Gigaom AI Minute – February 20

Transcript

Many of the ideas that we have about artificial intelligence come to us from science fiction, and many of these are dystopian by nature. I am a techno-optimist at heart, and find that dark plot lines of many science fiction dystopias to be tedious, repetitive and unbelievable. And yet, I'm kind of required to see them all because people are always asking me about them and I can't really say, "I didn't see that episode," or, "I didn't see that movie."

Now, I don't really fault Hollywood for telling dark stories because they're full of drama and conflict, and utopias can, and I'll be the first to admit it, be a little boring. But I do find that seeing dystopias, over and over again, can cause people, at some level, to suspect that that's what the future's gonna be like.

And there's a cognitive bias that's well documented, that's called "generalizing from fictional evidence" that makes people think that it's kind of proven that's what the future's gonna be like. Of course, dystopian science fiction isn't really about the future, it's really all about the present. Stories that set the rich against the poor, like the Hunger Games, or people against corporations, or people against the government, or any other drama, are really just biting commentaries on our own time.

Utopias, on the other hand, are in fact about the future and they're designed specifically to show how that world is different from our own.