This was the most exciting brief I’ve ever had for a short story commission; basically ‘Do you want to go to an Artificial Life conference in Sicily, hang out with an unconventional computing scientist who is trying to work out how to grow buildings from seeds, and then write a story about the consequences of this tech in 2070?’
I wrote about the experience in my blog posts Will buildings grow on trees in 2070? and The Mount Etna hat club.
In my contribution to the anthology, Growing Skyscrapers, a group of scientists heads out to investigate a shanty town grown out of an illegally seeded skyscraper, and within the town, two of its child residents discover an unusual and voracious insect.
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From the jacket blurb:
Computers are changing. Soon the silicon chip will seem like a clunky antique amid the bounty of more exotic processes on offer. Robots are changing too; material evolution and swarm intelligence are creating a new generation of devices that will diverge and disperse into a balanced ecosystem of humans and robjects (robotic objects). Somewhere in between, we humans will have to change also… in the way we interact with technology, the roles we adopt in an increasingly intelligent environment, and how we interface with each other.
The driving motors behind many of these changes will be artificial life (A-Life) and unconventional computing. How exactly they will impact on our world is still an open question. But in the spirit of collective intelligence, this anthology brings together 38 scientists and authors, working in pairs, to imagine what life (and A-Life) will look like in the year 2070. Every kind of technology is imagined: from lie-detection glasses to military swarmbots, brain-interfacing implants to synthetically grown skyscrapers, revolution-inciting computer games to synthetically engineered haute cuisine. All artificial life is here.
Edited by Ra Page & Martyn Amos
Featuring stories by Stuart Evers, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Martyn Bedford, Adam Marek, Margaret Wilkinson, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Adam Roberts, Sarah Schofield, Toby Litt, Sean O’Brien, Zoe Lambert, K.J. Orr, Julian Gough, Dinesh Allirajah, Annie Kirby, Lucy Caldwell, Claire Dean, Andy Hedgecock and Joanna Quinn.