AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines

by Stephen Cave (Editor), Kanta Dihal (Editor), Sarah Dillon (Editor)

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.

Genres: Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Philosophy, Cultural

448 pages, Hardcover

First published May 5, 2020

About the author

Stephen Cave is Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Co-Director of the Institute for Technology and Humanity, both at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on philosophy and ethics of technology, particularly AI, robotics and life-extension. He is the author of Immortality (Crown, 2012), a New Scientist book of the year, and Should You Choose To Live Forever: A Debate (with John Martin Fischer, Routledge, 2023); and co-editor of AI Narratives (OUP, 2020), Feminist AI (OUP, 2023) and Imagining AI (OUP, 2023). He writes widely about philosophy, technology and society, including for the Guardian and Atlantic. He also advises governments around the world, and has served as a British diplomat.

Reviews

[Amy H. Sturgis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent anthology. A longer review will follow!

[Xi'an · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of 16 individual chapters on the relation between culture (literature, films) and our societal approach to AI, with varying perspectives, some overlap between chapters, a wide range of extrapolation, especially in relation with the oldest books (like Homer's) and quotes from both books I enjoyed and books I had not heard of. Predominant place of Blade Runner, of Ĉapek's Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.), and of Asimov, but also a detailed analysis of the thought provoking Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. With a realization that William Gibbson's Neuromancer had aged quite a lot... For the modern times, very little outside the US-UK realm, as for instance no mention made of Jules Vernes or René Barjavel, neither of the Germanic literature (from the Grimm Brothers onwards), nor of the USSR science fiction production, nor yet of the Chinese input, like The Three-Body Problem. Reading through the book made me realise rather belatedly a parallel between AI scare or adoration, and the non-AI societies, where individuals are part of a structure large enough to miss the large picture.

[Lara]

I had gotten this as an audiobook to listen to at work, about work. Got through about 75 percent. It was more on the history. The current approach and essays on modern AI were brief, and didn't add much to what I already had learned at work

[Naomi Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It made me think about the AI in a different way.

[Phil Dwyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my purposes (research) this was an excellent resource, even though the prose is replete with academic language. Wouldn't recommend it to the casual reader.

[s]

Really liked this - gave me lots to think about and plenty to further explore.

[Melaku Kelelew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very much important book

[Shanshe Kenkadze · Rating 4 out of 5]

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