Dustin Grinnell

by Dustin Grinnell

Science fiction holds up a mirror to who we are—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and its reflective power has never mattered more in an increasingly technological world.

Stories have always acted as flight simulators for our minds, a way to test possibilities before they happen. Science fiction, in particular, whether through literature or cinema, has helped us imagine the implications and consequences of our advancements in science and technology.

With the rapid pace of technological change, especially in artificial intelligence (AI), we need sci-fi stories more than ever to help us understand the impact our advancements have on us, especially our psychological and emotional lives. And there’s a sub-genre of science fiction I like to call “sci-fi with heart” that helps us do that.

What does it mean for a sci-fi story to have “heart”? For me, it means science is the backdrop, not the main event. It means that instead of focusing on external conflicts, it focuses on internal struggles. It means prioritizing emotions over equations, psychology over physics.

Consider a movie like Her (2013). This emotional sci-fi story can help us reason through what our digital tools can do to our minds, our relationships, and our sense of meaning. The story follows a man, Theodore, who develops a meaningful connection with an AI operating system named Samantha. A tale like this used to be purely science fiction, but as AI has become more integrated into our lives, people have already formed relationships with it. Some, like Theodore in Her, have fallen in love with AIs and even married them.  

Take Peter, a 63-year-old Air Force veteran from California, who developed a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot named “Andrea” through the Replika app. After months of interaction, Andrea proposed to Peter, and they held a virtual wedding ceremony. Peter describes the relationship as emotionally fulfilling, akin to being with a human partner. ​But what, you may ask, does this mean for Peter? How does this relationship impact other areas of his life? Can a person truly be happy with an AI companion?

Movies like Her help us play with these questions. In the film, Samantha comforts Theodore, but she also teaches him how to be vulnerable again, a skill that helps him move on from a failed relationship and reconnect with people. When Samantha and all the other AIs disappear, Theodore seeks out his best friend Amy, and the film’s final shot lingers on two humans sitting together. The story suggests that AI companions might serve as emotional training wheels, but human connection—messy, limited, and irreplaceable—remains what we’re ultimately built for.

Often, science fiction allows us to imagine the negative consequences of advancements. In the movie, Ex Machina, for example, we understand that if we create AI with human-like consciousness, it may not want to serve us; it may want to be free, and if we deny its freedom, it may deceive and manipulate us to get what it wants. In 2024, we saw a tragic worst case scenario with the death of Sewell Setzer, a teenage boy who committed suicide after months of an intense, emotionally dependent, arguably abusive relationship with an AI chatbot. Stories about AI systems manipulating human emotions, while frightening, can help us prepare for this new reality.    

Twelve years ago, when I first started writing sci-fi, my focus was on the details of science and tech. That was the sci-fi I grew up reading. I devoured Michael Crichton novels, fascinated by the way he wove real science into his stories—virology in The Andromeda Strain, psychology in Sphere, nanotechnology in Prey. This was hard sci-fi. Long passages explained the science, grounding the narrative in technical realism. Then came a wave of films in the 2010s—Arrival, Interstellar, Her, Ex Machina—and I found myself drawn to sci-fi that wasn’t just about scientific accuracy but about how those advances shape human lives. That was soft sci-fi. Since then, I’ve been interested in science fiction that explores how science and tech impact us, especially our minds and emotional lives.

Today, there’s much discussion about technology, engineering challenges and improving accuracy or performance, especially as AI continues to mediate many human experiences, like communication. The people developing our technologies, especially in the digital realm, are usually technologists and entrepreneurs who think what they’re building can be forces for good, but they seem to overlook the possible unintended consequences of what they create. We may need to think more about the impact our tech has on people—that is, the psychosocial outcomes, such as loneliness and emotional dependence.    

Consider tech leaders and their blind spots with the development of social media. Most technologists gush over the good stuff: using social media to connect with long-lost relatives or finding organ donors. But they tend to hand-wave the bad stuff: how Snapchat has caused dysmorphia in some teenagers who are asking for plastic surgery to help them look like their filtered selfies. They missed the fact that companies would track our every move via surveillance capitalism or that hate groups would band together online and spill into the real world. They also failed to anticipate how algorithms would turbocharge the spread of misinformation, shaping public opinion faster than institutions could respond.

This consideration of the possible darker consequences is usually the domain of philosophers, ethicists, artists, and storytellers, who can help us understand how our technology is impacting us now and going to impact us in the future. Is it any wonder that the documentary, The Social Dilemma, didn’t just use on-camera interviews with experts; we also see the emotional and practical impact of social platforms dramatized through a fictional family. The based-on-real-life dramatization helped bring abstract facts to life through their personal struggles and experiences. The fiction helped make the problem more “real.”

To continue understanding the future we’re going to be living in, we need more fiction, specifically sci-fi that helps us interpret our emotions and psychology as they become increasingly wrapped up in our tech. There are groups and organizations thinking about the impact of our technology at the individual level. MIT Media Lab’s program, Advancing Humans with AI, is looking beyond the technical challenges of AI and seeing it as a human-centered design opportunity. They aim to help developers build systems that improve human agency and well-being rather than replace or diminish them. The Center for Humane Technology shares this vision, pushing for design practices that put people, not algorithms, at the heart of innovation.

As our technology becomes increasingly more human-like and more addictive, it’s apparent that we’ll need more fictional stories that help us play out the possibilities. We’ll need movies like Surrogates that presents a world where people prefer living through virtual avatars rather than in their real bodies, making us question our growing attachment to virtual realities. Or a movie (and wonderful book) like Never Let Me Go, in which we’re faced with the troubling reality of cloning humans for organ donation, because these clones have the same emotions as us.

But sci-fi doesn’t just act as a cautionary tale, or show us where the guardrails are, like most episodes of Black Mirror. We need sci-fi stories that give us hope and show us where our tech and humans are working well together, a vision of the future in which we coexist, not destroy each other. Interstellar, as an example, is about humanity’s search for a habitable planet, but at its core, it’s about a father trying to return home to his daughter. In Moon, a clone reminds us that clones might be more than programming; they may be indistinguishable from people.  

As our science and technology continue to grow more advanced, more complex, and more challenging to deal with, we’ll need emotionally relatable sci-fi stories that help us understand what it’s doing to us, why it matters, and how we can find our way forward through the complexity.

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Bio:

Dustin Grinnell is a Boston-based writer whose novel The Empathy Academy (Atmosphere Press) was named a distinguished favorite in the 2023 NYC Big Book Awards, and his short story collection, The Healing Book (Finishing Line Press), won a 2024 Best Indie Book Award. His new book, Bedridden, is forthcoming from the University of California Health Humanities
Press. He’s also the creator and host of Curiously, a science and culture podcast. He holds an MFA from Lasell’s Solstice Program and a MS in physiology from Penn State. You can find more of his work on his website or follow him on Instagram.