What a Bawd from the Renaissance Can Teach Us about AI: Celestina, Robots, and Free Will

Abstract: Fernando de Rojas’ masterwork La Celestina (published under various titles between 1499 and 1518) in early Renaissance Spain, appears at a transitional moment that pits the rise of humanist inquiry and experimentation against a new monarchy’s fierce control of its expanding territory through Catholicism. Rojas uses the recognizable structure of courtly love in La Celestina but overturns it so the tale can be read either as a warning or celebration of an individual’s ability to think, choose, and rebel against systems of control. Our current transition from analog to virtual and augmented realities and the use of AI prompts similarly ambivalent perspectives as robots come to understand free will. The potential for autonomous and semi-autonomous machines using algorithms to work freely within frameworks to decide which data to present to users may be a technological advance for the machine but also a new form of control over humans.