Reclaiming the Future
The AI Industry has long colonized the idea of the future with stories of the inevitability of AGI and sentient robots, ripped from the pages of fiction and repurposed as tech propaganda. Promising a brave new irreversibly transformed world, digital technology, techno optimists argue, will spawn a super- intelligence and lead to cosmic voyages and immorality. With the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, which has given way to a race for other corporate chatbots, the web has been forcefully inundated with generative-AI; it seems like a magic button that is not only everywhere all at once but also infinitely accessible. Yet, to rephrase Arthur C. Clarke, while “any sufficiently advanced technology” appears to be “indistinguishable from magic,” lift the hood and it reveals its bag of trick and the vast infrastructure on which it depends.
Turning Up the Heat
For all the promises of new worlds and shiny futures, in practice, the resource-intensive AI Industry fortifies existing political and economic power structures. Accelerating imperialism, wealth concentration, and labour exploitation while investing in the extractive economy and capitalist expansion, the AI Industry aggressively injects energy into an already exhausted model. For instance, having made unsubstantiated claims about solving global problems like the climate crisis, AI proponents, citing an endless need for energy, now support prolonging the fossil fuel era. Sustaining the unsustainable as the world burns, the AI Industry aggressively pursues profit maximization for a few at the economic and ecological desperation of the many, but this bubble will burst.
What You’ll Find Here
Social Robot Futures is a site where the story of AI “inevitability” is brought into question in order to open up space for thinking about possibilities and alternatives. We do this by tracking current news and events via BLUESKY and the SRF blog, presenting our own talks and publications, and curating critical scholarship on current issues and themes (see the Ideas/Issues menu on the navigation bar).
You will find the books and papers we have curated under the following headings: AI in the Classroom; Ecological Impacts; Ethics & Agency; Myth, Fiction & Rhetoric; Power & Political Economy; Technofeudal Shifts; and Weaponizing AI. As curation is an ongoing and evolving process, so too are these lists.
The site also provides annotated bibliographies on works of fiction and film pertaining to AI and robotics, as well a list of non-fiction texts accumulated since the launch of the Social Robot Futures site in 2014 (see the Ideas/Issues menu).
Recent Articles & Talks
- Teresa Heffernan, “The Religious Roots of AI and the Rise of Neo-Feudalism,” Religion 55, no. 3 (2025).
- Teresa Hefferan, “Autonomous Weapons in Fiction and the Fiction of Autonomous Weapons,” in The Realities of Autonomous Weapons, ed. Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis (Bristol University Press, 2025).
- Teresa Heffernan, “Orga Is Not Mecha: How Literal Readings of Fiction Are Damaging the World,” Apocalyptica 2, no. 2 (2024).
- Teresa Heffernan, “Mecha Is Not Orga: The Fiction of AI and the AI Industry,” Digital Humanities Summer Institute Keynote Lecture, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, May 1, 2024. Video.
- Teresa Heffernan, “Beyond the Hype: Exploring the Real-World Impacts of AI on Society, Democracy, and the Environment,” Interview by Sonja Johnson, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto, March 13, 2024.
- Teresa Heffernan, “Director of SMU’s Social Robot Futures Project On How AI Companions Manipulate Us,” Interview by Jeff Douglas, NS Mainstreet with Jeff Douglas, CBC Radio, December 18, 2024.
Feature Posts
An Open Letter to Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence
Dear Minister Solomon,
Congratulations on your new post as Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation.
I hope you will use this position to ensure copyright laws are enforced, to stop the theft and sale of data, to protect Canadians from resource-intensive and invasive surveillance technology, and to ensure we have good search engines.
Above all, I hope you will fight for a democratic and sustainable future, now under threat by the authoritarian technocrats that own the AI infrastructure.
GenAI technology is being aggressively marketed by companies like Google and OpenAI as saving time and money, but studies indicate that companies that have adopted it are finding little benefit. … [more here]
Why Science Needs Fiction
Scientists working in artificial intelligence and robotics often comment on the inspiration they draw from fiction. Yet what role do literature and film play when it comes to questions about the future of the industry, social policy, and ethics? … References to fictional robots are scattered throughout articles and books on artificial intelligence as designers of social robots and ethicists mine the rich array of “humanized” machines that have populated literature and film both for their imaginative richness and as a way of explaining and marketing their mission to the public. For instance, Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” are often cited in scientific articles; and social robot engineer Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Personal Robots Group at Media Lab at MIT, designs robots inspired by her love of C-3PO and R2-D2; while Amit Singhal, a software engineer and vice-president at Google, wants this web search engine “to become that perfect Star Trek computer.” But when it comes to “serious” discussions about the future of robots and AI, fiction is relegated to the background as the “truth” of science, steered by corporate interests, takes over. … [more here]
AI Idolatry and Technological Fetishism
In “Making God: The Millenarianism and Manifest Destiny of AI and Technofuturism,” Emily Gorcenski (2023) demonstrates not only her experience as a “data scientist and engineer,” but also an ability, and indeed, a desire, to grasp the illusions and contradictions of the AI industry within which she works. If the former gives her self-published essay its authenticity, the latter accounts for the approach she takes to grapple with the extra-scientific phenomena pervading her field. … [more here]
Henn na Hotel: Kawaii Robots and “the Ultimate in Efficiency”
… The feature of this hotel that has made international headlines and the reason we are spending the night, is the robots—they staff the check in, greet you at the door, and inhabit your room. Billed as “the ultimate in efficiency” and promising to “turn the hotel industry on its head,” the plan is to take this model international. … The check-in desks are operated by the pint-sized Nao, a female android called Yumeko (“dream girl”) and a dinosaur with a bow-tie and cap (only the dinosaur copes with English). Although they are promoted “as warm and friendly” and guests are invited to converse with them as the robots “go efficiently about their work,” it quickly becomes clear that the robots follow a set script and the process is in fact about getting the guests trained on self-check-in. … [more here]
Awakening to the Realities of AI in Healthcare
… With new technologies, computers outperform physicians at detecting early-stage breast cancers, robots provide companionship to nursing home patients, and AI is credited with the composition of a musical album. Technology can learn, empathize, and create. Or rather, thanks to recent advances, AI possesses the appearance of these abilities. Some people may think it esoteric to debate whether these technologies actually imbue AI with empathy and creativity or merely the illusion of such; however, the distinction is important when deciding if AI belongs in social domains such as healthcare. Do we want something that only appears to be compassionate caring for our loved ones when they are at their most vulnerable? … [more here]
The Tyranny of Life Under Algorithms: A Short Meditation
Alan Turing–the force behind theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, and the Universal Turing Machine–was instrumental in cracking intercepted coded messages, which enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis. He was charged with “gross indecency” in 1952 and punished for homosexuality. He submitted to chemical castration in lieu of prison. Just before his 42nd birthday, two years after the charge, he committed suicide though some speculate his death was an accident.
In the final section of Will Eaves’s brilliant novel Murmur, about a character based on Alan Turing, Alec Pryor faces a dream-like trial where he appears before “The Council of Machines”: “I was left to imagine what sort of extraordinary mental realm it was they inhabited in which pain and lies and deceptions were still said to offend, but offended as depressing inexactitudes rather than injustices, and I realized that I did not have to imagine very hard, because I had inhabited something very similar for most of my life … [more here]