What is Missing from Science Fiction? - Finance and Economics
There are many stories about Exploitation - of Resources - of People.
There is little about the Economics of these Exploitations and very little about the Funding of Projects and Governments and the reality for almost all people throughout history - Earning a Living Day-to-Day.
Great projects like tackling climate change require investment, both private and public.
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The people involved have to earn a living and incur social costs - the cost of Labour.
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There has to be investment needed to carry them out - the cost of Capital.
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Then there are Failings: of People, Organisations, and Technology.
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Outside of them all - the Forces of Nature.
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Dystopian stories began with EM Forster's When the Machine Stops in which collapse was total. There are less dramatic failings possible:
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technology (hardware and software) degradation
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failings of maintenance
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upgrades become less and less compatible
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money is tight and can runs out
History is full of examples of these failings. Why not the future?
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Machines That Think - Robots and Thinking Machines
For nearly a century there has been discussion of what machine intelligence might be - when it might have agency and what it might do with it. At what point could a machine understand and act of its own volition upon a general principle rather than as an agent of complex programming?
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Human-like robots emerged in fiction in the years when computers were largely unknown. An artificial human, an obvious rival to us, makes for a good story. With computers nearly ubiquitous we can re-evaluate what a machine that thinks might be like and how it might interact with us individually and as a species.
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Thinking machines may not be single entities but a collection of machines, some doing the thinking and exercising agency and subordinates doing the calculating. Thinking machines might be like a company with different departments having different functions under an overarching management structure. If adequately constructed they could transmit information internally and act on it far faster than a human team or organisation. The equivalents of accounting and compliance departments could be continuously and instantly updated and monitoring all the other functions from the creation and execution of deliverables to maintenance, supply of inputs, and disposal of waste and things unwanted.
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Humanity or the Human Race, if you like, needs to set ground rules for Thinking Machines - Fundamental Laws as Isaac Asimov imagined in his Laws of Robotics.
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