LUDDITES, ROBOTS, AND CONSOLE COWBOYS: AI AND THE HUMANITIES

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a significant influence on how we teach, how we communicate, and how we imagine the modern workplace. To understand what it means and how it will shape our lives, it is necessary to examine it from a humanities perspective with special attention to history, ethics, and literary representations of AI. Our science-fiction literary tradition provides ample material to work in works by Mary Shelley, Karl Capek, Isaac Asimov, Ridley Scott, and William Gibson. In these works, the iconic literary figures of the Luddite, the robot, and the console cowboy embody some of the most important tendencies in the advance-theorization of AI. They reveal anxieties about employee-obsolescence, a fixation on anthropomorphism, and a lingering hope for organized resistance to power-imbalances. A carefully considered humanities framework provides a check on exaggerated claims from both pro- and anti-AI constituencies.