This review considers multiple works of speculative fiction depicting artificial intelligence (AI) published over the last several years. Rather than review each for their qualities as works of fiction, I look at them collectively to discuss recurring motifs and themes as a way toward theorizing what AI means in our cultural imaginary today. The novels reflect on pressing sociopolitical issues that also animate works of cultural theory, including the racial profiling embedded in our technologies, practices of what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls surveillance capitalism, the looming loss of work due automation, and uses of these technologies by the military or in sex industries. At the same time, these fictions engage in philosophical reflections about subjectivity, agency, and ethics in dialogue with earlier science fictions that imagined futures in which we might live alongside—or be repressed by—AIs. Across its history, sf has also interrogated a contemporary culture in...
Literary AI: Are We Ready for the Future We Imagine?
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is an editor for the journal Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science in Popular Culture. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021) and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander).
Sherryl Vint; Literary AI: Are We Ready for the Future We Imagine?. American Literature 1 June 2023; 95 (2): 397–413. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10575176
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