Before Chat GPT: The Fiction That Imagined AI

R.U.R is a 1920 play about the creation of artificial workers designed to serve humanity. Mass-produced robots replace human labor, making life easier—but also stripping humans of purpose. When the robots gain self-awareness, they revolt, wipe out most of humanity, and inherit the world. The play explores the dangers of unchecked technology, exploitation, and what it truly means to be human.

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics—protect humans, obey human orders, and preserve a robot’s own existence—fundamentally reshaped how we imagine robots. In I, Robot, Asimov traces the evolution of robots through interconnected stories, from their early beginnings to a future where humanity itself may be at risk of obsolescence. The collection features robots that malfunction, read minds, tell jokes, enter politics, and even secretly govern the world, all delivered in Asimov’s signature blend of science fact and science fiction.

A revolution on a lunar penal colony–aided by a self-aware supercomputer–provides the framework for a story of a diverse group of men and women grappling with the ever-changing definitions of humanity, technology, and free will–themes that resonate just as strongly today as they did when the novel was first published. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress gives readers an extraordinary, thought-provoking glimpse into the mind of Robert A. Heinlein, who, even now, “shows us where the future is” 

By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn’t afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They even built humans. Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn’t want to be identified, they just blended in. Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids and retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

Susan Harris lived in self-imposed seclusion, in a mansion featuring numerous automated systems controlled by a state-of-the-art computer. Every comfort was provided. Her security was absolute. But now Susan’s system has been breached—from the inside. In the privacy of her own home, and against her will, she will experience an inconceivable act of terror and become the object of the ultimate computer’s consuming to cross the line between man and machine and learn everything there is know about the flesh…  

Case was the sharpest data thief in the matrix–until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions. Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary. But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state). Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles-micro-robots-has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive. It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour. Every attempt to destroy it has failed. And we are the prey.

From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara–an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities–watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous tale, Klara and the Sun, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

In Hum, Helen Phillips offers a future-gazing dystopian vision of motherhood that, like the best science fiction, seems both familiar and strange. Climate change has run rampant and privacy is nonexistent. Against this backdrop, a desperate mother is forced to trust a robot to try to save her family after they decide to take a vacation to the kind of natural landscape made rare by runaway industrialization.

All of Basit Deniau’s houses were haunted. Rose House, his final architectural triumph built in the remote Mojave desert, was perhaps the most. A house embedded with an artificial intelligence is a common thing. But a house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every crevice and corner with a thinking creature that is not human? That is something else altogether. That is Rose House.