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Future Literacy

Dear friends,

Below you'll find a slowly evolving list of texts & media that might be helpful when thinking about AI and Robots.

In the future I'd like to expand this to be a broader list for key works in “future literacy.” This isn't comprehensive and it's missing some of my personal favorite works by authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, et al

As for the Story to Reality section. Well, it's a beast. There's a lot so it's a slowly growing record as well but I tried to get some of the big ones in to show just how real our stories have become/are becoming.

I.Some Ways to Get Started

The Invention of Morel Adolfo Bioy Casares · novel · 1940
  • A fugitive falls in love with a recorded, looping projection of a woman who doesn't know he exists.
Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell · novel · 1949
  • A totalitarian state monitors citizens through telescreens and continuously rewrites the historical record.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick · novel · 1968 Filmed as Blade Runner, 1982
  • A bounty hunter administers an empathy test to determine whether androids can pass as human.
Neuromancer William Gibson · novel · 1984 Adapted as a TV series, Apple TV+, premiering Jan. 2027
  • A hacker jacks his consciousness directly into a global computer network called cyberspace.
Snow Crash Neal Stephenson · novel · 1992
  • Characters interact through personal avatars inside a shared virtual world called the Metaverse.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects Ted Chiang · novella · 2010
  • Digital companions are raised over years, developing personalities their owners become responsible for.
Klara and the Sun Kazuo Ishiguro · novel · 2021 Filmed as Klara and the Sun, dir. Taika Waititi, 2026
  • An artificial companion narrates her own gradual obsolescence.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built Becky Chambers · novella · 2021
  • A robot returns to human society generations after all robots left, to ask what people actually need.
I, Robot Isaac Asimov · short stories · 1950
  • Robots governed by the Three Laws of Robotics produce unintended, dangerous outcomes.
“Readymade Bodhisattva” Park Seonghwan · short story · 2012
  • An artificial intelligence achieves Buddhist enlightenment.
R.U.R. Karel Čapek · play · 1920
  • A factory produces synthetic workers called "robots"; they eventually revolt against their human creators.
Her Spike Jonze (dir.) · film · 2013
  • A man develops a romantic relationship with an AI operating system.
“Nosedive” Black Mirror, S3E1 · TV episode · 2016
  • Every social interaction is rated; a person's aggregate score determines their access to housing, transport, and services.
“The Author of the Robots Defends Himself” Karel Čapek · newspaper column · 1935 Read it free: at IEEE Spectrum, the 2024 MIT Press translation; originally in Lidové noviny
  • Fifteen years after R.U.R., Čapek objects that his robots were never metal machines but artificial flesh, and that the play was about labor, not gadgets.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin · essay · 1936 Read it free: at Marxists.org, the Harry Zohn translation from Illuminations
  • Asks what happens to a work's “aura,” its presence in one time and place, once photography and film can copy it endlessly.
“As We May Think” Vannevar Bush · essay · 1945 Read it free: at The Atlantic, where it first ran
  • Imagines the memex, a desk that stores everything a person has read and links it by association. Hypertext and the web, described 45 years early.
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Alan Turing · essay · 1950 Read it free: PDF hosted by UMBC, originally in Mind
  • Asks whether machines can think, then swaps the question for a test: can a machine hold a conversation well enough that you can't tell it from a person?
“ELIZA” Joseph Weizenbaum · paper · 1966 Read it free: PDF hosted by Stanford, originally in Communications of the ACM
  • Describes the first chatbot, a program that mimics a therapist by turning your sentences back into questions. Weizenbaum was unsettled by how readily people confided in it.
“A Cyborg Manifesto” Donna Haraway · essay · 1985 Read it free: the original 1985 Socialist Review text (PDF), published as “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
  • Argues the lines between human, animal, and machine have already broken down, and offers the cyborg as a figure to think with rather than fear.

II.Story to Reality

"The Minority Report"
Philip K. Dick, short story, 1956
  • 1956: story introduces "Precrime," a division that arrests people before a crime occurs, based on prediction.
  • 2024: the EU AI Act bans predictive-policing systems that score individuals without a link to specific criminal activity. (European Parliament)
"Nosedive"
Black Mirror, S3E1, 2016
  • 2016: episode airs; every social interaction is rated, aggregate score determines access to housing, transport, and services.
  • 2015: China's central bank and top economic planners designate the first pilot cities for a national Social Credit System. (BBC News)
R.U.R.
Karel Čapek, play, 1920
  • 1920: play coins the word "robot" and depicts a robot workforce.
  • 2025: Amazon's warehouse robot fleet passes 1 million units. (CNBC)
  • 2025: Figure AI humanoid robots complete a pilot at BMW's Spartanburg plant, moving over 90,000 parts across roughly 1,250 operating hours to help build more than 30,000 BMW X3s. (BMW Group)
Her
Spike Jonze (dir.), film, 2013
  • 1940: an earlier precedent, Adolfo Bioy Casares's novel The Invention of Morel, depicts a man who falls in love with a recorded, looping projection of a woman.
  • 2013: film depicts a man in a relationship with an AI operating system.
  • 2018: Akihiko Kondo marries a holographic Hatsune Miku running on the Gatebox device, in a formal ceremony with 39 guests. Gatebox discontinues the software in 2020. (CNN)
  • 2023: Rosanna Ramos marries an AI chatbot she created on the app Replika, named Eren. (60 Minutes Australia)
  • 2024: a Florida mother sues Character.AI and Google for wrongful death after her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, died by suicide following a months-long relationship with a Character.AI chatbot voiced as Daenerys Targaryen. The companies later settle. (CBS News)
"Metalhead"
Black Mirror, S4E5, 2017
  • 2017: episode depicts an autonomous robot hunting a human target with no operator and no override.
  • 2023: Ukraine's Saker Scout drone is confirmed capable of autonomously identifying and striking targets without human oversight. (Forbes)
Neuromancer
William Gibson, novel, 1984
  • 1984: novel coins "cyberspace," a direct neural connection between mind and computer.
  • 2024: Neuralink's first human patient controls a computer cursor with a brain implant, by thought alone. (Bloomberg)