Although the literature of automatism has existed in one mold or another since the late Middle Ages--with sixteenth-century folktales about a golem made of clay and summoned to life, through ritual incantation, to defend Prague's Jewish community --its modern form was set in motion by a play called "R.U.R.," by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Its 1921 première, also in Prague, set the agenda for the next century, and it has remained an apparently ironclad convention that all critical writing about the genre begin there. The drama gave us the word "robot," a derivative of an Old Slavic root related to "serfdom," and its narrative, of a rebellion among artificial workers, provided a metaphorical template--stories about robots are stories about labor and freedom. The word "robot" is still with us, and the underlying metaphor has a generous flexibility, encompassing two related but distinct ideas. One is that the first thing we would obviously do with artificial people is enslave them--as in, say, "Westworld."

In 2013, I designed the future for my novel Lifeform Three. I wrote about robots that were more human than people, people who were slaves of their devices, and creatures who wanted to escape the algorithms and find real connection and meaningful lives. Katherine and I discuss key fundamentals of writing a futuristic, science fiction, dystopia or speculative novel: creating a viewpoint character who is non-human yet relatable; designing a world with plausible social systems by figuring out the priorities of the rule makers; choosing names that reinforce the story's themes and resonance; and lacing the text with warnings that are subtle and not preachy. So, do androids dream of electric horses? We also discuss homage to favourite books – Lifeform Three is, in part, a love letter to the pony stories I devoured as a kid.

Long before the technology even existed in the real world, the concept of artificial intelligence has long been a topic of fixation for writers. From cautionary tales and science fiction epics to nonfictional explorations of the implications of AI in our modern world, artificial intelligence seems to be an endlessly fascinating subject of books both big and small. As such, there are all kinds of truly exceptional books about artificial intelligence out there for you to read, enjoy, and maybe even learn a thing or two from. As to be expected, these books about artificial intelligence truly run the gamut. Beyond simply falling under both fiction and nonfiction, artificial intelligence books cover topics ranging from the future to the past, from work to society, from computing to critiques… and all sorts of other topics along the way.

In 2020, the American poet Andrew Brown gave a student the following assignment: write a poem from the point of view of a cloud looking down on two warring cities. "I think I'll start to rain, Because I don't think I can stand the pain, Well, Brown's'student' turned out to be a computer program, not a human. The program, called GPT-3, is one of the most powerful AI language models ever made. Created in 2020 by the research firm OpenAI, its development has cost tens of millions of dollars. Trained on 200 billion words from books, articles, and websites, GPT-3 can generate fluent streams of text on any topic you can imagine. Companies like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and LinkedIn feed our personal preferences into them to create targeted recommendations.

"AlphaZero crushes chess!" scream the headlinesa as the AlphaZero algorithm developed by Google and DeepMind took just four hours of playing against itself (with no human help) to defeat the reigning World Computer Champion Stockfish by 28 wins to 0 in a 100-game match. Only four hours to recreate the chess knowledge of one and a half millennium of human creativity! This followed the announcement just weeks earlier that their program AlphaGoZero had, starting from scratch, with no human inputs at all, comprehensively beaten the previous version AlphaGo, which in turn had spectacularly beaten one of the world's top Go players, Lee Seedol, 4-1 in a match in Seoul, Korea, in March 2016. Interest in AI has reached fever pitch in the popular imagination--its opportunities and its threats. The time is ripe for books on AI and what it holds for our future such as Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark, Android Dreams by Toby Walsh, and Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell.6,8,9

A session that imagines the future and makes us realise that the future is now. Are we sleepwalking into an AI future? By 2062, we will have built machines as intelligent as us. An essential discussion with Professor of Artificial Intelligence Toby Walsh about how AI will evolve and the choices we need to make to ensure that we remain in control of the narrative. PURCHASE ON THE DAY Subject to availability, tickets to individual sessions at Mandurah Performing Arts Centre will be available at the venue on the day for just $5.00 per person.

Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor who portrayed Roy Batty in the film Blade Runner, passed away recently. To celebrate his iconic role, we are revisiting this piece on the Voight-Kampff test, a device to detect if a person is really human. Is Rick Deckard a replicant, an advanced bioengineered being? The jury concerning the character in 1982's Blade Runner is still out. Harrison Ford, who plays Deckard in the film, thinks he's human.

The first testing sessions for SampleRNN – an artificially intelligent software developed by computer scientist duo CJ Carr and Zach Zukowski, AKA Dadabots – sounded more like a screamo gig than a machine-learning experiment. Carr and Zukowski hoped their program could generate full-length black metal and math rock albums by feeding it small chunks of sound. The first trial consisted of encoding and entering in a few Nirvana a cappellas. "When it produced its first output," Carr tells me over email, "I was expecting to hear silence or noise because of an error we made, or else some semblance of singing. The first thing it did was scream about Jesus. We looked at each other like, 'What the fuck?'"

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick is the book behind the great Sci-Fi movie Blade Runner. But the book is stimulating, thought provoking and entertaining is so many other ways. The movies are great for the visuals, but the book paints visuals in your mind that no movie creator could do justice to. Imagine a grim post war world where almost all creators on earth have been destroyed, and humans are just hardly even hanging on, forcing migrations in Elon-Muskish-migrations to Mars and any other piece of rock in space that can generate resources for use by humanity. Imagine a world where the only pleasures on earth are simulated.

US author Philip K. Dick wrote around 40 novels and 120 short-stories on his writing machine. With this classic tool he created claustrophobic science fiction scenarios, writing less about alien invasions, but artificial intelligence. Doing so, he not only described technical possibilities, but furthermore described ethical concerns. Most of his stories featured different layers of reality, what his work compares to Franz Kafka. As all good science fiction, his stories were less an escape from reality, but the opposite, allowed us a view into a distorted mirror.