Science fiction has always inspired innovation. Mobile phones were used in Star Trek before they existed in the real world. Writers imagined bionic limbs, military tanks, submarines and the internet before their actual creation. As the American academic John Jordan writes in Robots (2016): “Science fiction set the boundaries of the conceptual playing field before the engineers did.”
No technology has been as richly imagined before its commercial launch as artificial intelligence (AI). Science fiction has informed existing concepts of AI, what it is and what it might do, more than any other technology in history. But whose plots are these? In November, Rishi Sunak interviewed Elon Musk. It didn’t take long before their conversation turned to science fiction. Musk mentioned his fear of killer robots. Sunak expressed relief that, at least in the films that he had seen, these monsters had an “off-switch” that made it possible to shut them down before they could destroy the world.
Content from our partners
