Category Archives: Thoughts and speculation

In the Guardian…

In the press Interesting links News Short stories Thoughts and speculation No Comments

Great to see the Creative Futures project get a mention in today’s Guardian.

This was a project that I was a part of with the Defence Science and Technology Lab (UK MoD) and Coventry University (Dr Allen Stroud).

Here the extract, but you can read the full article at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/19/ministry-of-defence-enlists-sci-fi-writers-to-prepare-for-dystopian-futures

“Stroud recently took a leading role in Creative Futures, a research partnership involving prominent science fiction writers and MoD experts looking at the challenges the UK will face in the next century. There are plans to produce and sell a volume of stories from that project.”

Is the Future of Justice Free, Fair, and Flawless?

News Thoughts and speculation No Comments

I’m very pleased to have another article in the BSFA Focus magazine’s ‘Shape of Things to Come’.

With this one, I take the section on Police and Justice in “All Tomorrow’s Futures” and expand and extrapolate into some new ideas.

I cover quite a bit in the article, but to give you a flavour of the areas I was thinking about, here are some examples:

  • the tension between wanting every crime to be prosecuted and the desire for lower taxes
  • whether human bias or machine bias is better for justice (presuming bias will always be there)
  • can an automated system eradicate the disastrous effects of human ego in righting wrongful convictions
  • where and how is the inevitable use of AI best deployed.

I really enjoyed pondering and writing about this, especially using All Tomorrow’s Futures as a launch pad for ideas, and I hope it gives some food for thought around how we might work towards a free, fair and flawless justice system.