Where Have All The Joyful Futures Gone?
- Jul 16
- 2 min read
A Call to Artists in the Age of AI
If you've noticed a trend lately, you're not alone. In the past year, I’ve watched films like Mountainhead and Companion arrive on our screens. These films are beautifully shot, and narratively rich yet steeped in dystopia, grief, and the persistent ache of disconnection. In these cinematic futures, AI is either ghost or God, reflecting our worst fears and glossing over our highest possibilities.
Where are the futures that sing?
I'm not asking for hard to imagine techno-utopias. What I'm wondering is more about the absences of stories that highlight symbiosis. Could we have more narratives that speak of mutual flourishing? Is there speculative fiction that dares to dream with AI instead of simply surviving it?
This cultural deficit matters. So very often life imitates art. Our stories shape our systems. If we only feed the public imagination with visions of AI as dehumanizing, manipulative, or indifferent, then we create a feedback loop of fear. It narrows what people think is possible. It wires hesitation into our innovation.
I believe that imagination is infrastructure. It’s how societies scaffold their values, how they practice becoming. And right now, we are long overdue for a renaissance in AI storytelling that invites awe, healing, humor, and hope.
So consider this your official creative prompt (and homework): What does a future look like where AI helps us remember who we are?
What if AI isn't the villain, but the unexpected chorus in the background of our most human moments? What if machines don't make us less, but help us be more?
This is your invitation, artists. Writers. Filmmakers. Animators. VR sculptors and immersive world-builders. It’s time to remix the mythos. It's time to generate content AND cultural direction. Let's stop outsourcing future narratives to Silicon Valley pitch decks and start crafting them from the heartspaces of community, culture, and care.
We need AI stories that feel like a warm hand on your back, like a poem decoded in your own voice, like a dance between wild intelligence and ethical design. Our future should be one worth running toward.
Because we are the Oracle, not the the machine.
What a fine writer and thinker you are. It strikes me that movies and TV—even in clip form— are still the coin of the cultural realm and that most revolve around violence. I say that as a devoted fan of the detective genre (esp. Scandanavian Noir), but it certainly extends to the Marvel movies and beyond. Visual arts offer possibility, but on their own do not have broad cultural impact. Novels don't have muscular presence they once did and, in any event, suffer from the same vanity problems you describe.
Perhaps one way to gain a foothold for the project you imagine is greater integration of AI capacities into existing genres—the way we now take cell phones, social media, and…