Humanizing Machines and Dehumanizing Humans: A Cultural History
“None of this is just about AI. It’s about who we imagine and want ourselves to be—and who gets to say what that is.”
By Brett Davidson
Narrative Lead at the International Resource
for Impact and Storytelling
Edited by
Mia Deschamps
Image credit: created by AI in Canva Dream Lab
I have long been troubled by the dominant narratives about AI in news media and the broader culture: the way it’s presented as inevitable, and the breathless fan-boy nature of much of the coverage of every new advance. To try and understand some of this, I’ve been reading AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Steven Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon—a book that brings together a fascinating collection of papers exploring the history of thinking about Artificial Intelligence within Western culture. Reading it gave me deeper insight into:
why AI is so deeply implicated in the ascendance of the far right,
why the biggest AI investors and proponents—the ‘broligarchy’—are also those who are driving the breakdown of government in the US, and
why the emergence of powerful AI tools has gone hand in hand with the rise of stigmatization, surveillance and control of anyone who is not a cis white male, and in particular of those on the margins, such as migrants and trans people.
It also shows why we need to put artists, writers and other creative visionaries at the forefront of our fight for democracy, freedom and justice.
The first thing that stood out for me is that dominant narratives about AI run deep. Genevieve Lively and Sam Thomas point out that intelligent machines appear in the literature of antiquity—such as in Homer’s Odyssey (autonomous vehicles in the form of self-steering, self-navigating ships) and Ilead. Homer’s machines are programmed by mainly male creators and used in the service of mostly male protagonists. Clearly, nothing much has changed in that respect over a few thousand years. In a fascinating chapter on AI and the Parent-Child Narrative, Beth Singler looks at movies such as Star Trek: Insurrection, and Tron, Legacy, in which robots and other intelligent machines are characterized as children. Unlike biological creation, which requires both male and female parents, the creators/parents of AI ‘children’ are nearly always cis-male—‘supporting a larger cultural narrative of who can do science and technology’.
The use of AI for espionage and surveillance is nothing new either, appearing in medieval literature, where machines police boundaries of class and serve as arbiters of sexual morality. ER Truit cites the 12th century poem Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes, in which two machine sentries guard a knight’s pavilion. They bar the way to anyone lacking noble blood and raise an alarm if a woman who is not a virgin tries to enter.
Image credit: created by AI in Canva Dream Lab
In her chapter, Kanta Dihal focuses on more recent times. The word ‘robot’ was coined by Karel Čapek in 1920 in his play R.U.R., from the Czech word, robota, meaning forced labour; computer terminology regularly uses terms such as master and slave to talk about a situation where one system controls another. Writers such as Isaiah Lavender III have argued that the institution of slavery has deeply influenced thinking about smart machines. Building on all of this, Dihal delves into the persistent notion of intelligent machines as mechanical slaves and points out that this leads to some deeply disturbing paradoxes in literature and entertainment about AI. We see machines portrayed as our tools, and thus less-than-human, but at the same time as more-than-human: intelligent, more powerful, more capable. Our society increasingly depends upon them, but there is also a deep and abiding fear that they might rebel, join together and take control.
As Dihal points out, the notion of artificial intelligence as having agency, personality—of being human-like—raises important questions about the boundaries of the human and about who and what is entitled to particular rights. If a certain level of intelligence is seen as a mark of being human (and let’s not forget that certain kinds of people – such as women or people of color – have been treated as less-than-human because of their supposedly inferior intelligence), how should we treat machines that are supposedly more intelligent than us? Questions like these lie at the heart of films such Blade Runner and play out in contemporary events. For example, in 2017 a robot named Sophia was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia – a country where many actual humans continue to be treated as second-class citizens. The more our culture humanizes machines, the more it also de-humanizes humans.
This twinned tendency intertwines with another strong cultural undercurrent – that of techno-solutionism, the deep conviction that machines and technology can and will solve all of our problems. Will Slocombe explores several examples of this in literature and entertainment (including EM Forster’s story The Machine Stops, Isaac Asimov’s work, and the TV show Person of Interest). These stories all illustrate that the more an AI mastermind takes control, the more it requires society to be organized through coding and mechanization. Humans become interchangeable components in a vast machine.
We see this playing out in the US right now as members of the ‘broligarchy’ collude to lay off government workers and insert their algorithms into federal computer systems in the name of cutting waste and promoting efficiency. Venture capitalist Mark Andreessen went so far recently as to say that the goal is to crash wages so that AI can deliver an economic utopia by lowering the price of goods and services to near zero. Even if you buy into this twisted logic, the question is, utopia for whom or what? It gets even more twisted: it turns out our tech overlords believe the development of AI will lead to the existence of billions of posthuman digital beings, whose rights they suggest should take precedence over the real lives of actual, present-day humans.
Image credit: created by AI in Canva Dream Lab
Which brings me to one of the ideas in literature and popular entertainment that I find most fascinating and disturbing – the idea that the development of AI will soon allow the uploading of human minds from physical bodies into computers, thus achieving immortality. This is a theme that comes up in many books, movies and TV shows, as I’ve written about before.
The super-wealthy in Silicon Valley have long been obsessed with immortality through mind uploading. Knowing this, it’s not far-fetched to believe the reason people with so many billions are obsessed with hoarding even more (and in the process, impoverishing the rest of us) is so that they can throw vast sums into speeding up the development of AI so that they can be uploaded and secure eternal life before their bodies grow too old and die.
Stephen Cave explores all this in a fascinating chapter, not only highlighting immortality through technology as an idea that goes back at least as far as Francis Bacon, but also pointing out that science fiction literature is an important source of ‘critique and response’ to the concept of mind uploading. Writers such as William Gibson, Greg Egan and Cory Doctorow explore what Cave outlines as three major conceptual problems with mind uploading. The first is the problem of sanity: how do we know we’d be happy, or even stay sane, without our biological bodies? The second is the identity problem: how do we know we’d remain ourselves, once our minds are uploaded (especially when there’s the possibility of creating duplicates)? Last is the substrate problem: even if one’s mind is uploaded, it has to exist within some kind of physical material – if not a biological body, then some sort of combination of hardware and software, which has its own limitations and tendencies. And, I might add, that substrate will likely be owned and operated by some sort of corporation or government, as depicted in the TV show Upload.
AI Narratives goes a long way toward explaining to me why there has been such a sense of inevitability about the current trajectory of AI, and illuminates some of the key contradictions and tensions in our collective thinking. It also helps explain how and why the question of AI is inextricably interconnected with questions of democracy and authoritarianism, gender and race.
It’s also a source of hope however, since Cave and many of the other authors point out that artists and writers – and in particular science fiction writers – are also a strong source of dissent, critique and creative re-imagining.
It seems to me that social justice activists should be talking to and drawing on these creative thinkers a lot more.
As Beth Singler says, ‘the stories we tell ourselves about AI are also stories about us as humans.’ None of this is just about AI. It’s about who we imagine and want ourselves to be – and who gets to say what that is.