We asked you what the future of artificial intelligence would look like, and you showed us. Terraform has just wrapped our Post-Human contest with AMC, and we’ve spent the last week up to our eyeballs in AI. We got far more submissions than we expected—hundreds in just a two-week period—and found ourselves reading just about every possible future iteration of machine intelligence we could wrap our heads around.
We got android companions and crafty programs. We got human hunters, human augmenters, and human replacements.
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We got precious few malevolent, human-hating SkyNets and a surprising (and encouraging!) surfeit of lonely, philosophical space-faring AI. We got humans forming bonds with their operating systems, even using them to mourn the loss of loved ones. We got fictional future Senate reports and satire that dropped machine intelligence into the plot of classics.
Sure, we got some classic ol’ gun-toting AI run amok, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t! Our robot overlords could still very well enslave us all, after all, if you throw in with Elon Musk. And of course we got plenty of confused, becoming-conscious cyber souls wary of their human forebears. All this to say: It was great reading.
Thanks so much for writing.
It was tough, but we’ve managed to whittle down the entries into three winners:
1) “The Prostitute,” by Max Wynne
2) “Parse. Error. Reset,” by Oluwole Talabi
3) “Tropical Premises,” by Peter Milne Greiner
For the Humans + Tomorrow category, we’ve selected “The Prostitute,” which is not as lurid as you might think, but is nonetheless a fascinating story about a future where “fronting,” or lending your body to a cyber-john, becomes a popular form of black market recreation—with some interesting customers.
For the Humans + 50 years, we’ve gone with “Parse. Erase. Reset,” about a future where android ciphers are opening up a creepy new possibility in achieving human perfection, and eliminating human ennui.
Finally, for Humans +100 years, there’s “Tropical Premises,” about an AI helping to survey the ruined earth, who develops a predilection for poetry.
Watch this space for the stories themselves—one of which will be announced next week as the grand prize winner—which will be published on Terraform in coming weeks.
Thanks again, and here’s to the future.
