Literary AI: Are We Ready for the Future We Imagine?

摘要

This review considers multiple works of speculative fiction depicting artificial intelligence (AI) published over the last several years. Rather than review each for their qualities as works of fiction, I look at them collectively to discuss recurring motifs and themes as a way toward theorizing what AI means in our cultural imaginary today. The novels reflect on pressing sociopolitical issues that also animate works of cultural theory, including the racial profiling embedded in our technologies, practices of what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls surveillance capitalism, the looming loss of work due automation, and uses of these technologies by the military or in sex industries. At the same time, these fictions engage in philosophical reflections about subjectivity, agency, and ethics in dialogue with earlier science fictions that imagined futures in which we might live alongside—or be repressed by—AIs. Across its history, sf has also interrogated a contemporary culture in which we might lose something integral to humanity as we become more integrated with and dependent on machines, and this anxiety too recurs across these works. After briefly describing each text, in order of publication, I comparatively discuss their themes; this approach is informed by my conviction that fiction functions as a popular site for theorizing, in this case about what it means to live with and through widespread algorithmic mediation of daily life.Among the works I consider here, not all are written by American authors, and a few are not set within the United States, but all speak to the issues of how AI technologies are reshaping daily life in the twenty-first century. These books have been selected either because they have been particularly influential in the cultural discussion of AI, a criterion I apply regarding both highly popular and critically acclaimed works, or because they represent a distinctive take on the topic that warranted foregrounding. Despite the very different frameworks through which their authors explore relevant issues, all share some common assumptions about the place of AI in our present and likely future, including a sense of a digital divide between those with access to and control over these technologies, translating to security in material reality, versus those without; a future dramatically changed by the consequences of climate change and environmental collapse; and the presumption that corporate control of information gathered and used by AI systems will produce a less democratic future.Speak (2015), by Louisa Hall, is written across seven voices: (a) the 2040s memoir of Stephen Chinn, who invented an AI system installed in children’s dolls that was deemed “illegally lifelike” (17) and banned; (b) transcripts from the conversation between a less intelligence precursor AI, MARY3, and Gaby White, a child who had one of these “babybots” and, like most of her peers, fell into catatonia when it was removed; (c) letters written by Karl Dettman to his wife Ruth (late 1960s), both German immigrants to the United States, and her journaled response two decades later after their divorce; (d) letters from Alan Turing from the 1920s to the 1950s to the mother of his friend Chris, the love of his life who died when they are both at public school; (e) the 1663 journal of Mary Bradford, a young women who emigrated from England to the New World; and (f) the haunting observations of the dolls themselves as they are transported to a facility in the desert to await power failure and permanent shutdown. Each of the human voices is programmed into the MARY code that will become the basis for the babybots in a narrative that reminds us that AI is not created by a single person or even a consensus viewpoint. What unites these distinct stories is a desire to communicate with another, most crucially to be not simply heard but understood.Nicky Drayden’s Prey of Gods (2017), set in a future South Africa, incorporates a story about a companion AI