Each month, Future Tense Fiction will bring you a dramatic telling of a short story exploring how tech that's emerging today could dramatically reshape tomorrow. Science journalist Maddie Stone will then have a conversation with the author about what inspired their writing, and their vision of the future.
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Each month, Future Tense Fiction will bring you a dramatic telling of a short story exploring how tech that's emerging today could dramatically reshape tomorrow. Science journalist Maddie Stone will then have a conversation with the author about what inspired their writing, and their vision of the future.
On this month’s episode of Future Tense Fiction, host Maddie Stone talks to Janelle Shane about her short story “The Skeleton Crew.”
The House of A.I. is a next-level haunted house: In it, a suite of advanced A.I.s read visitors’ facial expressions to generate perfectly tailored scares. Or at least, that’s what the marketing materials want you to believe. It turns out, the house is actually operated by a group of underpaid gig workers, tasked with posing as spooky A.I.s as they guide visitors through the mansion. When two gunmen sneak into the house in search of a famous rock artist who’s there visiting, things go south quickly—and everyone ends up really grateful for the humans behind the house’s spooky machines.
After the story, Maddie and Janelle discuss why the human workers behind A.I. are so often invisibilized—and why you should be suspicious when a company oversells its tech.
Guests: Janelle Shane is a research scientist. She writes about A.I. on her blog, aiweirdness.com, and she’s also the author of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.
Story read by Kat Bohn
Podcast production by Tiara Darnell
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Future Tense Fiction
Each month, Future Tense Fiction will bring you a dramatic telling of a short story exploring how tech that's emerging today could dramatically reshape tomorrow. Science journalist Maddie Stone will then have a conversation with the author about what inspired their writing, and their vision of the future.
