We live the awakening of new technologies that will change the world. And you have to be prepared for what can happen. He Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom has hired science fiction writers so that they imagine possible scenarios of wars and tension derived from the new technologies.
Artificial intelligence, autonomous dronesquantum computers… They have barely been born, but we can already sense that they have the power to provoke warsstart conflicts, and even end humanity.
What would happen if one AI is elected president of a country, and has access to the nuclear button? How will the geopolitical balance change when oil and gas are no longer used as a fuel source?
He Ministry of Defence of United Kingdom has asked the writers of Science fiction Peter Warren Singer and August Cole. And he doesn’t seem far-fetched. Many inventions imagined by writers and screenwriters 50 years ago, from mobile phones to tablets, the Internet or the artificial intelligence who chats with us like a human, have ended up becoming reality.
Eight short stories about a dark future
The task of these writers was to imagine possible war scenarios and conflicts that could cause the new technologies. The goal of Ministry of Defence of United Kingdom is to find strategies for deal with those scenarios.
And the stories are, to say the least, disturbing.
a ray of hope is a short story that analyzes the future impact of the quantum computing in the context of a battle and the capture of a novel technology.
The Solstice Cup focuses on human enhancement with “perfs”, a cyborg technology with which they can run at 50 km/h while playing a soccer game with enemy forces.
The potential impact of artificial intelligence is explored in a battle, in the short story of The Beresford Bridge AI. Ethics around data and its modeling is the subject of A Model of Peace.
chasing glory deals with the threats and opportunities of computer connections. The narrative thread is the transmission of a digital reporter aboard an unmanned supply convoy that is under attack.
green wars analyzes the societal shift towards a zero emissions world, and the conflicts over who would own and control the renewable energyand resources in the future.
the measure of a mind explores how increasingly global data could be used to better understand human behavior and thus be manipulated to control the behavior of individuals and groups based on the cyberpsychology.
Finally, silent sky is set in 2040, and focuses on the threat posed by drones when the skies are filled with large numbers of them performing various tasks with varying degrees of autonomy.
You can read all the shorts on the British Ministry of Defense website.
These short of Science fiction about future technologieswritten for the Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom, are an interesting read, because they are anchored in reality. What they say has not happened yet, but it could be real in a few years…