A Political History of the Future: AI at Lawyers, Guns & Money

After another long hiatus, my series A Political History of the Future returns at Lawyers, Guns & Money with a discussion of how science fiction has depicted artificial life in general, and AI in particular. This is a companion piece to a post that ran at LGM last month, in which I discussed not only my skepticism towards the growing technological field of "AI", but my dismay at the way that science fiction has been used to launder a technology that cannot do what it claims to do. 

In today's article, I look at the long tradition in science fiction of imagining artificial life as a way of working through anxieties about scientific progress. As our understanding of what computers can and can't do has changed, science fiction came up with the AI, a supposedly all-powerful being onto which we project our needs, fears, and anxieties.

An AI is something we make, but it's supposed to be better and wiser than us—in War Games (1983), it is the computer, not the human generals and politicians, who grasps that nuclear war is a game with no winners. We recognize its personhood, but also expect it to be bound by the task we created it for. Iain M. Banks's Culture is run by the all-powerful Minds, who have quirky personalities, a raft of prejudices and proclivities, and the capacity to make decisions in an instant, long before any humans are even aware that a problem exists. This leads characters within the books—as well as some readers—to conclude that the Culture is an AI society whose human citizens are little more than well-kept pets. But in Look to Windward (2000), Banks complicates this perception by revealing that even the most complex and intelligent Mind is bound by the cultural assumptions of the society that created it. The Minds of the Culture can't help but enact the violent, expansionist, do-gooding agenda that its human citizens require to feel good about their own lives of hedonistic plenty—a demand that leaves one of the Minds so shattered that it commits suicide. The AI, then, is at once a person, a god, and a slave.

Over the decades, science fiction's AIs have grown stranger and less like us. More recently, we have seen fictional treatments of AI that reflect the technologies that exist in the real world, complex engines that can mimic personhood while having no awareness or understanding of what they're saying. I discuss several recent stories and TV series whose AIs are terrifying precisely because they are not people, but have had personhood projected upon them. I suspect this is a shift that the genre will spend several years working through, and I'll be curious to see what comes out the other side of this process.