Beyond Fiction | S1E02 | Simon (SG) Bell | Who Writes the Future?

What if our fear of AI is helping create the AI we fear?

What stories are we telling about the future — and could those stories help create the very future we expect? Professor Simon Bell has spent a career crossing the boundaries between systems thinking, sustainability, technology and human behaviour. Now he is turning those same questions towards artificial intelligence, exploring how fear, cultural narratives and our assumptions about technology may shape not only how we respond to AI, but how we build it.

Simon challenges the familiar picture of AI as either humanity’s saviour or its inevitable destroyer. Instead, he asks us to look at what humans bring to the relationship: our extraordinary collective resourcefulness, our capacity to adapt to chaos, and qualities such as compassion, presence and self-sacrifice that may prove far harder for machines to replicate. From the “ecology” of competing AIs to the mystery of consciousness, his work sits at the boundary between technology and some much older questions about what it actually means to be human.

At the heart of the conversation is storytelling. Science fiction gives us a laboratory for possible futures, but the narratives writers create can also influence the fears, expectations and assumptions we carry into the real world. Rather than endlessly retelling stories of technological catastrophe, Simon asks whether we can imagine something different — and whether crafting better stories about tomorrow might be one of the ways we begin to build a better future.

Yes there are still the Big Questions.

Books of his we discuss: The AI Aftermath pentology

https://sgbell.org/

alternatefutures.substack.com

alternatefutures.co.uk