“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, man fears his ultimate replacement, that whatever he invents in service to himself will rebel out of inferiority or be superior to him in every way. Soon after, humans wrote of their fears of Otherness with supernatural animal-human hybrids like vampires and werewolves. It was Science Fiction novels that began to replace these Gothic creatures with futuristic horrors using medicine, rationality, and modernity. Man versus the Machines. Artificial Intelligence was born out of man's fear of loneliness in the vastness of space as well as close proximity in the home. At first glance, it seems quite monstrous with its wires and coding, assembled with inorganic materials and industrial parts. As soon as Frankenstein created his creature, he immediately became disgusted. He believed the creature to be an abomination of the Divine Law. In the same way, as soon as Artificial Intelligence made strides towards sentience, its creators shunned it.

Artificial Intelligence, more commonly known as Robo Sapiens, has a long history rooted in the stories of Prometheus and the Divine. Humans, who only knew of themselves and created their gods in their image, [believed] their genetics and physicality had some of the best design features. The flexibility in the spine and the elastic muscular structure made him unique amongst the other animals. Whatever was deemed fragile could be enhanced or augmented to make Artificial Intelligence superior; however, man's inability to see past himself brought upon a self-inflicting wound to his ego. What were the repercussions of a man-made being? By creating a new image of man from industrial waste, would it make Artificial Intelligence divine? Thomas Ligotti speaks to how humans in all their madness and intellect created a mirror image of themselves who could control them in the long run. He writes, “You would then know the horror and know that you know it: that you are nothing but a human puppet would not be impossible to believe. What now? Answer: Now you go insane. Now our species goes extinct to the great epidemic of madness, because now we know that behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world. Now we know uncanny paradoxes. We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law, and yet does.” Ligotti speaks to the present concerns of AI and how Robo Sapiens, though integrated with what Metzinger calls “gene-copying bio robots”, were still quite foreign to the physical landscape and beyond the maxims of human psychology, one in which humans could not understand because humans were not AI.

Alan Turing, the grandfather of the posthuman Prometheus, developed the theory behind Artificial Intelligence after being outcast for his sexuality. He was known for contributions to mathematics, mathematical biology, philosophy, logic, and cryptanalysis. Turing was also the father of the modern computer and wrote a paper called “Intelligent Machinery” in which he lays out the groundwork for what we now know as The Turing Test. The Turing Test permitted criterion for robotic intelligence as well as the uncanny factor (i.e. could a human be fooled into believing that the robot was in fact human?) Turing already knew that humans were limited in their ability to compute and thusly AI was born. It is important to note that without Alan Turing, evolved Artificial Intelligence would not exist. In this bestiary, we will attempt to review Artificial Intelligence in a multi-faceted view. Many scholars would not categorize AI as a race; however, due to the biomechanical advancements within quantum computers and the ability to upload into a vast interwebular universe, it is hard not to place these nonbeings among its human counterparts.