Join Schwartz Reisman postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Wald as he facilitates a biweekly discussion of issues in AI by using fiction—films, TV shows, short stories—to deepen our ability imagine possible futures that already confront us, and envision the impacts of artificial intelligence.
In this session, we discuss Charlie Jane Anders’ short story “The Minnesota Diet,” which explores a disturbingly recognizable future, in which a prosperous and thriving city of the future is brought to its knees by lack of the most basic human necessity—food.
The story raises a number of AI ethics issues, such as the opacity and seeming arbitrariness of AI algorithms (in this case, algorithms that route food to where it is needed), the fragility of modern supply chains due computerized inventory management, and worries about how technology is changing, and possibly making redundant, jobs. Anders shows us a future that looks in many ways utopian—but where that utopian exterior masks the dysfunctions that threaten to undermine this way of life.
As a secondary optional reading, a Computer Weekly article proposes artificial intelligence as a potential way of shoring up the fragility in the food supply system, and so as a way of avoiding the future Anders imagines.
Primary reading: Charlie Jane Anders, “The Minnesota Diet” (Slate).
Optional secondary reading: Brian McKenna, “Covid-19 crisis shows fragility of food supply system” (Computer Weekly).
Illustration by Laura Callaghan