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Humans Machines and the Screen of the Anthropocene

Link: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol13no2/palatinus In post-human narratives (in literary fiction, film and television) the problems of consciousness and sentience emerge as pivotal to the representation of not only the emancipatory politics connecting human and non-human species, but also to the mediation (construction and circulation) of anxieties that surround such politics. I will use Season 1 of HBO's high concept drama, Westworld, to argue that this duality is best understood if situated within the context of the Anthropocene, the epoch we live in and in which humans not only have positioned themselves as the dominant species but also have become an ecological factor exerting their impact on a planetary level. The article will use further filmic and televisual examples (including Ex Machina and Humans) to comment on cultural ideas about artificial intelligence that provide an excellent starting point for the understanding of the intricate relation between the post-human condition and the Anthropocene, especially in relation to the negotiation and symbolization of non-human sentience, agency, and a non-human future as part of human history. Keywords: Westworld, AI, post-human, Anthropocene, popular television, machine sentience, agency. ERRATUM: On page 9 this version incorrectly states the name of the actress portraying the character of Maeve in Westworld. The name of the actress is Thandie Newton. The mistake has been corrected in the published version.

ROBOTS, SLAVES, AND THE PARADOX OF THE HUMAN CONDITION IN ISAAC ASIMOV'S ROBOT STORIES

Slaves and robots have in common that they are intended to obey orders. Therefore I suggest taking a close look at some of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. Executing a program while detecting and overcoming problems and acting towards fulfillment of given instructions—all this makes a robot a perfect slave. In the same way as slave laws in the British Colonies in America were intended to keep slavery effective by confining slaves in their place, so are Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics the formal condition for the workability of a robot holding society. Asimov’s androids reveal the implicit impossibility of both robots and slaves by establishing the command structure that would be needed to keep the system working and then disassembling this structure. The Three Laws, as they are meant to guarantee protection, command, and operation, cannot possibly work with separate master/slave subjects. They are a paradoxical juxtaposition. And consequently, slavery is logically impossible.

Of Race and Robots

In this essay, I will explore the complex ways Isaac Asimov's fiction both engages with and disavows race. Looking mainly at his robot stories -- especially those collected in I, Robot (1950) and the most popular of the Dr. Susan Calvin stories -- I will show how Asimov's robots engage with the legacy of slavery as well as with contemporary racial issues. On the one hand, Asimov's robot stories and novels explicitly draw on tropes of black servitude, such as the way robots are routinely addressed as "boy" and older models call humans "master," or the parallels between the logic of slave codes, Jim Crow laws, and the Three Laws of Robotics. On the other hand, Asimov was a committed social liberal, skeptical of Golden Age editor John W. Campbell's tendency to, as Asimov put it, "take for granted, somehow, the stereotype of the Nordic white as the true representative of Man the Explorer, Man the Darer, Man the Victor." His stories often questioned the logic of all prejudice, and he even wrote a non-fiction book, Races and People, popularizing the work of his friend William C. Boyd, which the cover claims will convince the reader "that there is no such thing as a 'superior race.'" On yet a third hand (this is science fiction, after all), Asimov resisted the notion that his works were allegories for race. His characters, while not the Aryan engineers favored by more conservative Golden Age authors, were nonetheless privileged users of technology, working out the proper ethics for using their power, and grappling with their unfortunate prejudices; they were, in other words, characters who shared a science fictionalized version the white liberal perspective. Ultimately, this chapter will explicate the racial context into which Asimov's stories were written, offer examples of how to unpack the racial politics of the Robot stories, and situate Asimov's engagement with race in a larger discussion of the racial politics of science fiction and technoculture.

Intelligent Artificiality: Intermediality and Humanization

This anticipatory analysis of the robot in contemporary culture poses the question concerning technology as a primarily cultural and ethical question. In a reading of Carlos Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1983), Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950), Riddly Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Chris Cunningham’s All is Full of Love (1999), and Alex Proyas’ film I, Robot (2004), I will frame the robot as an intermedial key figure that signifies the “divorce” of technics and culture as theorized in the works of Bernard Stiegler, most notably Technics and Time: the Fault of Epimetheus (1994). This reading of the robot as a cultural and technical object is based on Heidegger’s and Stiegler’s revision of the Aristotelian division between natural and technical beings. In The Question Concerning Technology (1962), Heidegger traces our conception of instrumentality back to Aristotle’s four causes, and calls into question the primacy that is given to the efficient cause – the cause that brings about the effect, in the case of the technical object usually understood as the manufacturer – throughout the history of philosophy. In Technics and Time, Stiegler takes this argument a step further, and theorizes the technical object as having a distinct dynamics and evolution of its own. This analysis aims to raise the question of how, in an age of constant innovation, the future is being transmitted to us by the technical object, and through the medium.