Emanuelle Burton, Judy Goldsmith, Nicholas Mattei, Cory Siler and Sara-Jo Swiatek are the authors of a new book entitled: Computing and Technology Ethics: Engaging Through Science Fiction. We caught up with them to find out more about the book, what it covers, and what inspired them to use science fiction as a tool to teach about ethics. In addition to the content chapters there is a science fiction anthology at the end of the book containing 12 stories from contemporary authors including Ken Liu, T.C. Boyle, Elizabeth Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Rebecca Roanhorse. The book also provides Story Frames for each story that includes an introduction and reflection questions that tie the story, the characters, and their choices to the ethical frameworks. Each of these stories is anchored in multiple places in the content chapters through what we call Story Points where that story picks up on themes and/or ideas from the chapter.

Spanning from Silicon Valley to Upper Manhattan and everywhere in between, it seems this country is overflowing with tech-optimists. As you know -- a techno-optimist is someone who is generally optimistic about the current state of technology and its potential future. These people believe that technological developments will do more good for humanity than harm -- and that our technological future is very bright. These Techno-Optimists may believe that technology has the power to solve major crises, like global climate change, or believe that machine learning and AI will enable us to reach incredible new heights in humanity. They also tend to envision a technologically rich future, with science fiction-inspired gadgets and capabilities in the hands of average people.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Author Philip K. Dick posed this question as the title of his 1968 novel that was the basis for the film Blade Runner. The underlying themes of this story include the ethics and philosophy of sentient AI in androids. Two years after the story's "futuristic setting" of 2019, humans are exploring much more specific AI use cases that are nothing like those spun out in the science fiction story. Instead of having to distinguish android "replicants" from real humans, many people are struggling to disambiguate terms such as Data Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML). These terms have all become buzzwords commonly found in the business and tech world.

The following is an excerpt of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane. Listen to a radio interview with Janelle Shane about the mistakes artificial intelligence can make. Will the music, movies, and novels of the future be written by AI? Maybe at least partially. AI-generated art can be striking, weird, and unsettling: infinitely morphing tulips; glitchy humans with half-melted faces; skies full of hallucinated dogs. AT. rex may turn into flowers or fruit; the Mona Lisa may take on a goofy grin; a piano riff may turn into an electric guitar solo.

Dimension 404 on Hulu is a science fiction anthology show in the tradition of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. TV writer Andrea Kail loved the fifth episode, "Bob," about a (literal) giant brain who works for the National Security Agency. "I thought this was one of the best things I've seen in a long time," Kail says in Episode 347 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I thought it was incredibly good filmmaking, and incredibly great writing and acting. There was nothing about it I didn't love."

Everyone seems to agree that artificial intelligence (AI) will help businesses to automate, provide better customer experience or simply sell more. If we're honest, businesses have been doing these things for decades if not centuries, so why all the concern about AI? Isn't it just a new way of doing the same things? If a bank, say, is using machine learning to detect potential fraud or a telco using neural nets to predict churn, what's so new? These cases are very definitely AI, and have been helping companies to do better for a long time. Executives, however, want more concrete examples.

While some people are happy with regular sex, others have sexual fantasies and fetishes they yearn to fulfil. But some fetishes are not realistically attainable, and people are left having to use their imagination. Experts believe virtual reality may be the way forward, and could allow people with bizarre fetishes to achieve their desires from the privacy of their own home. Sex with unobtainable things like aliens, for example, is not a new concept. 'People have always had sexual fantasies engaging with notions of "otherness" and that which we cannot have or are realistically unattainable,' Trudy Barber, a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth, told MailOnline. 'A wish to have sex with aliens is very prevalent in lots of science fiction stories such as in the film Galaxy Quest or the classic seductive green Orion "slave-girl" of early Star Trek fame.'