I am linking my Task 12 ‘Speculative Futures’ to Melissa Guzzo’s. Melissa does not state specifically that her first Speculative Future is a dystopian one or that her second is utopian (this is my assumption). I like that as it made me think more about their first story and the view they were taking. I had to read it twice before concluding that this is not a happy future. The choice not to label their stories as either utopian or dystopian makes me regret my own. I now think it would have been better to let readers draw their own conclusions about my stories.

Like me, Melissa chose to tell a story about how AI would work as some kind of an assistant to or in service of humans. In both our stories it is an uneasy relationship between human and machine. Ostensibly the partnerships in both our stories should benefit the human. We both make the point that humans do not always want what is best for them. Machine like efficiency and precision can very quickly become tiresome for most humans. In my story the father probably knows he should work diligently with AI Harvester and in Melissa’s the person can probably recognise that reflecting on their inappropriate comment is a good thing to do, but they still resent being asked to do it.

Melissa’s stories raised interesting questions for me about what rights we might have to images of ourselves captured in public and what use those images might be put to with our permission, similar to questions about data ownership. The story also I believe makes the point that future technology will most likely not be used in an overtly evil way (e.g.,machines initiating a war with humans) but will instead be used to subtly manipulate us and shape the way we think and behave. I also liked how Melissa’s story taps into some of the current conversation around ‘cancel culture’ and political correctness and how that may be policed/enforced in the future.

Finally, reading the story reminded me of what is currently happening in China with their Social Credit System. It is not hard to imagine that something like Melissa described could be integrated into that system.