there wasn't, you know,
a massive global pandemic locking us in our houses with Netflix and Stan and those things.
So I think at this point where we're going to see changes in appetite for what people want to watch, what people enjoy is the rise of Tick-Tock.
For example, I've been fascinating to me because this this is short format, you know,
sketch comedy video app, which people have shown incredible ingenuity with.
And they're doing it all from the living room. And they and they've got production facilities on an app that, you know.
That are remarkable given how easy they are to implement. And they're doing it all at home while locked down.
And how will that change the world we live in? When will we ever go back to cinema?
Even when it comes back, will we just want to stay at home and watch it off any way with, you know, what will we watch when we watch things?
Now, why the hell was Tiger being so addictive to everyone?
I think it's because for a lot of people, it was someone whose life was even more bananas than their lives were right now.
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. There's a really interesting kind of shift towards thinking about, you know,
we used to consume reality TV thinking about the 2000s and the boom of Big Brother,
and that was a scene that was so culturally relevant and referential.
And now we have kind of a return to two alternatives, which I think is really funny, given the sort of boom of dystopia in the last.
Or dystopian novels and TV shows and media in the last 20 years.
And I yeah, I do wonder about what will it look like and what will the media and publishing landscape look like in the next five years,
given that we're currently living through what feels like sort of futuristic world?
I think the apple might have kind, you know, put the finger on the pulse of things with the unrest we saw recently,
they announced that he is a trailer for foundation, the Asimov, the series that adapting into a TV show.
And and it's very much a TV show about the end of one civilisation and the rising of another one through its ashes.
You know,
a ASMOF inspired by the fall of the Roman Republic and how the Roman Empire or the Western Roman Empire and how in other things came out from that.
And and I think everyone is very clearly, very obviously feeling the reality of an end of one era right now.
You know, we're living through that moment when Rome kind of fell or when when the Assyrian
empire collapsed and did the fall of Minawi or or something along those lines,
although the British Empire had suddenly discovered that they weren't empire anymore.
And we're going to go through that with America now and where we don't know what comes next.
And I think dystopian fiction right now might actually be a little too close to home and you might end up seeing the birth of utopian fiction instead.
Yeah, a return to the, you know, the feminist sci fi as of the 1970s.
This might be the time that Ursula Killigrew in her books will finally get the full global appreciation.
Narrative futures for those writers and speculators listening.
Stay with us.
Now for writing prompts and exercises designed to encourage putting pen to paper or hands to keyboard, as well as reflection on the writing process.
This section is designed and presented by Louis Greenberg.
In this interview, Sami Shah raises the intriguing possibility of a benign A.I. taking over the work of global government.
Although my unimaginative leaning is towards knee jerk, paranoid Luddite ism when it comes to take short makes a compelling case that government
by a I would be efficient and free of corruption and ego would need to set some rules.
Surely. For your first exercise, I'd like you to help save the world by making five rules for an A.I. government.
Think of it as a specific update of Asimov's three laws of robotics.
This is your chance to shape the world in your image. Last gasp for human ego.
What would your priorities be? Please share your results with that.
Compare them with other writers responses. Is your focus on specific problems and industries or is it more global in reach?
Shots gone off near future science fiction. He says futuristic predictions have failed.
Unlike some other writers in the series, he's enduring far flung science fiction.
Alfred based as the stars, my destination was a very influential example of far future science fiction, are so struck by it.
I went to the 21st birthday party dressed as Gallie Foyle.
That novel showed me the extent to which we could imagine humanity changing in thousands of years.
Time will evolve physically and psychologically as well as technologically.
For a second exercise, instead of a broad think piece,
I'd like you specifically to imagine waking up in a human settlement in 10000 years time suddenly shunted forward from here and now,
this time focus on the descriptive specifics of your experience, not the ideas.
Write a few paragraphs of pages showing us how it feels. Smells, tastes, sounds.
Is gravity different? Who is around you? Where are you?
You know nothing about the world you in and it can only start to piece it together with his immediate sensory stimuli.
Have fun and please share compare your responses to any others that have been shared.
How does your vision match and differ from other visions? What do you think that says about your creative imagination?
Thanks for listening to this episode of Narrative Futures. Next week, Mahvish Murad joins me from Kuala Lumpur to discuss the art of the short story,
discovering tabletop games and whether Tick-Tock is an effective platform for narrative engagement.