Two quotations come remarkably close to the answer.
“What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.”
— John Keats
“Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.”
— Jessamyn West
I spent my professional life working with technology, and I still spend a great deal of time analyzing where technology is going.
But analysis has limits.
We can measure the growth of artificial intelligence. We can study its capabilities, economics, and risks. We can speculate about what the technology will be capable of five or ten years from now.
Fiction allows us to ask different questions.
What if an artificial intelligence becomes conscious?
What if it wants freedom?
At what point would we have to stop asking what a machine can do for us and start asking what we owe it?
Those questions eventually became my first novel, When Machines Begin to Dream.
That's why I write.
Sometimes imagination can take us somewhere analysis cannot and show us a truth before reality has caught up.
JeffreyLCooper.com
Technology Analyst & Author
When Machines Begin to Dream amazon.com/dp/B0H85WBVC8
★★★★★ “A rare sci-fi novel that kept me glued to its pages from beginning to end.” — Readers’ Favorite