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This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines, featuring contributions from leading humanities and social science scholars who detail the narratives about artificial intelligence (AI) that in turn offer a crucial epistemic site for exploring contemporary debates about these powerful technologies.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Imagining AI
- PART I - ANTIQUITY TO MODERNITY
- 1: Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas: Homer's Intelligent Machines: AI in Antiquity
- 2: E. R. Truitt: Demons and Devices: Artificial and Augmented Intelligence before AI
- 3: Minsoo Kang and Ben Halliburton: The Android of Albertus Magnus: A Legend of Artificial Being
- 4: Kevin LaGrandeur: Artificial Slaves in the Renaissance and the Dangers of Independent Innovation
- 5: Julie Park: Making the Machine Speak: Hearing Artificial Voices in the Eighteenth Century
- 6: Megan Ward: Victorian Fictions of Computational Creativity
- 7: Paul March-Russell: Machines Like Us? Modernism and the Question of the Robot
- PART II - MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
- 8: Kanta Dihal: Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt
- 9: Will Slocombe: Machine Visions: Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Control
- 10: Graham Matthews: "A push-button type of thinking": Automation, Cybernetics, and AI in Mid-century British Literature
- 11: Beth Singler: Artificial Intelligence and the Parent/Child Narrative
- 12: Anna McFarlane: AI and Cyberpunk Networks
- 13: Stephen Cave: AI: Artificial Immortality and Narratives of Mind-Uploading
- 14: Sarah Dillon and Michael Dillon: Artificial Intelligence and the Sovereign-Governance Game
- 15: Kate Devlin and Olivia Belton: The Measure of a Woman: Fembots, Fact and Fiction
- 16: Gabriel Recchia: The Fall and Rise of AI: Investigating AI Narratives with Computational Methods
About the author
Stephen Cave
Dr Stephen Cave is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy, and Fellow of Hughes Hall, all at the University of Cambridge. After earning a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge, he joined the British Foreign Office, where he spent ten years as a policy advisor and diplomat, before returning to academia. His research interests currently focus on the nature, portrayal and governance of AI.
Kanta Dihal
Dr Kanta Dihal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. She is the Principal Investigator on the Global AI Narratives project, and the Project Development Lead on Decolonizing AI. In her research, she explores how fictional and nonfictional stories shape the development and public understanding of artificial intelligence. Kanta's work intersects the fields of science communication, literature and science, and science fiction. She is currently working on two monographs: Stories in Superposition, based on her DPhil thesis, and AI: A Mythology, with Stephen Cave.
Sarah Dillon
Dr Sarah Dillon is University Lecturer in Literature and Film in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Her books include The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007), Deconstruction, Feminism, Film (2018), and Listen: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning (2020, co-authored with Claire Craig). She is the General Editor of the series Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays, and editor of two volumes in the series: David Mitchell: Critical Essays (2011), and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (2015, co-ed). Dr Dillon was a 2013 BBC Radio 3/Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinker and regularly broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.
Summary
This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. These chapters explore the revealing pre-history of key concerns of contemporary AI discourse, from the nature of mind and creativity to issues of power and rights, from the tension between fascination and ambivalence to investigations into artificial voices and technophobia. Part II focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first-centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerge alongside rapid developments in AI technology. These chapters reveal not only how AI narratives have consistently been entangled with the emergence of real robotics and AI, but also how they offer a rich source of insight into how we might live with these revolutionary machines. Through their close textual engagements, these chapters explore the relationship between imaginative narratives and contemporary debates about AI's social, ethical and philosophical consequences, including questions of dehumanization, automation, anthropomorphisation, cybernetics, cyberpunk, immortality, slavery, and governance. The contributions, from leading humanities and social science scholars, show that narratives about AI offer a crucial epistemic site for exploring contemporary debates about these powerful new technologies.
Additional text
AI Narratives triumphantly paves the way for future work in AI humanities. Individual chapters—all balancing historical context with sharp analysis—would make valuable additions to relevant module syllabi, and the volume would be of certain advantage to any reader seeking a fresh and substantiated approach to AI scholarship. This is only a first glance into this kaleidoscopic field of study, but it positions future researchers well for imaginative thinking about their own perceptions.
