Robots (from the Czech word for laborer) began appearing in science fiction in the early 1900s as metaphors for real-world ideas and issues surrounding class struggles, labor, and intelligence. Author Ken MacLeod says that the idea that robots would one day rebel was baked into the narrative from the start. As technologies have advanced, so too have our fears.

"Science fiction can help us to look at the social consequences, to understand the technologies that are beginning to change our lives," says MacLeod. He argues that while robots in science fiction are a reflection of humanity, they have little to do with our actual machines and are "very little help at all in understanding what the real problems and the real opportunities actually are."

AI has made the threat of "autonomous killer robots" much more of a possibility today than when Asimov wrote his three laws, but it's the decisions we make now that will determine the future. "None of these developments are inevitable," says MacLeod. "They're all the consequences of human actions, and we can always step back and say, 'Do we really want to do this?'"

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KEN MACLEOD:

Ken MacLeod is the multiple award-winning author of many science fiction novels, including the Fall Revolution quartet, the Engines of Light trilogy ("Cosmonaut Keep," "Dark Light," and "Engine City"), and several stand-alone novels including "Newton's Wake," "Learning the World," and "The Restoration Game". Born on the Scottish isle of Skye, he lives in Edinburgh.

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TRANSCRIPT:

KEN MACLEOD: There's so much unrealized potential in science fiction. It asks the most profound questions. We were there at the airship and the airplane and the atomic bomb, and we're still with you. We are in the beginnings of what's being called the fourth industrial revolution, and the application of AI to many, many areas that go beyond routine clerical work. But even a fully-automated world is not beyond having to make hard choices. Science fiction can help us to look at the social consequences, to understand the technologies that are beginning to change our lives.

My name is Ken MacLeod. I'm a science fiction writer. Science fiction has always acted as a metaphor for the mundane, to get across these ideas and consequences to the public in engaging ways. In the age of aviation, science fiction was all about space ships. In the age when the internet has become part of everyday life, a lot of science fiction became about a singularity.

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