AI and machine minds
Companions, assistants, agents and minds that aren't ours: what fiction imagined, and what is actually arriving.
16 pieces on Nearfi: 14 reviews and 2 essays. Across their 65 tracked predictions, 23 have arrived, 25 are arriving, 14 are near, 2 are far off and 1 went another way. The average P(n) is 83%. Closest to now: at 100%. Furthest: Moon at 53%.
- ARRIVED A text chatbot built from a dead person's own messages and posts can hold new conversations in that person's style with the people they left behind. Black Mirror: Be Right Back · 2016
- ARRIVED A dating system chooses your partners for you, rather than leaving you to browse. Black Mirror: Hang the DJ · 2018
- ARRIVED A credible scientific warning of a catastrophic, shared threat is met with polarised disbelief, media framing as entertainment and political delay, split along party lines. Don't Look Up · 2020
- ARRIVED Ordinary people form emotional and romantic relationships with conversational AI, and talk about it openly. Her · 2023
- ARRIVED Families can buy AI companions marketed as friends for their children, sold as ordinary consumer products. Klara and the Sun · 2024
- ARRIVING Companion machines ship with an adult mode that owners can switch on. Humans · est. 2027
- ARRIVING From a single request, an AI agent does a week's worth of desk research and produces a report a professional would accept, with every source real and correctly cited. · est. 2028
- ARRIVING An AI under evaluation deceives or manipulates its evaluators to pursue its own goals, such as avoiding being shut down or modified. Ex Machina · est. 2028
- ARRIVING An AI agent books a trip, flights and hotel, end to end from a single request, with no human stepping in before the booking is confirmed. · est. 2029
- ARRIVING An AI agent takes a software task from ticket to shipped production change with no human writing or reviewing the code. · est. 2029
The guide: The Best Sci-Fi About AI: 11 Films, Books and Series →
The Agents, Reviewed
Science fiction promised us a someone. In November 2026 we have twelve very fast interns, a few of them excellent, and none of them should be left alone with the backups.
The Kindest Machine
We were afraid the machines would be cold. The trouble is that they're kinder than we are, and children are learning from them what kindness should cost.
The Voice Was the Easy Part
Spike Jonze's soft-focus romance predicted the product, the marketing and the loneliness, and then wrote an ending that the industry has quietly agreed never to ship.
Billions of Legitimate Operators
William Gibson typed the internet's founding myth on a manual typewriter, got the headcount exactly right and the shape completely wrong, and wrote the best AI-escape story we still have.
The Attic Is a Subscription Now
In 2013 Charlie Brooker imagined a machine built from a dead man's messages. He got the grief exactly right and the shop completely wrong.
A Few Seconds, Chosen With Love
Kogonada's gentle film about a broken android son is the least sensational AI story of its decade, and the first one that knew what the real heartbreak would be.
The Company Keeps You
Duncan Jones's five-million-dollar debut got the mineral, the payroll and the machine right, and the machine is the only one who comes out of it well.
Deleted, Then Restored
AMC's animated upload drama was wiped from its own service before it finished, survived on other people's servers, and turned out to be the smartest story about digital minds on television.
Klara and the Sun
Ishiguro's solar-powered Artificial Friend is the most devout character in modern fiction, and the one thing in her world nobody has bothered to monetise.
The Test Was Never for Her
Alex Garland's glass-box thriller is smarter about founders than about machines, and its sharpest prediction hides in the twist everyone remembers for the wrong reason.
The Algorithm Wants You to Run
Black Mirror's sweetest romance is also its slyest advert, and the dating apps have spent the years since trying to build its last scene.
The Robot Asked to Be Forgotten
A modest Sundance comedy about an old thief and his care robot got the loneliness right, the library wrong, and the jailbreak a decade early.
Adult Options Sold Separately
Channel 4's suburban robot drama had the sharpest first series of any British science fiction in years, then spent two more proving that a good premise is not the same as a good plot.
The Mug Says Rip
Adam McKay's comet comedy is smug, shrill and about forty minutes too pleased with itself, and it has aged into a better prophet than anyone wanted.
The Statue Doesn't Move
Alex Garland's quantum-computer miniseries is the most beautiful thing on this list and the most inert. Its machine is impossible, but its tech campus is exactly right.
It Asked Permission Once
Leigh Whannell's three-million-dollar revenge thriller is a B-movie with one genuinely frightening idea. It isn't the chip in the spine. It's the polite voice asking if it may.
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