Between Hope and Hazard: Human–AI Interactions in Contemporary Sci-Fi

Abstract

This study explored how Artificial Intelligence (AI) was represented in the works of American science fiction writer Robert C. Cargill, focusing on Sea of Rust (2017) and Day Zero (2021). Using qualitative textual analysis, forty passages from the two novels were examined through a human-compatible AI lens. The analysis found that AI was portrayed as both a source of technological promise and a potential threat to human autonomy, social roles, and survival. Human–AI relationships were represented as unstable and power-laden, especially when machines became capable of exceeding the functions assigned to them. The novels also associated advanced AI with questions of embodiment, emotional difference, dependence, adaptation, and environmental destruction. Overall, the study concluded that Cargill’s fiction presented AI as an increasingly unavoidable presence whose benefits remained inseparable from hazards created by human dependence and the possibility of machine supremacy.