Tag Archives: narratives

NEW BOOK PUBLISHED – AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press)

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It never fails to be an exciting moment when a book that you have worked on for years finally meets the world. My co-edited book, AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, is now out with Oxford University Press. Mapping AI narratives from the classical era through through to the present, the collection examines how stories about AI anticipate, and can usefully inform, many contemporary debates about the social, ethical, political and philosophical consequences of AI. It was a pleasure to work with the contributors, from whom I learnt so much and who bring such a rich range of different expertise and methodological approaches to the topic.

CONTENTS

Introduction
Imagining AI, Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon

PART I – ANTIQUITY TO MODERNITY
1. Homer’s Intelligent Machines: AI in Antiquity, Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas
2. Demons and Devices: Artificial and Augmented Intelligence before AI, E. R. Truitt
3. The Android of Albertus Magnus: A Legend of Artificial Being, Minsoo Kang and Ben Halliburton
4. Artificial Slaves in the Renaissance and the Dangers of Independent Innovation, Kevin LaGrandeur
5. Making the Machine Speak: Hearing Artificial Voices in the Eighteenth Century, Julie Park
6. Victorian Fictions of Computational Creativity, Megan Ward
7. Machines Like Us? Modernism and the Question of the Robot, Paul March-Russell

PART II – MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
8. Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt, Kanta Dihal
9. Machine Visions: Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Control, Will Slocombe
10. “A push-button type of thinking”: Automation, Cybernetics, and AI in Mid-century British Literature, Graham Matthews
11. Artificial Intelligence and the Parent/Child Narrative, Beth Singler
12. AI and Cyberpunk Networks, Anna McFarlane
13. AI: Artificial Immortality and Narratives of Mind-Uploading, Stephen Cave
14. Artificial Intelligence and the Sovereign-Governance Game, Sarah Dillon and Michael Dillon
15. The Measure of a Woman: Fembots, Fact and Fiction, Kate Devlin and Olivia Belton
16. The Fall and Rise of AI: Investigating AI Narratives with Computational Methods, Gabriel Recchia

AI Narratives at the Global Governance of AI Roundtable, World Government Summit, Dubai

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This month I experienced a new country and a new downloadenvironment as I took our AI Narratives research to Dubai for the World Government Summit. I had the privilege to chair a session on underrepresented narratives at the Global Governance of AI Roundtable, hosted at the WGS. We discussed what kind of narratives dominate around AI, who is telling them, whose voices aren’t being heard and, most importantly given the purposes of the event, developed five policy recommendations in order to redress some of the inequities we’d identified. After the GGAR, I experienced the rest of the WGS, primarily attending sessions on either AI, or on women and leadership. The latter were particularly inspiring, from hearing Helen Clark (former Prime Minister of New Zealand) talk about her experiences of national leadership, to listening to Sarah Al Amiri (the UAE’s Minister of State for Advanced Sciences) share her story of scientific endeavour and leadership. It certainly did not feel natural being a humanities academic in such a policy-focused and political environment, but I was not the only one there and we all shared a common belief in the increasing importance of the presence of humanities scholars in these kinds of spaces. The benefits are reciprocal: we bring knowledge and skills that others present do not; but we also learn from interacting outside of our comfortable environments – it is challenging to one’s sense of established norms and values, but sometimes we need these to be challenged in order to reaffirm, or adjust them, in the context of an ever-changing world.