6 Sci-Fi Writers Imagine the Beguiling, Troubling Future of Work by Diana M. Pho published by WIRED (2020).
“Today, we work with each other, with apps, with the occasional robot—but what will collaboration look like tomorrow?
THE FUTURE OF collaboration may look something like … Twitter’s Magical Realism Bot. Created by sibling team Ali and Chris Rodley, it randomly recombines words and phrases from an ever-growing database of inputs. The results are absurdist, weird, whimsical: “An old woman knocks at your door. You answer it, and she hands you a constellation.” “Every day, a software developer starts to look more and more like Cleopatra.” “There is a library in Paris where you can borrow question marks instead of books.” People ascribe intentionality and coherence to these verbal mash-ups; in the end, they sound like stories drawn from a wild imagination. A bot’s output, engineered by humans, creates a unique hybrid artform.
Magical Realism Bot is a pleasant social media diversion—somewhat at odds with our historical fear of working hand in (mechanical) hand with robots. A century ago, when Karel Čapek’s play R. U. R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots debuted in Prague, his “roboti” lived as enslaved creations, until they rebelled and destroyed humankind (thus immortalizing a common science-fictional trope). Čapek’s play is a cautionary tale about how humans treat others who are deemed lesser, but it also holds a lesson about collaboration: Technology reflects the social and moral standards we program into it. For every Magical Realism Bot, there are countless more bots that sow discord, perpetuate falsehoods, and advocate violence. Technology isn’t to blame for bigotry, but tech has certainly made it more curatable…”