Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved science fiction. I was obsessed with time travel and space exploration, but robots always had my heart. One Christmas, I was given a huge (well, huge for me at the time) R2-D2 that beeped and booped as I dragged it around the house. I loved them all, from the clunky, boxy machines to the eerily human-like androids.

Now, as artificial intelligence weaves itself into our daily lives, I find myself thinking about those fictional depictions a lot.

For decades, we’ve been fed stories of talking computers, sentient machines, and AI companions. And today, as people form relationships with chatbots and debate whether large language models are “conscious,” I wonder: have those stories helped us prepare or distorted our expectations? Have they made us too trusting, too fearful – or simply too imaginative – for our own good?