Machine fictions

Nature Machine Intelligence, 2019

I n the anglophone West, the prospect of intelligent machines is often portrayed in tones of great optimism or equally great pessimism. Regardless of how accurate they are, these portrayals matter, as they create a backdrop of assumptions and expectations against which AI is interpreted and assessed. There are at least three ways in which these narratives could shape the technology and its impacts. First, they could influence the goals of AI developers. Recently, Dillon and Schaffer-Goddard (manuscript in preparation) have explored this systematically with regard to AI researchers' leisure reading, noting that narratives can "inform and develop research already underway and open up new directions of exploration. " Second, narratives could influence public acceptance and uptake of AI systems: for example, a UK parliamentary report 1 notes that those they consulted "wanted a more positive take on AI and its benefits to be conveyed to the public, and feared that developments in AI might be threatened with the kind of public hostility directed towards genetically modified (GM) crops". Third, narratives could influence how AI systems are regulated, as they shape the views of both policymakers and their constituents 2-4. Given these lines of influence, it is important that narratives about intelligent machines should broadly reflect the actual state and possibilities of the technology. However, the aforementioned parliamentary report emphasized that currently "many of the hopes and the fears presently associated with AI are out of kilter with reality. " To understand why this is so, we must first clearly identify and describe those hopes and fears, and second understand why they are prevalent and perpetuated. This Perspective focusses on the former, with some moves towards the latter. We offer a categorization of what we consider to be the most prevalent hopes and fears for AI, and the dynamics between them. Based on a survey of fictional and non-fictional narratives, we argue that these responses can be structured into four dichotomies, each comprising a hope and a parallel fear. We hope further studies will build on this to examine how and why these narratives are "out of kilter with reality", and the nature of their influence.

Perspectives on Digital Humanism

This text explores the contemporary fascination with robots and digitality and points out how this distorts our view on what digitization can do for us. It pleads for a realist and non-fictionalized view on robots and artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a regular part of Science Fiction (SF) Literature since its early inception. SF is generally accepted to have started with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Although Frankenstein is a biological entity patched together from dead body parts, it is in fact a prototype of "robots" which are built out of nonorganic materials and are usually endowed with intelligence. Robots are one of the manifestations of "intelligence" ascribed to non-human entities, although this idea has also evolved over time.

Springer (Science and Fiction series), 2021

Bringing together literary scholars, computer scientists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and scholars from affiliated disciplines, this collection of essays offers important and timely insights into the pasts, presents, and, above all, possible futures of Artificial Intelligence. This book covers topics such as ethics and morality, identity and selfhood, and broader issues about AI, addressing questions about the individual, social, and existential impacts of such technologies. Through the works of science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Ann Leckie, Iain M. Banks, and Martha Wells, alongside key visual productions such as Ex Machina, Westworld, and Her, contributions illustrate how science fiction might inform potential futures as well as acting as a springboard to bring disciplinary knowledge to bear on significant developments of Artificial Intelligence. Addressing a broad, interdisciplinary audience, both expert and non-expert readers gain an in-depth understanding of the wide range of pressing issues to which Artificial Intelligence gives rise, and the ways in which science fiction narratives have been used to represent them. Using science fiction in this manner enables readers to see how even fictional worlds and imagined futures have very real impacts on how we understand these technologies. As such, readers are introduced to theoretical positions on Artificial Intelligence through fictional works as well as encouraged to reflect on the diverse aspects of Artificial Intelligence through its many philosophical, social, legal, scientific, and cultural ramifications.

SN Social Sciences, 2021

Since the advent of the technological revolution 4.0, the development and massification of new technological systems such as the Internet of things, advanced robotics, virtual reality and augmented reality, Big Data, artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing, GIG economy, among others, have taken place. Such changes and transformations in social practices and relationships have reconfigured the forms of social structuring of current societies. Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology used in various industries, which generates changes in our ways of seeing, feeling and relating to the world. Here, we focus on the relationship between artificial intelligence, algorithms, digital emotions and narratives as a social phenomenon of the twenty-first century.

The article is a short introduction in the problems of science fiction genre, posthumanism and a short presentation of the articles of the present volume.

2023

Critical Humanities, 2023

2018

Drs Cave, Dihal, and Dillon are funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Centre Grant awarded to the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Dr Singler was funded by a Templeton World Charitable Foundation grant during the course of the AI narratives project, awarded to the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St Edmund's College, Cambridge.

Drawing upon the concept of homo narran, this essay suggests an extension of Fisher's narrative paradigm, that of glimpsing the processes of continuity and change underlying storytelling, via the concepts of Brown (1978). This approach is illustrated specifically through a rhetorical analysis of a storytell-ing process presently ongoing in popular discourse about the relationship between human beings and artificially intelligent computers. It reveals the communication patterns used to maintain and shift ideologies, thereby influencing cultural/social continuity and change.