“Science fiction isn’t useful because it’s predictive. It’s useful because it reframes our perspective on the world. Like international travel or meditation, it creates space for us to question our assumptions.”

Eliot Peper
”Why Business Leaders Need to Read More Science Fiction”
Harvard Business Review
July 17, 2017

“Narrative is our way of linking cause and effect, contextualizing information and emotion as we encounter the world, making meaning out of raw data. Stories in the form of fables and parables have guided religious thinking for millennia. Through compelling stories we can inspire, persuade, frighten, provoke. We can demonstrate through characters the kinds of choices that lay before us and the stakes involved as we confront a world where Al is a reality.”

Elias Kruger and Brian Sigmon

Caretaker Robots Pros & Cons

In “The Exemplary Son,” Jana Pavloušková gives us the sad story of Greta Grunn, a bed-ridden woman who develops whose attachment to her PCP-1 caretaker robot becomes so strong it replaces the son in his mother’s affections. It’s easy to foresee AI agents so superior to humans caretaking abilities that we come to prefer their company to that of family members and friends.

Caretaker robots will be commonplace soon. As AI and Faith Research Director Mark Graves notes, FDA already has a framework for incorporating AI in medical devices, so progress in this arena will be rapid.

In our next conversation on AI and the Human, we’ll talk with Jana and Mark about robots and why we’ll both love and fear them.