What Hollywood Is Missing About A.I. The technology is now popping up onscreen in everything from "The Morning Show" to "St. Denis Medical"--but nothing on air this year could compete with reality. Until recently, the most reliable source of clever thought experiments about ascendant technologies on television was the Netflix series "Black Mirror." The anthology drama débuted in 2011, and its creator, Charlie Brooker, quickly established his interest in the promise and perils of artificial intelligence.

So far, it has been an encouraging year for science fiction. My favourite new offering to date is probably Hal LaCroix's Here and Beyond, but then, I'm a sucker for a good ark-ship story. In LaCroix's take on the trope, a vessel called Shipworld is heading for HD-40307g, "a habitable Super Earth hug orbiting a simmering red dwarf star". It is a journey of 42 light years – meaning that none of the 600 souls who begin the journey will actually live to see HD-40307g. Only the Seventh Generation will make planetfall. There are rules on board.

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."

A confession: This dispatch will not be coming to you from one of the long-devout Martha Wells faithful. I'm a convert, a curious reader who turned to Wells' The Murderbot Diaries series after reading my colleague Meghan Herbst's fantastic 2024 profile of the author, which left me questioning who would be challenged with taking on the series' title character in Apple TV's adaptation and why it was Alexander Skarsgård. Put differently, I wanted to know if the actor known for playing blood-sucker Eric Northman in True Blood and a berserker prince in The Northman would be the right fit to play a security robot, or SecUnit, struggling with social awkwardness after hacking his own "governor module" to give himself the freedom to not obey human orders. If the weird affection he forms for the scientists he's charged with protecting, and the stunted way he goes about showing it, would translate to Murderbot. After watching the first episodes of the show, which debuts Friday on Apple TV, I got my answers--and found myself asking a lot more questions.

Murder is in the air. Everywhere I turn, I see images of a robot killing machine. Then I remind myself where I actually am: in a library lecture room on a college campus in East Texas. The air is a little musty with the smell of old books, and a middle-aged woman with wavy gray-brown hair bows her head as she takes the podium. She might appear a kindly librarian or a cat lady (confirmed), but her mind is a capacious galaxy of starships, flying bipeds, and ancient witches.

I've encountered a lot of artificial intelligences, both the ones I've trained for my blog AI Weirdness, and the ones I've written about for my book on artificial intelligence, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why it's Making the World a Weirder Place. I focus on the machine learning algorithms that exist today, the ones that sort spam, tag photos, and drive cars. We call them AI, but they're as different from the AI of science fiction as a toaster is from a person. In the book, I spend a lot of time explaining why today's AIs, with their tiny worm brains, don't understand their tasks or the human world. They won't be taking over from people, but they also won't be saving us by questioning bad orders.

One major theme that's been running through science fiction recently is the rise of artificial intelligence and the impact that might have on humanity. As we continue to improve upon and refine machine learning, it seems inevitable that the development of a true AI will occur at some point. And consensus is that, once it does, humans will probably be in a bit of trouble. The four books on this list deal with common themes: intelligent robots that are contemplating the nature of their existence, and malevolent AI that seek the destruction of humanity (and the link between the two). When it comes to machine intelligence, we will reap what we sow, as these novels make evidently clear. Thirty years ago, humans lost the war with their servants, robots they created.