What kind of technology will become widespread by 2100? What kind of social order will exist? What will the natural world look like? Read the second blog in a three-part series by Nirica that brings you books with different imaginations of the future.
Artificial intelligence H.A.L. in 2001: A Space Odyssey / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Part Two: Technological Futures 
Stories of the technology of the future have been a staple of the SF genre since its inception, and in fact form the basis of the most widespread definitions of what constitutes “science fiction”. And real-world technology is being improved and invented at a record rate. Doesn’t the NYT article about a conversation with ChatGPT sound straight out of an SF novel? (We’d also recommend reading SF writer and scientist Ted Chiang’s very succinct exploration of how ChatGPT works!) Artificial intelligence, the rise of surveillance, memory-keeping, flying cars – these stories may be less about what technologies we can expect to be introduced in the years to come, and more about what they could be saying about the world we already live in.
Artificial Intelligences: In Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein and Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit, we come up against questions of identity, authority, love, and the search for connection, told through the stories of created, artificial intelligences. Frankenstein is sometimes considered the first ever science fiction novel – and Mary Shelley started writing it when she was just eighteen! In A Closed and Common Orbit, an artificially intelligent being wakes up in a new body, explores the universe, and falls in love.
Digital worlds and digital memories: Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is an expansive, inventive, and deeply thoughtful collection of short stories that examine our possible place in the world, and our relationship to the technology we create. In Vauhini Vara’s moving novel The Immortal King Rao, set in a techno-capitalist future, we meet an ambitious man, a powerful Algorithm, and a young woman trying to understand her father’s past.
Surveillance and Social Media: Today, we are already surrounded by so much tech – social media platforms, cameras, and tracking devices. In Luiza Sauma’s Everything You Ever Wanted, the protagonist gets the opportunity to leave her humdrum life, her office job and ringing phone, and move to another planet that promises to be better. But is it? In Samanta Schweblin’s eerie novel Little Eyes, little stuffed toys hold cameras, and people can choose to view through them, or allow one to enter their house. It’s a moving, unexpected story of the ways our hyper-connected world might be dividing us.
We recommend pairing these fictional explorations with these nonfiction stories – Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, a personal exploration of how tech, culture, and feminism intersect; Oliver Letwin’s Apocalypse How?, which explores (through the example of the UK) our dependence on technology and what would happen if we faced a collapse; Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, an exploration of how existing technology and infrastructure is predicated on data that is primarily male; and Intimate City by Manjima Bhattacharjya, an exploration of intimacy in the digital age in India.
Humanoid artificial intelligence Eva in Ex Machina / A24