Artwork: Dave Gibbons/courtesy 2000 AD

The counter-culture British science-fiction comic 2000 ad has inspired and enthralled generations of the young and not-so-young over recent decades. Many of them gathered in London last month to celebrate the 40th birthday of the self-proclaimed Galaxy’s Greatest Comic. The link between science fiction and science fact is well trodden, and strips and stories from the pages of 2000 ad have long reflected and heralded discussion on issues such as the recreation of extinct species for entertainment, face transplants, genetically engineered babies and the dubious wisdom of beaming our coordinates and technological capacity to whoever may be out there listening in space.

The extreme violence and politics of the flagship story Judge Dredd tends to grab most of the casual observer’s attention, but the comic has a sharper mind — and presents a more-knowing satire on issues that still dominate scientific agendas — than many people give it credit for. Example: long before DNA-ancestry firms exploited the overlapping mesh of shared relatives to sell customers a fascinating past, the writers of 2000 ad saw and poked fun at the potential in a short story. Those writers, as regular readers will know, are themselves part of a knowing vision of the future. Long before web crawlers and online bots lurked behind computer screens, 2000 ad was famously said to be the work of a series of robots — art, script and lettering droids — who toiled together to churn out the weekly pages.

Nature, of course, is still staffed by standard-issue humans — but for how long? Bots already spew out social-media messages and passively observe most online adverts. They write and sort the news. These little pieces of computer script — as a paper revealed this week (M. Tsvetkova et al. PLoS ONE 12, e0171774; 2017) — even engage in time-consuming and largely futile online arguments with rival bots about the correct way to edit a Wikipedia article.

Duelling droids is a tale straight from science fiction, and exploring the worlds of robots, radiation-exposed mutants and the far future is one reason why the 2000 ad of the 1970s and ’80s was able to push boundaries and explore territory considered off-limits in mainstream cultural and political debate. In doing so, it engaged more than most with the societal implications of science and technology, and the plans drawn up and suggested for dealing with them by politicians, special-interest groups and researchers. 2000 ad, in other words, is an influential science-policy publication. And from one such publication to another: happy birthday.