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• February 28, 2025

  Mothering the Bay

  When a busy BART train suddenly screeches to a stop deep under the San Francisco Bay, passengers turn to personalized AI agents to understand what’s happened—but they begin to realize that those agents may obscure more than they illuminate.

• February 14, 2025

  Actually Naneen

  Shristi employs a robot nanny named Naneen to watch over her kids. As Naneen’s hardware and software ages, Shristi debates whether to replace the nanny with a newer model—and questions which parts of parenting she really wants to automate.

• March 28, 2022

  Episode 11: Can Bureaucracy Build a Climate Revolution?

  Between 2009 and 2019, India brought electricity to half a billion citizens, and then turned around and presided over a grid where power from wind and solar became cheaper than electricity from… Read More

• Spring 2023

  Generating Meaningful Energy Systems Models for Africa

  Michael O. Dioha, Rose M. Mutiso

  About 77% of the 770 million people living without access to electricity today reside in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Increasing access to energy in the region could raise prospects for the 431 million… Read More

• Spring 2024

  “AI Is a Tool, and Its Values Are Human Values.”

  Fei-Fei Li, Sara Frueh

  Fei-Fei Li has been called the godmother of AI for her pioneering work in computer vision and image recognition. Li invented ImageNet, a foundational large-scale dataset that has contributed to key developments… Read More

• January 31, 2025

  The Funniest Centaur Alive

  At a Vegas comedy club, a stand-up has rapidly improved his act—thanks to the secret help of advanced AI trainers. When two spectators catch on, they unravel a complex debate about transparency, technology, and the process of artistic improvement.

• January 17, 2025

  The Wait

  When Emilia’s brother disappears, she turns to a government agency that tracks citizens’ locations in real time in order to protect them—only to realize that the agency’s real goal is to simply create an illusion of safety.

• Summer 2024

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Impact

  David H. Guston

  When most people talk about “impact,” they often imagine one thing physically hitting another, for example, the impact of the meteorite that scientists think was responsible for killing off the dinosaurs—and leaving,… Read More

• Summer 2024

  A Space Future Both Visionary and Grounded

  In “Taking Aristotle to the Moon and Beyond” (Issues, Spring 2024), G. Ryan Faith argues that space exploration needs a philosophical foundation to reach its full potential and inspire humanity.… Read More

• Summer 2024

  A Binational Journey Toward Sustainability

  Christopher A. Scott, Constantino Macías Garcia, Natalia Martínez-Tagüeña, Thomas F. Thornton, Heather Kreidler

  The border between the United States and Mexico is both a political boundary and a demarcation of different ideological representations of a shared binational landscape. Both sides of the border share climate,… Read More

• Fall 2023

  New Voices on the Hill

  Yadira Caraveo, Jen Kiggans, Eric Sorensen, Brandon Williams

  Yadira Caraveo Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo. Illustration by Shonagh Rae. Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo, MD (D-CO) is a pediatrician and previously served in the Colorado state legislature. She represents Colorado’s Eighth (and newest) Congressional… Read More

• Summer 2024

  Unleashing Synergy or Accelerating Fragmentation?

  Kyung Ryul Park

  Over the last 40 years, international collaboration has become an essential strategy for the global science and technology (S&T) enterprise. Collaboration enables countries to leverage foreign expertise and equipment and distributes the… Read More

• December 20, 2024

  The Trolley Solution

  What does it take to be a good educator? In Shiv Ramdas’s story, a creative writing professor competes for tenure against an AI—and forces us to consider what we really want from technology in the classroom.

• December 13, 2024

  A Healing at the Triple B Trophy Lodge

  What if you could create a clone of someone who has done you harm—and then kill it? When a skeptical journalist visits the cultish “kill therapy” retreat to profile its ambitious founder, she inadvertently opens the door to histories she had long endeavored to forget.

• Summer 2024

  Bringing Communities In, Achieving AI for All

  Shobita Parthasarathy, Jared Katzman

  Hopes for the future of artificial intelligence would seem to be bright. There is, after all, a great deal of utility in AI already. AI tools can provide high-quality real-time translation for… Read More

• Summer 2023

  Regulating Space Debris

  This wicked problem needs US leadership Marilyn Harbert and Asha Balakrishnan’s call to action should be generalized to a broader international audience. Space debris presents a particularly wicked international problem; the millions… Read More

• Summer 2024

  Medicine Means More Than Molecules

  Sindy Escobar Alvarez, Sam Gill

  The Doris Duke Foundation, where we work, has a long track record of supporting early-career fellowships that allow physicians to pursue research to improve patient care. For the past 25 years, we’ve… Read More

• Summer 2024

  “This Is Also a Time of Great Possibility and Great Capability.”

  Saul Perlmutter, Molly Galvin

  Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter is best known for his groundbreaking discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating—for which he shares the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. But Perlmutter, a professor of… Read More

• November 22, 2024

  A Time Between

  Detectives digging into evidence of a tragic death find themselves confronted with two different versions of the past—and, perhaps, the present.

• Winter 2024

  In the Heart of the Yakni Chitto

  Monique Verdin

  

  Monique Verdin began documenting the lives of her relatives in the Mississippi delta in 1998, when she was 19. That year, her grandmother Armantine Marie Billiot Verdin and other Houma elders traveled… Read More

• November 8, 2024

  Collateral Damage

  From the Future Tense Fiction archives: A short story from Justina Ireland about what happens when a robot is sent into combat alongside human soldiers.

• Summer 2023

  How to Investigate an Algorithm

  Meredith Broussard

  At the end of 2021, Sujin Kim was a senior at the University of Michigan. Eager to follow up her undergraduate political science studies with a PhD, Kim was applying to 15… Read More

• June 18, 2024

  Brent Blevins Makes Mars Policy in Congress

  Brent Blevins, Lisa Margonelli

  In this installment of Science Policy IRL, Lisa Margonelli goes behind the scenes of congressional policymaking with Brent Blevins. Blevins is a senior congressional staffer and staff director of the… Read More

• November 1, 2024

  Domestic Violence

  From the Future Tense Fiction archives: When an employee tells Kristen she can’t clock-in on time because her house is locking her inside, Kristen begins to suspect the problem runs deeper than a malfunctioning smart lock.

• October 25, 2024

  Patrons

  Cassidy McFadzean imagines extraterrestrials who selectively lift humans from Earth and transport them to a deep-space artists colony. As they do, the distant visitors, known as Patrons, dramatically shift the terrestrial communities where they touch down.

• Spring 2024

  Channels for Arctic Diplomacy

  Nataliya Shok, Katherine Ginsbach

  Illustration by Shonagh Rae During the summer of 2016, in Russia’s arctic Yamal Peninsula, a heat wave resurfaced anthrax bacteria long buried in the permafrost. The bacteria then killed thousands of reindeer… Read More

• December 21, 2021

  Episode 4: Art of a COVID Year

  In the early days of the pandemic, communities began singing together over balconies, banging pans, and engaging in other forms of collective support, release, and creativity. Artists have also been creatively responding… Read More

• Spring 2022

  Electrifying Agents and the Power Thieves of Mexico City

  Diana Montaño

  Leer en español Mugshot from Tomás Sánchez’s booking record. One morning in 1908, the fate of Tomás Sánchez, owner of the San Antonio mill on Mexico City’s Pueblita Street, took a sharp… Read More

• Summer 2023

  How Open Should American Science Be?

  In “The Precarious Balance Between Research Openness and Security” (Issues, Spring 2023), E. William Colglazier makes an important contribution to the ongoing dialog about science security, and particularly regarding the… Read More

• October 4, 2024

  Empathy Hour

  From the Future Tense Fiction archives: A story about the aftermath of massive climate migration, and the use of deepfake technology to manufacture complacence.