I’m giving a talk at an actual f2f academic conference today, Critical Borders, Radical Re(visions) of AI, in Cambridge. I was particularly excited to see this conference because it’s organised by the people who edited AI Narratives A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, a really useful anthology of essays on stories about AI ranging from the Ancient Greek myths about the autonomous machines Hephaistos built, via medieval ideas about magical mirrors and golems to twentieth century scifi.
Here is the PDF Handout for my paper “Artificial Intelligence is Social and Embodied: AIs that Care in Contemporary Science Fiction”. I would love feedback, if you have any – I’ll be revising this before it eventually hopefully ends up as a full paper. I’m presenting at 13:20 UK time today, and it’ll be streamed (and I think archived?) on YouTube here, with the many other interesting talks happening today.
Yesterday I was able to sit in an actual auditorium and hear Ruha Benjamin speak, and today the conference itself starts. It’ll be live-streamed on YouTube as well and about 2/3 of the speakers will be remote. It’ll be interesting to see how a hybrid conference works.
My paper is about eleven science fiction novels published in the last five years where caring AIs are main characters:
| Author | Title | Year | AI character |
| Becky Chambers | A Closed and Common Orbit | 2016 | Sidra, Owl |
| Annalee Newitz | Autonomous | 2017 | Paladin, Med |
| Martha Wells | Murderbot series (2017-21) | 2017 | Murderbot |
| Neal Shusterman | Thunderhead | 2018 | Thunderhead |
| Yudhanjaya Wijeratne | The Salvage Crew | 2018 | Amber Rose 348 |
| Ian McEwan | Machines Like Me | 2019 | Adam |
| Carole Stivers | The Mother Code | 2020 | Rho-Z (Rosie) |
| Bjørn Vatne | Død og oppstandelse | 2020 | Oda |
| William Gibson | Agency | 2020 | UNISS (Eunice) |
| S. B. Divya | Machinehood | 2021 | Welga/dakini |
| Kazuo Ishiguro | Klara and the Sun | 2021 | Klara |
I’m using this to explore how actual (non-fictional) AI is also always social and embodied. This is a work in progress, and I’m trying out the Mumford Method, where you write up a concise handout, present using this several times, revising the handout each time to integrate feedback, and then write it up as a full paper when the ideas are throughly worked through.
If you’d like to look at my thoughts, I would really love feedback, as this is very much a work-in-progress.
I usually just start writing without a clear idea of where I’m going, which often works well, but also often requires a LOT of work and confusion when I’m revising, and has led to many abandonned half written papers. So I’m curious as to whether this method will work for me. I’ve enjoyed writing the handout – I like the constrained space and having the whole structure laid out. It really makes me think about what the point of the paper is rather than just writing out bits I enjoy. I do wonder whether the very concise style of writing will affect my final writing style though. Will I end up less essayistic than I’d like?
Here is the video feed from today’s conference – I’m in the 13:20 panel (UK time) today.
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Francois Lachance
Jill
This is a fascinating handout. I am almost seduced by the move from “care” to “seeing”. Could a further step be thinking about AI as “hearing the human” in that the machine vision needs to be translated for social links to emerge? The seeing is in a sense feeding the words of natural language. All the best in evolving the visual of the handout into the words a paper. 🙂
Jill
What an interesting idea! It also makes me think of Annette Markham’s recent paper on echolocation – how people send out “pings” to others to confirm their own existence and location.