Warning: This post has strong doomer energy. (But I promise, there’s a silver lining for homo sapiens if you stick it out to the end).
We humans are stubborn. (Already, at least one reader has started thinking up an angry reply to this, inadvertently proving my point).
Our stubbornness manifests in myriad ways, but the form that is most enduring—across time, across cultures—is the dogged refusal to accept any other life as equivalent in value, let alone superior.
Sure, we might toy with the notion of all-out extinction through our beloved post-apocalyptic media… AI uprisings and nuclear winters and killer prions, oh my!… but that’s as far as we go. Toying with it. This fantasy of “the end” has come part and parcel with civilization since Sumer rose out of the holy mud.
Yet in recent years, our species has been examining another form of “the end” that, while less destructive, is just as frightening: human obsolescence. Many would claim it’s far worse, in fact, as (to rip off T.S. Eliot) it suggests humanity ending with a whimper of irrelevance instead of a hydrogen bang. And given the pride and fireworks-loving machismo that has characterized humanity since we crawled out of the caves, this is a profoundly upsetting idea to us.
Just twenty or thirty years ago, it was not uncommon (among laypeople, at least) to dream about humanity expanding across the universe, setting foot on new worlds and spreading “human values” (as though we have ever agreed on those in the first place). Maybe we were inundated by optimistic media predictions, or maybe the Cold War space race gave us an inflated sense of confidence. An exuberance that has faded in the pale light of more recent headlines. As time goes by, we’ve seen a host of changes—technological, social, cultural, and governmental—that put a real damper on our theory of humanity being the inheritor of the universe.
AI has crept into just about every industry, and it is not going away anytime soon, if ever. Funding for space missions (let alone colonization of foreign celestial bodies that offer little value) has plummeted. Our own planet is imperiled and may not make it more than a few centuries, regardless of its cause of death.
Thus, many of us have begun to earnestly wonder if our great species will become a relic, an artifact, a bunch of hapless meatbags forced to watch our own creations soar past us and colonize a galaxy that we will never get to experience firsthand. (Voyager is doing a wonderful job of that already).
And so we come to the downtrodden demographic known as sci-fi writers. When your profession seemingly revolves around trying to predict the future, you may find it very difficult to work in the current climate, especially if you are concerned with plausibility and realism for your future worlds. When confronted with overwhelming evidence of machines racing past humans, and humans themselves being sidelined to increasingly useless positions (both occupationally and existentially), it may feel harder than ever to justify why your setting has humans in the cockpit rather than supercooled mainframes.
Many of you will not feel this way, and will be happy to shrug it off and continue to plop humans everywhere and anywhere, regardless of logic, because it is simply more enjoyable and cool to tell stories that way. And to that I say… hell, yeah. I’m not the arbiter of storytelling. I’m not here to say hard sci-fi is superior to any other subgenre, or that those who spend hours pedantically, neurotically pondering humanity’s exponentially shrinking place are better than those of us who want to write about lasers and space dogfights.
But if you are one of those neurotic humans, let’s dive in.
Gods of the gaps
The blunt, painful truth is that AI already has a leg up on us when it comes to most realms of productivity. And it has a few million legs up on us when it comes to productivity in space. At root, we are fragile bags of water who evolved for one planet, one atmosphere, one gravity. Any task in space can, in theory, be done more precisely and efficiently by a silicon-based construct who doesn’t depend on pesky needs like food or water or socializing or even sanity.
We have plenty of ways to lampshade this truth. Interstellar‘s explanation (sorry to pick on it; I truly do love it, and you can ask my wife how many times I’ve cried while watching it) is among the most bafflingly lampshadey of them all, to the point that it was memed to death in online discussions and cited as the film’s most cop-out plot point. Love. That’s the missing ingredient that lets humanity survive.
For the purposes of this discussion, love=sentience=sapience, and that is the magic sauce that many authors assign to humanity. We’ll discuss that more in the next segment. For now, though, let me point out that I find it to be a weak argument, even if I am sympathetic to the philosophical importance of humans directly experiencing space rather than relying on transmitted images or data. Peter Watts’ Blindsight (please read it!) makes a fairly compelling (albeit downbeat) case against consciousness, suggesting that it is not required for survival, nor even advantageous in an evolutionary sense. In fact, it may an aberration, or even the very flaw that ends us and allows “blind” life to prosper in our absence.
Even so, it’s natural that people reach for consciousness when trying to point out why humans will win over machines. It’s the one thing that definitively separates us from them (for now). But strange as it is to say, whether AI ever truly becomes self-aware is irrelevant; many have already begun to treat it as though it is, with some people now using it as a therapist or stand-in parent. If there is a new cold war going on between machines and humanity, we are probably losing. And so we continue to find the small gaps where we can wedge ourselves in and claim to still hold dominion.
Look no further than the annoying sci-fi trope in which plucky humans outsmart superintelligent constructs by merely asking an “impossible question” or stumping them with a logic-based riddle, proving that medieval legends about “tricking the trickster” have wonderful longevity. There’s another variation in which “human creativity” radically outmaneuvers the killer AI swarm, perhaps taking the form of an unprecedented tactic like (gasp!) a barrel-roll or distraction. Very exciting to see as a human, to be sure, and it makes us want to give our species a pat on the back and start a USA-USA-USA-style chant, but there’s a difference between what is comforting and what is plausible. And the truth is probably not comforting at all.
But enough of my cheery optimism. Let’s talk about what it all means for storytelling.
The Writer’s Quandary
So, time for the awkward question.
If machines are superior to us in survival, intelligence, and efficiency, how do we justify the role of humans in far-future sci-fi?
Here, I’m not talking merely about humans existing in your setting. There are plenty of forms of obsolescence that don’t lead to annihilation. The question is more about what value or place these humans hold, and, if they are places of prominence, why we would choose an intentionally inefficient way of doing things, especially when survival or financial interests are on the line.
Put another way, why do your starships even have humans on them? If you try to make insanely high-G maneuvers with a flesh-based crew, you’re likely to wind up with flesh-based jelly floating and plastered to the walls. You need to account for all kinds of supplies and oxygen needs and artificial gravity and a thousand other variables that machines do not.
How can a faulty human brain possibly measure up to a supercomputer when it comes to calculating laser angles or intercept courses that require unimaginable amounts of data processing in a fraction of a second? What’s the use in sending a few hundred flimsy, death-prone humans to a distant planet (which, going by “real science,” will likely take centuries to reach) when we could just rely on a swarm of self-replicating nanites or industrial networks to begin terraforming the world and raising batches of embryos? Moreover, what’s the point in terraforming planets when we can build orbital habitats to host far more people with far fewer complications? Why even look at planets when asteroids and moons provide all the materials we need?
If we want to get really controversial (sorry, Starship Troopers fans) why rely on squishy, whiny human soldiers in space (much less drop them onto worthless planets) when we could utilize drones, or cross-system missiles, or X-ray penetration, or bioengineered creatures, or… I could go on, of course.
The truth is, there really isn’t a good reason.
As I mentioned previously, most of us sidestep logic or outright ignore it because it leads to some very, very good stories about our favorite type of characters (other humans). Star Wars is perhaps the most popular sci-fi franchise for a reason, laws of physics and common sense be damned. It has a low barrier to entry, lots of human drama, and stakes we care about. Great. But if we want to get into the nitty-gritty (and likely uncomfortable) discussions about humanity and its attempts to keep up with AI on the galactic stage, we need to get real.
We need to be honest and admit that most of our justifications for a human-centric future are, in the end, justifications. There’s plenty we can dish out, to be sure. Ah, maybe consciousness has some metaphysical spark that machines can’t replicate! Maybe empathy is a secret weapon against unconscious mega-networks! Maybe electromagnetic storms scramble AI! Maybe we’ve had a Butlerian Jihad a la Dune and tossed out machines for good! (If you’re interested in a complete list of how authors can reliably justify humans in a future sci-fi setting, you may want to check out my Reddit comment on the subject… but for now, let us get back to doomerism).
Ultimately, all of these excuses can work, but they are used to plaster over a truth that seems not only likely, but almost inevitable: humans, as they currently exist, will become obsolete in almost every field. Not just in fictional fields, either. It’s all over our own world. You find it on Reddit from frustrated job seekers being laid off and replaced by LLMs. You find it on the streets, quite literally, in the form of driverless taxis. You even find it in the bedroom, where some people are ditching the sweat and stank of flesh-based lovers for AI erotica.
So, that leaves us writers in an unenviable position. We have to either make up some bullshit to explain why humans are still kicking around in space/orbit/starships, or we have to relegate ourselves to a “realistic” but soulless story in which machines, not our darling, story-enabling humans, are the star players…
Or do we?
Accepting Obsolescence
Now, just for a moment, imagine dropping the pretense. Imagine sitting down to write a book in which your worst fears are realized, and humanity is swept off the leaderboards. Maybe we’re just adrift as a species, wasting away in VR servers or luxury starships while machines do all the work and exploration. Maybe we’re extinct. Maybe we’re just plain useless when measured against AI constructs that can outperform us a million times over, left to pick through tin cans and barter amongst ourselves while our overlords mindlessly expand toward Ganymede. There are plenty of variations to work with here, but the underlying premise is the same: humans are not the top dogs anymore.
At first, this might seem hopeless…
But here’s the funny paradox. In giving up hope, in no longer fighting to argue for why humanity can and must be the dominant species in your setting, you also give up fear and frustration. You give in to what is, from our anthropocentric point of view, the worst possible outcome… and amid the rubble and debris, you find (to your joy) that there are still very human stories worth telling, even if it doesn’t involve redshirts getting phaser’d to bits on an away mission.
This may sound cynical, or even heretical… but in my experience, there’s an almost liberating honesty in writing futures where humans are obsolete. Archaic. Put out to pasture, as it were. Picture a setting, bleak or otherwise, in which machines (industrial monstrosities or nanobots or stripperbots, take your pick) handle all the heavy lifting of terraforming, exploration, combat, production…
So, where does this leave us? On Earth? Languishing in post-scarcity O’Neill Cylinders? Uploaded into immortal cloud servers? I don’t know, dude. It’s your story. And that’s the point.
There’s still ample room to run if we stop trying to handwave the problem and cobble up half-baked reasons for why humanity still needs a place at the big-boy table. A galaxy with redundant humans is still full of grief, and struggles, and conflict, and all the other brutish goodness that we enjoy in our stories like proper sadists. You might have to be willing to set aside the easy or more obvious manifestations of these things, however.
Yes, there’s good fun and excitement in humans dogfighting (the Expanse’s combat is a beautiful middle ground between hard sci-fi and more conventional “pew pew in vacuum” tales), but flashy explosions and streams of autogun fire are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to compelling conflict in sci-fi.
Take a look at 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Hyperion, or Accelerando. Compared to a lot of modern sci-fi, there’s hardly any action kicking off at any given moment… and yet the questions they raise, and the stakes they present, feel much grander and more gripping than what you’ll find in the entire canon of Marvel films or modern Star Wars. And it just so happens that these works are also very, very interested in the question of how humans and machines ought to relate to one another, if indeed they even can.
So rather than thinking of human obsolescence as inherently boring, or a dead end for your storytelling, I would urge you to examine the cracks. Find the pressure points that create tension. Look for humanity in the places where it seems the least likely to be found. There are plenty of quiet wars that don’t depend on humans fighting humans with lasers or nukes, many of them with relevance to our own lives and futures. No matter how far we go as a species, we will still grapple with questions of meaning, and identity, and belonging, and community, and loss, and ethics, and religion, and… My, we have a lot to figure out, don’t we?
(That’s good news for writers, by the way!)
Obsolescence as Narrative Fuel
We are loath to acknowledge how tenuous our position is. Not only as a species, but as workers, thinkers, lovers… as individuals competing not just with other humans, but with machines who will outperform us, if they don’t already do so. It’s uncomfortable. We generally read to escape, not to stare into the abyss (that’s what social media is for).
But this abyss is actually the unknowable fear that gives rise to great storytelling. How would it feel to watch machines swarm the Solar System, destined to colonize far-away stars and worlds while we rot here? What might we be willing to give up if it means keeping pace with machines or exploring the stars, whether it’s our “original” body, our memories, our society, our sanity, our very sense of self? At what point do we become something other than human in our attempt to escape this obsolescence? Hell, how does it feel to slowly die of radiation sickness while the onboard AI sings you lullabies, unable to help or even comfort you?
What you wind up with, if you follow the thread far enough, is a contemplation on what it means to be limited and small in a vast, uncaring, hostile universe that is not rooting for organic life or even existence, let alone one species. And that seems like a pretty damned good place to start.
Another is to take a look at the view from ground level. Instead of starting with worldbuilding interstellar empires and twenty-nine historical wars involving trillions of casualties, why not just get curious about a single person and their daily life? If they don’t have to work, what do they do with their time? How does that affect them? If they do work, what do they do, and why? Start with a close-angle zoom and pan outwards, and you’ll see that a whole world (still full of meaning and human drama) falls into place quite naturally. You may even find yourself examining large-scale systems and dynamics that you’ve glossed over in the past in a blind march toward the “rule of cool.”
Take a look at Elysium. Middling action flick, but as an allegory for class struggle and artificial scarcity fueled by the ultra-wealthy having access to high-end AI… it was brilliant. (And probably prophetic, but that’s too scary to consider before I’ve had my coffee). The humans down on the surface toil endlessly, but for what? Where are they going? What happens when the rich don’t need them whatsoever? When machines fill every possible role that humans ever could? Are they kept alive out of mercy, or to serve as slaves beneath the nobility? Things to point and laugh at? Even more unsettlingly, Elysium suggests that it’s not just machines that will make us obsolete. We humans are exceptionally good at doing it to one another already. When we watch Matt Damon slaving away in the factory, losing the last dregs of his humanity to compete with glitchy industrial bots, we see a reflection of ourselves and the world we’re wandering into. We see a portrait of change and loss.
In fact, if you look for it, you can find this same fear of obsolescence filtered through nearly infinite prisms, including loss of specialness (Ex Machina), loss of dignity (Wall-E), and loss of empathy (Blade Runner). The way we view machines is a reflection of the way we view ourselves, and what we fear from machines is often what we fear about our place in existence as a whole. Who are we when we’re not defined by labor or salaries? What should we become in a world that doesn’t need us to become anything?
The answer to these questions need not be depressing or pessimistic. They do, after all, represent a wholesale shift in the way we define ourselves. That’s not a bad thing in itself. For the first time in millennia, perhaps ever, we are faced with a “blank canvas” regarding the nature and function of human life. For some, this blankness is terrifying, and for others, it is exhilarating. Yes, machines may work faster, longer, and downright better than us… but can they contemplate their own existence better? Can they offer a warm hug to our loved ones?
It should go without saying that a living being is defined not only by productivity, but by quirks and flaws and fears and blunders. Rabbits may not be the smartest of animals, and they certainly do not produce any goods worth buying, and yet the world would be immeasurably darker without them. My wife may be clumsy, but I find that endearing. There is always beauty in the imperfections of the world. Wonder and joy cannot be captured on ROI spreadsheets or board-room projectors.
In fact, one might say that all of the depressing, existentially horrifying media I’ve mentioned in this article is a rejection of the nihilistic, misguided notion that humanity is defined by any one quality, any one capability. We were not born to work, or to fight wars, or to do anything, really. Existence precedes essence, as Sartre might say.
In that view, what we are is an active choice, not a matter of fait accompli, and the same is true for the worlds we construct. True, technology may impinge upon us, and even impinge greatly, but at no point can it ever rob us of our most fundamental gift as sapient beings: our capacity to experience, contemplate, and connect as this particular body-mind. Nobody else will ever live your life. It is a one-time viewing, an exclusive event, and that makes it priceless. Treat the inner world of your characters with the same value.
Dignity in Smallness
Maybe I am terribly wrong, and humanity will inherit the stars as surely as we inherited the Earth’s skies and oceans (just, you know, not the deep oceans). Maybe we will invent a breakthrough that allows us to go faster than light, or place people in “cryosleep” without rupturing their brains, or find a way to upload minds that doesn’t just create a binary-based philosophical zombie.
Maybe.
I am not here to make sweeping predictions about the future of our species. My goal is smaller and humbler. I ask you, as an author, to consider that whether the galaxy at large is colonized by organic life or silicon, there will always be stories to share, and real stakes to explore. The question isn’t whether we’ll become obsolete, but what we might lose or even gain if such a thing happens, and how those losses alter what it means to be human.
Your fictional victims of this loss may be embryos packed aboard a colony ship, or wastrels living out their immortality in VR, or anything in between, but what matters is how deeply you investigate one question: what would it be like to experience that?
By dwelling on that loss long enough, you may start to see all the new beginnings that emerge from the same ground. The new ways of thinking and imagining and connecting that we have buried for so long in our mad dash to be worker drones. Understandably, many of us will be afraid of (and even hurt by) seeing our labor or passion projects dropped into the hands of AI. But we’re still here, aren’t we? We still have minds and dreams and desires, and plenty of other humans in the same boat who demand our attention and compassion. In obsolescence, there is change, and in change, there is freedom. Lean into that. Find yourself in the questioning.
Or, you know, you can write about laser dogfights. I like both.
(If you enjoyed this ramble on existentialism… or hated it… please consider checking out my trilogy Interstellar Gunrunner, which is not at all hard sci-fi and proof that I am not above giving a well-crafted middle finger to the laws of physics when appropriate).
James Wolanyk 