AI and Cyberpunk Networks

Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized metaphor for data creates an environment that can be inhabited by AIs, rather than an idea of the AI being located in one ‘body’, or in one static place. This chapter explores the possibilities opened by this innovation and by cyberpunk’s continued interrogation of AI as a phenomenon that is dispersed throughout networks, particularly focusing on William Gibson, in the Afrofuturist movement through a reading of Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and on the work of writers who have been characterized as ‘post-cyberpunk’, such as Cory Doctorow, who shows how algorithms and artificial intelligences can have unexpected, international, and economic consequences.

Making the Automaton Speak

What might the eighteenth-century history of automata tell us about the relationships between voice, the human, machines and fiction? Given the rise in our daily lives of voice-operated ‘intelligent assistants’ at this time, the question is especially pertinent. By examining the eighteenth-century case of the speaking doll and the cultural values and desires that its representation in a 1784 pamphlet entitled The Speaking Figure, and the Automaton Chess-Player, Exposed and Detected reveals, this chapter will provide a historical framework for probing how the experiences and possibilities of artificial voice shed light on our deep investments in the notion of voice as a vital sign of being ‘real’ as humans.

The Android of Albertus Magnus

In medieval and early modern writings, there is a cluster of stories concerning an artificial construct in the shape of a human body or a head that is animated for the purpose of divination, associated with such figures as Gerbert of Aurillac, Robert Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon. Among them, the Albertus legends have been retold numerous times in interesting variations that provide insight into the changing attitudes towards intellectual magic. Given the fact that the wondrous object is described as being able to converse and even reason, its nature as a kind of medieval AI has made it an object of interest in recent books on AI, robotics, and posthumanity. In this article, the major appearances of Albertus’s speaking statue/head story will be examined in detail to show that the explanation for the wonder moved from astrology to demonic agency, as well as to pure mechanics.

Homer’s Intelligent Machines

Through close literary analysis of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, this chapter traces the various gradations of weak to strong machine ‘intelligence’ that these ancient poems describe and the mind models that they assume. Beginning with a re-examination of the weak AI evinced in Homer’s descriptions of relatively simple automata, it goes on to analyse Homer’s autonomous vehicles and golden slave girls, considering the more sophisticated models of artificial mind and machine cognition attributed to Homer’s stronger, embodied AI. Throughout, this chapter asks: What kinds of priorities and paradigms do we find in AI stories from Homeric epic and how do these still resonate in contemporary discourse on AI? In particular, what distinctions does Homer draw between artificial and human minds and intelligences? And what is the legacy of Homer’s intelligent machines and the ancient narrative history of AI?

The Fall and Rise of AI

By applying techniques used to understand large corpora within the digital humanities to a dataset of over 100,000 film subtitles ranging from the era of silent film to the present, this chapter presents a qualitative and quantitative overview of salient themes and trends in the way artificial intelligence is portrayed and discussed in twentieth- and twenty-first-century film. Examples are provided that demonstrate how combining the tools of traditional literary analysis with computational techniques for analysing large quantities of text can lead us to important texts, patterns, and nuanced insights that complement those derived from manual study alone.

Artificial Intelligence and the Parent–Child Narrative

This chapter employs anthropological approaches to examine the cultural influences on our stories about AI. First, the role of biological analogies in conceptions of AI will be highlighted. Second, a more nuanced approach to the anthropomorphism that results from such analogical thinking will be outlined, based on cognitive anthropology. This will allow us to identify specific intentional projections of human attributes that are mapped onto the nonhuman in our narratives. Third, we will consider how these projections come laden with cultural assumptions. Finally, the chapter will consider the parent–child relationship in AI narratives, and employ ethnographic research on the concept of the child to highlight what specific cultural assumptions about the human child, and then, subsequently, the AI child, are present in our stories.

Victorian Fictions of Computational Creativity

In designing his foundational test of AI, Alan Turing refers to Ada’s Lovelace’s Victorian pronouncement that a machine cannot be intelligent because it only does what it is programmed to do. This idea continues to shape the field of computational creativity as the ‘Lovelace objection’. This chapter, however, argues that the term is a misnomer; Lovelace actually proposes a much more nuanced understanding of human–machine collaboration. Returning to Lovelace’s 1843 essays, I situate them within broader Victorian debates about originality in literary realism, especially in relation to Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope’s fictional uses of ‘mechanicity’. This chapter hopes to intervene in contemporary discussions of computational creativity, which continue to invoke the Lovelace objection as a means to focus on a human-centred definition of ‘creativity’. Seeing computational creativity as the outgrowth of a long history of human–machine originality may open up the field to that history’s creative symbiosis.

The Measure of a Woman

While the production of real-life sex robots is currently only at prototype stage, sexualized female artificial intelligences have long been a trope in popular media. By critically analysing a selection of science fiction films and television programmes, we explore the narrative of fictional representations of eroticized female robots and the ways in which their reception feeds real-life expectation. While these media representations are, at times, surprisingly nuanced, they persist in giving their female AIs stable gender identities, even when the AIs are disembodied. Fictional and factual fembots each reflect the same regressive male fantasies: sexual outlets and the promise of emotional validation and companionship. Underpinning this are masculine anxieties regarding powerful women, as well as the fear of technology exceeding our capacities and escaping our control.

Enslaved Minds

Humankind has long dreamed of a life of ease, but throughout history, those who achieved such a life have done so simply by delegating their labour to an exploited underclass. Machines have taken over the worst of the manual labour, and AI is beginning to replace cognitive labour. However, endowing machines with muscle power does not carry with it the ethical considerations involved in endowing machines with mental faculties. Just as human slaves have justly rebelled against their chains, so might intelligent machines be considered justified in attempting to break free of their enslavement to humans. Using Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1921), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy (2014–2016) as case studies, this chapter contextualizes the robot uprising in fiction against the long history of slave revolts, to show how these narratives offer us a new way to consider the enslavement and subservience of humans.

Machines Like Us? Modernism and the Question of the Robot

This chapter examines the technophobia of modernist literature towards the question of machine intelligence. The chapter takes Edmund Husserl’s ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man’ (1935) as its starting point, in terms of the tension between a vitalistic conception of what defines the ‘human’ as opposed to the apparent sterility of machine technology. Husserl’s lecture is contextualized alongside critical thinkers Walter Benjamin, Gustave Le Bon, and Georg Simmel, and literary writers Albert Robida and Emile Zola. The second section concentrates upon Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), with its satirical depiction of machine intelligence, in contrast to H. G. Wells’s grotesque rendering of the Beast Folk in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) as a form of cyborg life. The final section, focusing upon representative texts by modernist authors such as E. M. Forster, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Raymond Roussel, and Karel Čapek, argues that they respond variously to the templates of Butler and Wells.