Science Fiction Today – Accidental A.I.?

We wrote a lot of Science Fiction Today posts for this year’s April A to Z Challenge, and one thing I noticed over and over as we talked about science fiction examples was that in pretty much all of them Artificial Intelligence comes about as an accident.

I feel like it has happened so much now in stories that it’s become almost an assumed trope. Like the stories always end up in that Skynet situation where the AI was created and we weren’t ready for it, and it hates us, and it takes over.

Is that really how it’s going to go? I don’t know. Because no one really knows how the singularity will truly and finally come to be, I guess the best we can do is the accident, like many of the great inventions and scientific discoveries of the past. But I’ll look at a couple of thoughts as to what’s happening today that make me wonder how it really is going to go down.

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Science Fiction Today – The Police

One of the things that we try to do with our Science Fiction Today posts is to explore modern problems by not really looking at the current problem – but instead at what it might look like in the future. And lately, the police have been making the news a lot.

Okay, mostly it’s Ferguson. But Ferguson reminds us of all of the stories that haven’t caught as much news, of similar situations. It’s also spawned a story like this one from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight:

Between public opinion, and technological changes and access, I feel like we’re reaching a critical mass. So what might the future look like, when it comes to police? There’s actually a lot of thought on this, as so much of TV and movies has to do with the police, and law and order – and some of it is science fiction. Police Procedurals remain popular, and we explore the idea of the police all the way from the real – in a show like Cops – to the distantly fictional – like Almost Human.

And this is a subject I really don’t want to approach any other way. Every community has different problems, different police forces and personalities, different crimes being dealt with, different racial, cultural, economic conflicts and existence… So in relation to the police, what can our future look like?

What Happened to Almost Human?

From IMDB.com

Holly’s talked about it before, but we were really bummed that Almost Human got cancelled. We really liked this show, and had done a number of posts on it, getting invested and then getting let down.

The underlying principles of the show were a mixed bag: some were solid, some were unexplained, and some had been done before. So, to make a better show, you have to do something better, have to be good.

This show had potential, but in their 13 short episodes, maybe they did fail to set up their world enough to legitimate continuing. I’ve been thinking about it, so I thought I would share some of those thoughts here.

Good Science Fiction Cancelled

From ktvb.com

So David mentioned that David and I wanted to talk about the new show we discovered called Believe that we were really enjoying. But of course when I went to look at when it premiered what do I find out except that it got cancelled on May 9. The show had only started on March 10 and two months later it has been cancelled. I think it didn’t have the best chance partly due to it’s time slot, Sunday night is usually not a great starting night for a tv show. It just seems sad because this is the second decent science fiction show, in my humble opinion, to have been cancelled. Almost Human, a show about the police force in the future and the human / robot relationship between a forced police partnership. The relationship between Kennex and Dorian was so good and it had so much potential, but it just did not hit its stride. Shows get cancelled for a variety of reasons and Science Fiction shows seem to have a tougher time getting an audience. Both of these shows got cancelled, but I think of some of the problem was how they were handled. 

A to Z Reaction and All The Things in April!

Last week we finished up the April A to Z blogging challenge, with 26 Character Studies! We hope you enjoyed them; we certainly had a good time writing them. Welcome to all our new followers from the challenge, and thank you to everyone who stopped by and were reading and commenting!

Of course, what this also means is we have a whole month of things that have been happening that we have left pretty much untouched. We did a post for International TableTop Day, but otherwise it was the challenge. 

And then we went on a weekend trip to Seattle, to visit our friends and occasional guest bloggers @Odorunara and @Briantific. They each did a great guest post – Leah on Hannibal, which we now have to watch (sounds pretty good!), and Brian on ESO, in which he has gotten much further than we have and has taught us much of what we know about the game. Thank you again to them, and make sure you read their posts!

So we have a ton we want to talk about and want to catch up on and share with you and we didn’t really know where to start. So, here’s some thoughts on things that have been going on we want to talk about, or will be soon!