They Will Know You by Your Love (for Robots): Technology, Relationality, and <scp>AI</scp> Fictions

Abstract This essay draws on a repertoire of pop culture representations of AI/human relationships read alongside scientific and technological speculations about AI futures to explore the tropes and images, plots and patterns of existing AI fantasies that are formed first in pop culture and that are nurtured, re‐mixed, and reabsorbed into our shared sense of the possible. The essay will explore three paradigmatic tropes and patterns that define our common fantasies of AI‐human relationship: servants (or slaves) and masters, child‐parent relationships of care and nurture or “the robot who can learn,” and confrontations with inhuman otherness. In most of our fantasies we have a tendency to lapse into fundamental relationships of domination (whether we are being dominated by AI or are justified in dominating it), or to treat all near‐human agents like children that must become human, suggesting that our scientific and fictional speculations are woefully inadequate to imagine relationality with agents of profound otherness. But this may be exactly where we most need to draw on theology, anthropology, philosophy, and the study of religion. The essay concludes by suggesting some sources that might prompt new speculative fictions.