Our understanding of AI and how intelligence works has come a long way since HAL’s fixation on the pod bay doors. Nowadays “AI” powers everything from what you see on social media to what happens when you make a phone call. Depictions of AI in media have and haven’t changed to accommodate this reality. What does AI mean for us in our everyday lives? How have our AI characters and motifs changed or evolved in response to that understanding.
“The problem is when you have systems created with one set of morals and they’re brought into a different culture with different morals” like making AI tech in the US and bringing it into India for example
Obsession in media with the physical differences between androids and humans – the monstrous, inhuman, robotic element
Many androids are written to be white – and ones written to be Asian are often “hive mind”
Assumption that AI will automatically want to hurt us — maybe comes from us being “bad parents” like Frankenstein abandoning his monster
Reading Recommendations:
- Blindsight by Peter Watts
- Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell
- Anatomy of a Robot by Despina Kakoudaki
- Gaze of Robot, Gaze of Bird by Eric Schwitzgebel
- Paper Hearts: Robot Dreams by Justina Robson
- Semiosis by Sue Burke
- Firewalkers by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Khepra (webcomic) by TashaDancy
- Skye (webcomic) by Cynthia J.S.
- LoveBot (webcomic) by Chase Keels and Miranda Mundt
- Memory (webcomic)
- Conference of the Birds by Benjamin C. Kinney
- The State Machine by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
