WorldCon: The Future is Here

The 2025 Seattle World Science Fiction Convention will be held in August 2025. In getting ready to produce the event, organizers used AI to vet a list of about 1,500 potential speakers. The conference wanted to ensure they would not invite anyone who might create a controversy by their attendance. AI read through social media posts, public records, 3rd grade report cards, everything available online looking for red flags. Imagine the organisers' surprise that in trying to prevent controversy, they created an even bigger controversy! Once word got out that AI was used to vet the list of potential speakers, people got big mad and had feelings about using robots to do human work. Kathy Bond, volunteer chairperson of the 2025 event, issued an apology amidst calls for her resignation (and a few nerds wanted to shoot her into space). WorldCon is not only a SciFi convention, it's home to the Hugo awards - for SciFi writers, their publishers, and their readers, a Hugo award is a big deal. We dive into the WorldCon situation and visit Hugo award controversies past to discover it truly is A Brave New World (see what we did there!).