‘Oh! my creator, make me happy”:
A Literary Study of the Production, Instrumentalization, and Ethical Implications of Artificial Intelligence
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”, Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science, famously asks at the opening of his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” However, the question is really a red herring, for rather than tackling what he means by a thinking machine, he reframes the question as one of effective imitation by matching capabilities (that is, whether machines can do what humans do). Notwithstanding his innovative conception of the Imitation Game, the Turing Test leaves many core issues unaddressed: what is intelligence, is language (the recognition, use, and generation of symbol systems) vital to intelligence, is consciousness constitutive of intelligence, is affect essential to intelligence, is creativity an evolved property of intelligence, how should humans interact with “thinking machines”, among others. In this unit, we will consider some of the epistemological, ontological, and ethical problems implicit in the production and instrumentalization of AI for purposes of surveillance, of scientific research, and of pleasure and companionship. As a point of departure, we will begin our study with Margaret A. Boden’s overview of the subject matter in Artificial Intelligence (2018) – its history, its controversies, its theoretical and practical ramifications. Next, we shall examine the ethics of creation through the theological lens of the Judeo-Christian narrative (i.e. the Book of Genesis) and the inquiring spirit of the Socratic dialogue (i.e. Euthyphro). Crucially, we ask: what makes AI good? Good for whom? To that end, we will venture into William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) as the first literary stop of this unit. For much of the play, the fraught relationships between Prospero and his servants Caliban and Ariel provide ample material for our intersecting meditations on the (un)ethical use, on the moral agency, and on the ontological status of superintelligence. After our foray into early modern science fiction, we will train our attention on Mary Shelley’s immortal progeny, Frankenstein (1818). Long hailed as the forerunner of modern science fiction, the novel is in fact steeped in Enlightenment ideas about nature and society, in contemporary debates about culture and education, in aesthetic disagreements over solipsistic genius and collaborative creativity, and in personal anxieties about birth and death. The experience, the actions, and the desires of Victor Frankenstein’s nameless creature/monster raise tantalising questions about the connection between emotions and consciousness, about the competing modes of scientific (masculine) and artistic (feminine) education for intelligent learning, about the possibility/impossibility of AI alignment, and about the unpredictable consequences of embodied machine learning in the human world. Finally, our study concludes with a critical look at Philip K. Dick’s dystopian noir fiction, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). In this disturbing post-apocalyptic universe (and future?), the androids behave even more humanlike than the supposed humans. Not only is the work an early commentary on the ethics of sexbots and the “natural” rights of conscious machines, it also aptly, and properly, redirects the entire moral and philosophical query back at ourselves: and that is, what makes us human? What makes us good?
READING TEXTS:
I. Primary
“Book of Genesis.” The Bible. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 4th ed., Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 11-80. (ISBN 978-0-19-528960-2) (Read only pp. 11-13)
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Del Rey, 2017. (ISBN 978-0-345-40447-3)
Plato. Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro, and Crito. Translated by David Gallop, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-954051-1) (Read Euthyphro and Defence of Socrates)
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, edited by Stephen Orgel, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-953590-3)
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, edited by J. Paul Hunter, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. (ISBN 978-0-393-92793-1)
II. Secondary
Boden, Margaret A. Artificial Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2018. (ISBN 978-0-19-960291-9) (Read Ch. 1-6)
Nyholm, Sven. “The Ethics of Human-Robot Interaction and Traditional Moral Theories.” The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, edited by Carissa Véliz, Oxford UP, 2024, pp. 43-62.
Scheutz, Matthias. “Artificial Emotions and Machine Consciousness.” The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 247-266.
Sterri, Aksel, and Brian D. Earp. “The Ethics of Sex Robots.” The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, edited by Carissa Véliz, Oxford UP, 2024, pp. 241-257.
Véliz, Carissa. “The Surveillance Delusion.” The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, edited by Carissa Véliz, Oxford UP, 2024, pp. 555-574.