There is a lot being said about the rapidly advancing technology of AI, how it has already impacted our lives without our realizing it, how it mirrors our worst social structures, and how it will bring seismic changes to every corner of human life, like it or not. What’s interested me is that most of the public discourse is rooted in ethics, grappling with the same philosophical questions as nearly every fictional world that has AI—what makes us human? what rights do non-living things deserve? what is reality and perception? All the news and think pieces tell the story of the current zeitgeist, and they continue the legacy of a sci-fi writing that includes everything from Shelley’s Frankenstein to The Matrix series. It’s perhaps too easy to say Asimov predicted this all, just as the photos of New York’s orange skies kept getting called “apocalyptic—they were a surreal sign of collapse we’d only considered through art until now. (I kept thinking of this scene from Apocalypse Now, going on about our lives as if absolute destruction weren’t happening right in front of us). The reality now looks like what once existed only in our imaginations.
Probably the best thing I’ve read in response to the rise of ChatGPT and other uncanny AI software comes from a sci-fi author, Ted Chiang, in a New Yorker piece, “Will AI Become the New McKinsey?” In it, Chiang draws the parallels between AI and the most prestigious consulting firm in the country to ask, “Is there a way for A.I. to do something other than sharpen the knife blade of capitalism?”
But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.
Like corporate consulting, AI absolves those in power of responsibility by putting their dehumanizing decisions onto an outside “neutral” source—it conflates what is financially beneficial with what is right. It is not progress if technology makes people’s lives worse, and the concentration of wealth, the power of people who don’t do the work over the people who do, is making most people’s lives worse. I might have guessed the term luddite came from early humankind, but in this article I learned about the term’s origins in the protest movement in Industrial Era Britain:
…It’s helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry. The Luddites did not indiscriminately destroy machines; if a machine’s owner paid his workers well, they left it alone. The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice.
Ultimately, Chiang argues for the (maybe I’m too cynical to say, unlikely) use of policy and technology for greater economic justice: “The only way that technology can boost the standard of living is if there are economic policies in place to distribute the benefits of technology appropriately.” It is possible to make ethical decisions about AI, to avoid our sci-fi reality:
No one enjoys thinking about their complicity in the injustices of the world, but it is imperative that the people who are building world-shaking technologies engage in this kind of critical self-examination. It’s their willingness to look unflinchingly at their own role in the system that will determine whether A.I. leads to a better world or a worse one.
The Chiang piece has been bouncing around my head since I read it, so when I read an entry from the artist Keith Haring’s diary, it felt like the two were speaking to each other across decades.
JUNE 13, 1984
This drawing I first did in Milano. It was something I had been thinking about for a while. The reconciliation of the head and the stomach. Pure intellect without feelings is impotent and even potentially dangerous (i.e., the computer in the hands of those who wish to control). Expressionism (stomach) without intellect is pointless and usually boring. The problem facing modern man now (the reconciliation of intellect and feelings/brain and heart/rational and irrational/mind and spirit/etc. etc.) is compounded by the increasing power of technology and its misuse by those in power who wish only to control. The mentality of people who are motivated by profits at the expense of human needs is perfect for the computer. Computers are completely rational. They save time and money, they can keep records of every transaction (telephone, bank, etc.). Money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The worlds of art and money are constantly intermingling. To survive this mixture the magic in art has to be applied in new ways. Magic must always triumph.
Magic must always triumph
I think what makes AI so unsettling is its disembodiment. To make it more palatable, corporations give it placid and blandly pleasant voices, name it Siri or Alexa, make it female. I’m struck by how much of the artistic history of robots and cyborgs is full of female forms—from Maria in Metropolis to Ava in Ex Machina. Gynoids (female androids) combine the sex and terror of male fantasy. In Westworld, Stepford Wives, Her, Blade Runner, and so many others, the robotic female may begins fulfilling fantasies, but its weakness-creating femininity becomes dangerous and must be destroyed. In each of these films, the camera gives particular attention to the violence visited upon those robotic female bodies.
In Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking 1927 film, a robot takes the form of the human working-class activist, Maria, and bewitches the industrialist men of Metropolis with her dance and misleads the working people into rioting. She’s ultimately burned at the stake, Joan of Arc style.
(Also: check out this colorized and touched-up version of this same scene—werid and beautiful, but a very different piece of art from the original).
(Side Note: In thinking about the narratives given to gynoids, I think about how The Odyssey is propelled by fear of feminine infidelity, how many of the pitfalls are women: Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, Calypso, Circe, how man must vanquish and resist them to succeed in his quest).
“There can be no understanding between the hand and the head unless the heart acts as mediator.” -Epigram from Metropolis
Socialist, feminist, scientist, and theorist, Donna Haraway reappropriates the cyborg as a symbol of liberation from socially constructed binaries in her 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto. It is not an easy read, so I’ll give you a synopsis. Within the context of Reganomics and rapidly advancing technology, she argues we are all increasingly cyborgian. Haraway looks at events of the past century that shifted thinking about binaries between nature and humans (Darwin’s publication of Origin of the Species), nature and artificial/machine (the Industrial Revolution), and physical and non-physical (invention of microtechnology). As a hybrid of organism and machine, a “creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” the cyborg stands at the center of dualisms in Western, colonialist, and patriarchal culture which “have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self.”
High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices.
By embracing the cyborg, breaking down the boundary between human and technology, we can find acceptance of fluid and contradictory identities. It’s not just a liberation from limiting social constructs of race, gender, and class, it’s a more universal, interconnected perspective:
Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infdel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the super savers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
Franny Choi’s poetry collection Soft Science explores Haraway’s theories from a personal perspective. Choi speaks from a place of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality that is complex, both shaped by and in resistance to Western, colonialist, and patriarchal paradigms. I found this cool animation by artist Jane Lu of Choi’s poem “Turing Test”.
Choi’s book began as a response to the character Kyoko from Ex Machina, a movie with absolutely incredible cinematography, so I had to share this scene featuring Kyoko. Moments that are surreal undermine assumptions about reality, highlight the absurd power of the inventor (played by Oscar Isaac).
A conversation about gynoids—about the creation of a female fantasy, about the control of women’s bodies, about dehumanization through technology—leads me naturally to abortion acces. It has been a year since the Supreme Court overturned a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. It has had time to settle into our collective consciousness. I remember the day the ruling officially came out, Jia Tolentino had a new piece in the New Yorker, ready to go, and it was her voice that tethered me that day, helped me process both the larger perspective and the impact to individual lives.
We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth. Those who argue that this decision won’t actually change things much—an instinct you’ll find on both sides of the political divide—are blind to the ways in which state-level anti-abortion crusades have already turned pregnancy into punishment, and the ways in which the situation is poised to become much worse.
As a woman who was raised in an evangelical household in Texas and who is also a mother, Tolentino’s perspective on abortion access has more compassion and complexity than I can summon with my own experiences as a secular New Englander and gratefully childless woman. She says she can “still feel the old world view flickering, a photographic negative underneath my vision.” Though her first essay practically went viral and received a lot of attention, it was her second New Yorker essay on abortion, “Is Abortion Sacred,” that spoke best to the moral issues at the heart of the discussion around abortion. By then, she had had her own baby, and that impacted her thinking.
What multiplied my commitment to abortion were the beautiful things about motherhood: in particular, the way I felt able to love my baby fully and singularly because I had chosen to give my body and life over to her. […] I had been able to choose this permanent rearrangement of my existence. That volition felt sacred.
I thought long and hard about having a child. For a while, I thought I wanted one, but ultimately I recognized I did not want to “rearrange my existence.” There is a reason so few women can maintain a creative practice as mothers—it’s hard to justify the time, to make space in the brain, to dedicate to something without immediate value or demands. There is one sentence in Tolentino’s second essay that hits home to me more than any other.
Abortion is often talked about as a grave act that requires justification, but bringing a new life into the world felt, to me, like the decision that more clearly risked being a moral mistake.
I think that’s why I wanted to share these essays and explore this issue in post that’s mostly about robots. In the sci-fi genre, robots highlight our ethical oblications to life, they complicate what defines life, and these are the issues at the heart of abortion access. And in particular, gynoids raise issues of power, of control over female bodies. What happens when a gynoid stops performing the way she was programmed to do? What happens when she has autonomy? Feelings of her own? If literature and film are correct: we revolt.
I’m ready for the fight.
Earth is an Anagram for Heart, U Fucking Idiots
by June Gehringer
I.
This is all wrong.
We should be talking about how there’s a nine-year-old smiling somewhere.
We should be saying the names of all the people we have loved and never known like those words are a magic spell, because they are.
I don’t want to hear another word about Trump until you have whispered the names of all ~50,000 species of trees in my ear.
Sext: there are so many flowers you haven’t seen.
II.
The world comes to us in terms of death,
140 characters at a time.
I don’t want to talk about it.
I want to lie in what little grass remains
and try to fit your heart inside of mine.
But soon there is no grass,
and the function of the heart is transportation.
Soon, there is no grass anywhere,
and love is not enough.
I don’t know how to stop the flight of a tomahawk,
I’m busy building houses out of colored sand.
I am such a useless thing.
III.
None of this belongs to me or anyone.
I was simply born with more eyes
than could be made comfortable,
I was born with blood.
I wonder if it is possible to bury myself. Each day
more than the day before, I wonder
how much blood is in the Earth.
It is time we move, uproot
our budding bodies from the blood-soaked Earth,
it is time to go.
And if there’s not somewhere for us to go
then we’ll make somewhere,
we’ll move as one toting bags of dirt,
and we’ll fucking bury them.
We’ll bury them in Mar-a-Lago and
we’ll bury them in Washington, and
we will bury them in the shopping malls.
We’ll bury them in the oil fields
and in Baton Rouge, and in the Gulf of Mexico.
We will bury the borders and we will bury
the aircraft carriers and we will
even bury skyscrapers: we have earth enough
for this.
We will bury this Earth in earth and
I will love you while we wait
for blood to grow.