The last three Hugo-nominated novelettes for 2023 are something of a mixed bag. You’ve got a real-life problem that’s almost guaranteed to get worse, a future technology that highlights the very best that humanity has to offer to its descendants, and one more that I can’t actually describe because no one knows how to find it.
“The Space-Time Painter” – Hai Ya
This one appears to be missing in action. I’ve stumbled across a short story collection containing this in its original Chinese, but as far as I can tell there’s no English-language version available. The Hugo awards are an international contest, so obviously authors and publishers don’t have to cater to an English-language audience (especially when the award ceremony itself will be in Chengdu, China this year). Still, the story’s highly-rated, so if anyone knows where I can get my hands on a copy I can actually read then please leave a comment.
“Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness” – S. L. Huang
Harrison received the first message on a sunny afternoon in July 2012. It popped up on his computer and wouldn’t go away.
i’m watching u
Over the course of six years, a wealthy CEO received more than three hundred thousand accusing and threatening messages. The mysterious stalker who only identified herself as “Sylvie” sent abuse on every possible social media account and private communications device, even showing up in the error messages on his home printer. The relentless abuse combined with the stress of actually being guilty of the things he was being accused of eventually drove the man to suicide.
And then it happened to another CEO. And a lobbyist. And a hedge fund manager. And it kept on happening. The FBI announced that they had a suspect in custody, but it’s looking less likely that the prisoner is Sylvie, and more likely that she was the one who created Sylvie and then set her loose.
S.L. Huang’s Hugo-nominated novelette is not the story of authorities having to hunt down a killer intelligence who roams the internet. Not really. It’s written as an article covering some of the real-life problems that are cropping up in our eternally plugged-in culture, but the incidents of wealthy businessmen killing themselves because an Artificial Intelligence has discovered their sins isn’t actually real. That we know about. Yet.
Years ago I stumbled across the meme “You can be whatever you want to be on the internet. It’s strange that what so many people want to be are assholes.” This is becoming more and more true, not just for people, but for AI’s. Online abuse is rampant, and the laws about harassment and stalking aren’t keeping up with the problem. More and more companies are using algorithms to try to rule out biases, but the algorithms are designed by humans who may not even realize how their own biases are being plugged into the systems they’re creating. And an Artificial Intelligence is only as good as the information it’s learning from. One of the more famous examples is the Twitterbot Tay, a chatbot that learned from the online environment so well that she had to be shut down after just sixteen hours because she wouldn’t stop spewing racist abuse.
The story is filled with examples like this, many of them with links to the news stories so you can see that yes, this really did happen. It’s dizzying, and I mean that literally. I had a moment of vertigo after following a link to another article, then doing a google search to hunt up a different story that was mentioned, then going back to the novelette that’s written like an article about a fictional AI, except for all we know there really is an AI out there designed to hound someone to death because how do you know for sure if the person on the other side of a Mean Tweet is actually a person.
It’s a fascinating read. S.L. Huang asks a lot of questions that we haven’t even started to answer, and technology is moving so fast that most of our attempts are just creating more questions. Probably the scariest part of the whole concept is that an unstoppable stalker AI is just an extension of all of the worst parts that humanity is already pouring into the internet. The call really is coming from inside the house.
“A Dream of Electric Mothers” – Wole Talabi
Olusola Ajimobi, daughter of the great warrior clan
The one who gathered the threads of her people’s minds
And wove a new Òrìṣà of them
Olusola Ajimobi, daughter of the moon and the sun
The one whose eyes deciphered the secrets of Ifá theory
And wrote the name of her family in the heavens
Ever since the scientist Ìyá Ajimobi discovered the way to download and merge copies of human minds, the ruling body of a futuristic West African country have used it to resolve disputes, accessing the stored memories of every long-gone citizen in a dream-ceremony called “consulting the electric mothers”. Dolapo Abimbola Titilope Balogun, a Brigadier General and new member of the Ọyọ Mesi is about to participate in the process for the first time. The official goal is to figure out how to handle a border dispute with a neighboring country, something which if it isn’t handled properly could lead to deaths, and maybe even a full-scale war.
Dolapo’s unofficial goal is to talk with her mother again.
The fact that human jobs are being ceded to AI is in the news a lot these days. And for years (decades?) writers have been using the trope of artificial intelligence taking over because it’s decided it knows what’s best for humanity. So it’s a refreshing change that Wole Talabi has come at the AI question from a completely different direction.
The dreamlike interface between technology and ancestral memory is a backdrop for a story about family, and grief, and love, and what shaping the next generation could be if we look at the very best that humanity has to offer, instead of the very worst. What if the goal wasn’t for parents to make their children into carbon-copies of themselves, or to drive their children to success and somehow make up for their own failures in life? What if the goal could be to give each generation what they need in order to be stronger and kinder than the generation before?