Top Stories
Stories in Futurism that you'll love, handpicked by our team.
A Token for Your Thoughts. Top Story - July 2026.
There is an unspoken issue right now flooding the internet. As AI does more and more of the heavy lifting, when we need information, no one seems to be talking about the huge money grab that it's causing. I am talking about tokens. Tokens are an imaginary currency, like Bitcoin, used to pay for generating AI content, asking whatever bot you prefer to use, and general AI usage. It feels like double taxation with few perks or benefits. I’ll tell you why.
By Alexandra Grant3 months ago in Futurism
The Price We Pay for Convenience. Top Story - June 2026.
When I was a teenager, I had five lights in my bedroom. One was the overhead. They call it a boob light now, which is hilarious. That was the first one to go out as I settled into my bed for evening reading. I had to get up to turn it off, so I had to be really annoyed by all the extra light to put forth the effort. The second two were on pullstrings that hung in my very open-plan closet. I usually got those two at the same time. The next was a lamp by my mirror. It was hideous, but it gave off a pretty light, so I liked it. By then, I was down to one light by my bed that I didn't have to stand up to turn off. It was a touch lamp that you could whack in any way at all to make it turn on to three different levels of brightness. I bought it for $13, and it was one of my favourite objects as a teen.
By Stephanie Van Orman4 months ago in Futurism
The A.I. Doc Review: “Down the Stack” Optimism and the Illusion of a Tech-Saved Future. Top Story - April 2026.
Title: The A.I. Doc or How I Became an Apocaloptimist Directed by: Daniel Roher, Charlie Tyrell Written by: Daniel Roher Starring: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei
By Sean Patrick7 months ago in Futurism
The Fears of AI And How Much Fun It Can Be. Top Story - March 2026.
ChatGPT has come a long way, as has AI in general. There are those people who are scared of it, and for understandable reasons. People fear that as technologies advance, they’ll be replaced in the workforce. Then, there are the fears that AI could evolve into something that brings us to the brink of extinction.
By Jason Morton7 months ago in Futurism
How machines can learn from human behaviour. Top Story - March 2026.
In order to understand where we are and where we are going, we need to understand where we were first. - Susan Fourtane Could a human behaviour simulator be embedded into a robot or online avatar to the point that it’s hard to distinguish between a real person or artificial intelligence? Scientists have been upping the stakes in this “Turing test” for years, to the point that human-mimicking programmes are ready to answer tricky questions, assist people with online shopping or be companions.
By Susan Fourtané 7 months ago in Futurism
About Binding Prometheus. Top Story - January 2026.
I want to start actively advocating on behalf of my own work, and the most valuable part of my canon is, without a doubt, Binding Prometheus, the play I have been working on since 2019 and only finished in 2023 as part of my MA. The play itself is an amalgamation of a million different inspirations. On one end, it evokes the Ancient Greek myth-play, deriving its own title from the earliest extant work of Western drama we have, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. On the other end, it borrows significantly from the sci-fi bulwarks from over the years, namely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. The play could be an episode of Black Mirror, I fear. I don’t know. I’ve only ever seen one episode of Black Mirror.
By Steven Christopher McKnight10 months ago in Futurism
A Dystopia of Our Own Design. Top Story - November 2025.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever. –George Orwell, 1984 More and more often, I look around and find that the themes of my favorite dystopian novels have come to life: separatism/division, erasure, controlling the past to control the future, the rich stamping on the poor while the poor take it out on each other, using technology to control and monitor our lives, etc. It is everything that we have been warned against, especially in literature—time and time again.
By Stephanie Hoogstad11 months ago in Futurism
Accidental Time Travel. Top Story - October 2025.
There are many stories and concepts that have deeply fascinated me. Stories that consist of that strange and hazy divide between science and the supernatural. One such concept that has always intrigued me is the bizarre phenomena of time slips.
By Jasmine Aguilarabout a year ago in Futurism
