About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon: 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.
Review :
A path-breaking book that surveys the important place of narrative in the long history of the interaction between humans and intelligent machines.
All of the chapters are well researched, well argued, and informative, whether they recount a recent book by the author or present new research ... These virtues make AI Narratives a path-breaking book that surveys the important place of narrative in the long history of the interaction between humans and intelligent machines in Europe and the United States.
Readers will find in this volume a rewarding trove of narrative analyses that inform contemporary thinking about the social and political consequences of AI and prompt further historical investigation.
The editors have organized wide-ranging historical and critical materials into an admirably coherent set of chapters that focus on our age-old interests in myths, legends, and stories about artificial life, especially when it looks like us ... AI Narratives is consistently interesting and critically significant.
... a milestone book, ... sure to become required reading for any undergraduate course on the intersection of technology and the humanities, ....
... consistently interesting and critically significant.
Drawing on diverse perspectives, this compelling collection shows how AI narratives have prompted critical reflection on human-machine relations, moving beyond the reductive dichotomy that pits visions of happy humans with AI-slaves against visions of defeated humans ruled by machines. By invoking such concepts as equality, rights and social justice, the essays investigate what it means to be human in an increasingly automated world.
The collection's focus on the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines, as well as the importance of narrative itself, offers a study that has been lacking in Al criticism. By including both literal and figurative representations of machine intelligence, the collection identifies the role of sf in the interplay between fiction and non-fiction, but brings to the fore the importance of non-sf through the exploration of narratives that intersect with understandings of Al, and engage with concepts that underpin societal understandings of machines, humans and their continued, growing coexistence.
a powerful account of AI imaginaries
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.
