The novel "Machinehood" - which belongs to this year s Nebula Awards Nominees - by S.B. Divya is set around the year 2090 ( amazon). Most jobs are done by AIs and other machines and humans take advanced drugs and get micro-machines (pills) implanted to be able to compete with the superior machines. The plot follows two sisters, one in India s Chenai, the other in Phoenix, USA. They - and the rest of the world - have to deal with massive attacks by a terror group, called "Machinehood", who is fighting for the rights of AIs and other machines (this is a spoiler free blog). The complex plot has interesting & plausible ideas about the future labor market, how corporations & social networks might have developed and how humans and robots could cooperate & compete.

Editor's note: This episode is part of our podcast series on emerging problems in data science and machine learning, hosted by Jeremie Harris. Apart from hosting the podcast, Jeremie helps run a data science mentorship startup called SharpestMinds. AI research is often framed as a kind of human-versus-machine rivalry that will inevitably lead to the defeat -- and even wholesale replacement of -- human beings by artificial superintelligences that have their own sense of agency, and their own goals. Divya Siddarth disagrees with this framing. Instead, she argues, this perspective leads us to focus on applications of AI that are neither as profitable as they could be, nor safe enough to prevent us from potentially catastrophic consequences of dangerous AI systems in the long run.

In response to automation and dislocation in the 19th Century, Mary Shelley gave us Frankenstein. Signals processing engineer, data scientist and now author S. B. Divya has imagined a whole world where boundaries between machine and human are blurred. Interestingly, according to reviews, the question of how work is performed by either human or machine drives a lot of the dramatic tension in Divya's imagined world. At Data Decisioning, we like that because work is the meaning of technology. When the CEO asks about ROI of a proposed AI investment, the justification is productivity, i.e. more work for less.

For anyone who has purchased a pair of shoes online, only to be immediately pursued across the Internet by enthusiastic algorithms exclaiming that we will love exactly the same pair of shoes (which is, technically speaking, true), the globe-spanning future of 2095 that Machinehood presents through the eyes of two women caught in its web feels disconcertingly logical. From the very first page, Machinehood, the debut science fiction novel from Nebula- and Hugo-award nominated machine intelligence specialist and biomedical engineer S.B. Divya, achieves what the very best science fiction aspires to -- it establishes our future by making it relatable, plausible, and infinitely strange at the same time. That Machinehood goes on to upend long-established laws of robotics, question longstanding political machinations, establish a credible voyeurism-based sub-economy, and take us on a thrilling who-done-it through the advent of the singularity are only a few of the novel's accomplishments. Machinehood also introduces us to the plight of humans caught within a future where everything is faster, better, and smarter -- everything except humans. That'Machinehood' goes on to upend long-established laws of robotics, question longstanding political machinations, establish a credible voyeurism-based sub-economy, and take us on a thrilling who-done-it through the advent of the singularity are only a few of the novel's accomplishments.

In SB Divya's 2016 novella Runtime, nominated for the prestigious Nebula Award for science fiction, a gritty, under-equipped young tech genius competes with the most advanced cyborgs in a challenging multi-terrain marathon set in the distant future. As the protagonist battles the elements, pain and even betrayal equipped only in gear put together from other people's garbage, the gripping, fast-paced narrative brings up issues relevant to the present world: economic inequality, corporate monopoly, and social injustice. There are other thought-provoking, absorbing stories in Divya's 2019 collection Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse (Hachette, Rs 399), which is full of fantastical situations, genderless, ageless humans and brilliant machines – a must-read not just for fans of sci-fi but anyone who loves a good book. "Most of my ideas tend to be mashups of different elements in real life. The technological inspiration often comes from science and technology, because I love to read up on the latest research and developments. I draw the human and social elements from observations about my life or news items," says the 44-year-old US-based author, who worked for 20 years as an electrical engineer before becoming an author.