Reading Nancy Kress’ take on where machine learning might take us in a story from 2015 is a testament to how good she is at seeing where current technology trends might lead. Or maybe it is just because she got an insight view into what Microsoft was working on at the time for this anthology. In this story we follow a researcher trying to make an AI model better at reading human emotions.

Future Visions

In this future a terrible virus has killed millions of kids across the world, and the researcher Ethan lost his daughter to it. He buries himself in work with an AI program by training it with letting the program teach kids, where the kids indirectly also teaches the program. This narrative opens up interesting themes about how humans deal with emotions and whether everything can be deduced to just data points for a machine learning AI.

While I do love stories that explore such themes and Kress is often the best at that sort of thing, it comes of as mostly half finished here. The world building is too complex for what the story really needs, there are too many characters that remove focus from Ethan and while it did like the rather pessimistic ending, it did left me wanting for more character depth.

I think this could actually be a good basis for a movie script with an actor that excels in subtle acting, but the story is just an intriguing concept for something more.

Read in Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft
Rating: 2+