Tag Archive for: Futures

Working Futures: The Future Of Work May Be Beautiful

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We’re off today for the long weekend, but I wanted to use the opportunity to publish the last of our posts about the stories in our Working Futures science fiction anthology about the future of work. If you haven’t read the earlier ones, they’re here:

  1. Welcome to Working Futures
  2. The future of work is likely to be complicated
  3. The future of work will have unexpected consequences
  4. The future of work will blur the line between humans and machines

The post will cover the final two stories in the book, which both really stood out when we went through the selection process.

Generation Gap by Holly Schofield. This is Holly’s second story in our collection and among the many things we loved about it was how it really painted a picture of a potentially very different world — which had the possibility of being both beautiful, but also possibly terrifying. Or, again, somewhere in between. And it raises questions about how our future world will connect with the past.

A Brief History of Algorithmic Life: Introduction by Christopher Alex Hooton is the final piece in the book for a reason. It’s such a lovely story, purporting to be the introduction of a long textbook about the history of “algorithmic life.” As Chris explained on our recent podcast, his goal with the story was to get away from the science part of science fiction and see if he could write was just a “beautiful story.” And he succeeded, writing a touching story about an incredibly unexpected friendship between a human and an “algorithmic” life.

I’m happy we’re closing out with both of these stories, because they’re probably the two most literary of the entire anthology. As with most of the other stories, the world they present has things that will frighten some people — and intrigue other people. Aspects of both utopia and dystopia show up in both, but what stands out about both those stories is the relationships they portray, and the way in which both stories build an incredibly visual world in the future that comes alive via those stories.

So now we’ve summarized all 14 stories in the book — we hope that they’ve inspired you to check out the collection. We’ll still have some more posts about the project in the future, but first we wanted to put the focus on what matters most: the stories the anthology includes.

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This Week In… Working Futures

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Techdirt is taking a break for the long weekend — and while we’ve still got the comments post coming tomorrow, today instead of the usual history post we’re looking forwards, with our new Working Futures anthology.

For those who don’t know or who haven’t had time to check it out yet, Working Futures is a collection of fourteen speculative short stories by science fiction authors, exploring the question of what work will be like in the future as artificial intelligence and other technologies continue to transform our world. If you want a taste, you can check out the first half of one of the stories, A Quiet Lie in our pre-launch teaser post. Since then, Mike has been sharing summaries and thoughts about other entries in the book: about how AI and humans could keep each other in check, and how private services and social credit could define our lives, and how the lines between human and machine could blur in fascinating and challenging ways, among many other topics.

This week, we also had a special episode of the Techdirt Podcast in which Mike was joined by three of the authors: Katharine Dow, whose story The Funeral Company portrays a society divided by its reactions to both climate change and ubiquitous surveillance; James Yu, whose story The Mummer gives us eerily real characters in a not-too-distant future running up against the darker side of our interaction with robots; and Christopher Hooton, whose story A Brief History Of Algorithmic Life: Introduction closes out the anthology with a moving, lyrical tale about about the first true human-AI friendship.

And of course, Working Futures also contains a pair of stories by Mike himself, who hadn’t tried writing fiction in a long time, but hit the ground running with two engaging possible futures: one in which increasing centralization has put our lives in the hands of a few big companies that compete to offer the services and products for your entire life, and another in which the return to a truly decentralized online world has led to an energetic and anarchic knowledge economy. We’ve also got a story by our own Tim Geigner, who has been at this for a long time (his earlier sci-fi novels Digilife, Echelon, and Midwasteland are available as pay-what-you-want ebook downloads in our Insider Shop) and who went straight for the core of the “future of work” premise with a story about working in corporate human resources for not-so-human employees.

I hope some of that piques your curiosity. Techdirt will be off on Monday, so if you’re looking for something to read, grab a copy of the Working Futures paperback or ebook to see you through! And if you do read some or all of the stories, we’d greatly appreciate a review on Amazon and anything else you can do to help spread the word.

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