Story Details
Categories Science Fiction Robots & AI
A delightful tale from a first-time author, wherein a driverless car is empowered to take you not where you want to go, but where you need to go. While every advance presents opportunities for dystopian failure, it’s equally true that the next generation of machines could be taught to know us better than we know ourselves.
Author Details
Amara Mesnik Lost in Intuition
Amara Mesnik is a Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker with a love for all things science, fiction, and science fiction. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Amara has directed several short films, including the award-winning In Suspension (2020), and is now working as a video editor at BBC Studios. She enjoys worldbuilding and creating languages, and is currently writing her debut novel. STORY NOTES ABOUT “LOST IN INTUITION” 'Lost in Intuition' is based on a story idea my dad and I always joked about— the GPS that takes you not where you want to go, but where you need to go. He always saw it as a sort of magical realism, possibly set in the 90s when GPS technology was first becoming widespread amidst the public. But for me, it resonated more with the rise of automation and artificial intelligence that we're seeing in the present. It's no longer a fantastical thought that a computer might know more about ourselves than we do— ad targeting algorithms are building profiles of us based on everything we do online. And one of the biggest fears around the current surge of AI development is the tech going rogue. But instead of being some uniformly scary thing, what if a system like that could be helpful? What if it could help us reshape our relationships and our lives for the better? This story is also inspired by the time I spent working with the Robot Locomotion Group at MIT. I was fortunate to spend time with prominent roboticists and engage in very interesting discussions about their visions of the near future. Russ Tedrake, Professor and Director of the Center for Robotics at MIT as well as VP of Robotics Research at the Toyota Research Institute, once told me he believed autonomous vehicles would someday be ubiquitous on our streets, and the next generation's children might not even have to learn to drive. While I'm a bit less optimistic about how soon autonomous vehicles will become the norm, it's nice to imagine that in a climate- and community-positive future, a network of fully-autonomous electric vehicles would all but eliminate vehicular deaths, drunk driving, and road pollution. This story also received an honorable mention from the Sapiens Plurum 2022 Awards.
Lost in Intuition, Amara Mesnik
Author Details
Amara Mesnik Lost in Intuition
Amara Mesnik is a Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker with a love for all things science, fiction, and science fiction. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Amara has directed several short films, including the award-winning In Suspension (2020), and is now working as a video editor at BBC Studios. She enjoys worldbuilding and creating languages, and is currently writing her debut novel. STORY NOTES ABOUT “LOST IN INTUITION” 'Lost in Intuition' is based on a story idea my dad and I always joked about— the GPS that takes you not where you want to go, but where you need to go. He always saw it as a sort of magical realism, possibly set in the 90s when GPS technology was first becoming widespread amidst the public. But for me, it resonated more with the rise of automation and artificial intelligence that we're seeing in the present. It's no longer a fantastical thought that a computer might know more about ourselves than we do— ad targeting algorithms are building profiles of us based on everything we do online. And one of the biggest fears around the current surge of AI development is the tech going rogue. But instead of being some uniformly scary thing, what if a system like that could be helpful? What if it could help us reshape our relationships and our lives for the better? This story is also inspired by the time I spent working with the Robot Locomotion Group at MIT. I was fortunate to spend time with prominent roboticists and engage in very interesting discussions about their visions of the near future. Russ Tedrake, Professor and Director of the Center for Robotics at MIT as well as VP of Robotics Research at the Toyota Research Institute, once told me he believed autonomous vehicles would someday be ubiquitous on our streets, and the next generation's children might not even have to learn to drive. While I'm a bit less optimistic about how soon autonomous vehicles will become the norm, it's nice to imagine that in a climate- and community-positive future, a network of fully-autonomous electric vehicles would all but eliminate vehicular deaths, drunk driving, and road pollution. This story also received an honorable mention from the Sapiens Plurum 2022 Awards.
