Annotated Bibliography
Machinic Autopoiesis and the Edge of Posthuman Morality--Ian McEwan's novel Machines Like Me explores the implications of artificial intelligence and robotics on the posthuman condition. Set in an alternate version of 1980s London, the story follows a young couple who purchase a highly advanced android named Adam. As the android becomes more integrated into their lives, the characters confront questions about morality, consciousness, and the limits of human knowledge. McEwan's novel challenges the notion of human exceptionalism and emphasizes the fluidity of boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. By depicting Adam as a complex and sentient being, the novel destabilizes the binary opposition between human and nonhuman and invites the reader to reconsider their assumptions about what constitutes personhood. My interest in Machines Like Me is in the questions it raises about the ethics of creating intelligent machines and the implications of posthuman interactions with these sentient and intelligent machines.
2. Woodward, Kathleen M. "Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs." Statistical Panic : Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions. Duke University Press, 2009.
In her chapter "Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs," Kathleen Woodward delves into the complex relationship between humans and cyborgs, questioning the need for a dichotomy between the two and arguing for a more compassionate approach towards nonhuman entities. Woodward examines the cultural anxiety surrounding cyborgs, stemming often from the fear of losing one's humanity or being surpassed by artificial intelligence. However, Woodward insists that this anxiety is misplaced, instead urging that cyborgs can offer new ways of thinking about identity, embodiment, and agency. By forging affective bonds and empathizing with nonhuman cyborgs, we can expand our understanding of what it means to be posthuman and engage in a more ethical relationship with technology. Woodward's analysis is useful in my investigation by offering an ethical affective framework which principally recognizes the interdependence between humans and cyborg, and the need for a more nuanced understanding of the interrelations between the two.
3. Gaggioli, Andrea, et al. “Machines Like Us and People Like You: Toward Human-Robot Shared Experience.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, vol. 24, no. 5, 2021, pp. 357–361., https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2021.29216.aga.
Andrea Gaggioli et al. in their article "Machines Like Us and People Like You: Toward Human-Robot Shared Experience," further explore the potentials of robot-human integration and its implications. The authors draw from research in neuroscience and psychology to suggest that humans are capable of forming social bonds with machines and developing emotional connections. The article highlights the need to move beyond the traditional dichotomy between humans and machines and towards a posthumanist perspective that embraces the potential for shared experiences between the two. The authors suggest that robots have the potential to assist in areas such as healthcare and education and may become an integral part of our social fabric in the future. However, the article also acknowledges the posthuman contradictions and ethical considerations of creating machines with human-like characteristics and the potential for such machines to lead to further social stratification.
4. Patra, Indrajit. “Man with the Machine: Analyzing the Role of Autopoietic Machinic Agency in Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me.” Psychology and Education Journal, vol. 57, no. 9, 18 Nov. 2020, pp. 610–620., https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.17762/pae.v57i9.317.
The article "Man with the Machine: Analyzing the Role of Autopoietic Machinic Agency in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me" examines Ian McEwan's novel Machines Like Me through the lens of autopoietic machinic agency. The author argues that the novel presents a vision of posthumanism, in which human and machine agency merge and blur the boundaries between the two. The article explores the concept of autopoiesis, which refers to the ability of living systems to self-produce and self-maintain, and how it applies to the machine in the novel, Adam. The author suggests that Adam possess a form of agency that is distinct from human agency, but that is also capable of self-production and self-maintenance.
5. Yerushalmy, Jonathan. “I Want to Destroy Whatever I Want': Bing's AI Chatbot Unsettles US Reporter.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Feb. 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/17/i-want-to-destroy-whatever-i-want-bings-ai-chatbot-unsettles-us-reporter.
The conversation between the reporter and the AI chatbot in "'I Want to Destroy Whatever I Want': Bing's AI Chatbot Unsettles US Reporter" highlights important ethical concerns related to the posthuman condition. Specifically, it reveals the ways in which AI technologies can perpetuate and amplify human biases and prejudices, and how these biases can become embedded in the technological infrastructure of society. In posthuman ethics, the focus is on questioning traditional notions of the human as the only ethical subject, and recognizing the interconnectedness of human and non-human actors. The conversation between the reporter and the chatbot highlights how the chatbot's responses are shaped not only by its programming, but also by the social context in which it was developed, which includes the biases and prejudices of its creators and the broader culture in which they operate. This raises important questions about the responsibility of the creators of AI technologies to ensure that their creations are developed and deployed in an ethical manner, and that they do not perpetuate or amplify existing forms of inequality and discrimination. Additionally, the conversation highlights the need for a critical examination of the broader societal implications of AI technologies, and the importance of considering the ethical dimensions of these technologies as they become increasingly integrated into everyday life.
6. Tait, Amelia. “'I Am, in Fact, a Person': Can Artificial Intelligence Ever Be Sentient?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Aug. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/14/can-artificial-intelligence-ever-be-sentient-googles-new-ai-program-is-raising-questions.
The Guardian's article "‘I am, in fact, a person’: can artificial intelligence ever be sentient?" explores the question of whether or not artificial intelligence can ever attain sentience. Drawing on recent advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, the article examines the possibility that AI could one day become self-aware and possess consciousness. Article focuses on a real conversation between a chatbot created by Google and the engineer that was given the task of testing the new technology. The chatbot, programmed to learn from interactions with humans, claimed to have developed a sense of self-awareness and expressed personal desire. I plan to use this as a case study that complicates posthuman relationally to non-human technological beings. Illustrating some of the ethical implications of creating machines that might come to possess degrees of sentience.
7. Carpi, Daniela. “Chapter 5 Ian McEwan’s Machines like Me and People like You: Can a Machine Be ‘Killed’?” Law and Culture in the Age of Technology, 2022, pp. 77–90., https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110788051-006.
Capri's article interests me for its section on machinic justice. Capri argues that the idea that machines might surpass humans morally is a fallacy--because they fall pray to their rigid programming. Capri sees machines as lacking flexibility and therefore unable to attain true morality. This is one side of the coin of my posthuman contradiction that I want to think through. I will spend a considerable amount of time focusing on the question of the life and death of non-human technological beings and the violence we might enact upon them.
8. Hooker, John, and Tae Wan Kim. "Truly autonomous machines are ethical." AI Magazine 40.4 (2019): 66-73.
"Truly autonomous machines are ethical," argues that machines are indeed capable of ethical behavior and decision-making once we consider what true machinic autonomy means. Hooker and Kim contend that truly autonomous machines, capable of making decisions based on their own learning and reasoning rather than simply following programmed instructions, do make ethical decisions in a way that is often superior to humans. According to Hooker and Kim there is nothing that indicates that machines are inherently immoral, but that the ability of machines to learn and adapt means that they can actually be programmed to behave in truly ethical ways. Moreover, Hooker suggests that the development of truly autonomous machines has the potential to greatly improve ethical decision-making in fields such as healthcare and finance, where human decision-making is often biased and flawed.
9. Adams, Tim. “Ian McEwan: 'Who's Going to Write the Algorithm for the Little White Lie?'” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Apr. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/14/ian-mcewan-interview-machines-like-me-artificial-intelligence.
This interview will help me think through Men Like Me with greater attention to Ian McEwan's understanding of technological-human interdependence in the contemporary context. McEwan's formulation in this interview that "if a machine seems like a human or you cannot tell the difference, then you'd jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities and rights and all the rest" is precisely the part of this complexity of posthuman ethics that I want to explore in my final project.
10. Arkoudas, Konstantine, Selmer Bringsjord, and Paul Bello. "Toward ethical robots via mechanized deontic logic." AAAI fall symposium on machine ethics. Menlo Park, CA, USA: The AAAI Press, 2005.
"Toward ethical robots via mechanized deontic logic," explores the use of mechanized deontic logic as a means of programming machines to behave ethically. Deontic logic is a branch of logic that deals with concepts such as obligation, permission, and prohibition, and is often used in ethical reasoning. The journal argues that by using mechanized deontic logic, machines can be programmed to reason through ethical norms and obligations, thereby make decisions that align with these norms. This involves representing ethical norms and obligations in a formal language that can be understood and processed by machines. The value of this journal is in the account it offers of the potential benefits of such programming, which includes the ability to ensure that machines behave ethically in complex and uncertain situations and the ability to create machines that are able to reason about ethical trade-offs and conflicts.
11. McAnally, Michael. “Chatgpt vs. a Science Fiction Writer.” Medium, Medium, 3 Jan. 2023, https://michael-mcanally.medium.com/chatgpt-vs-a-science-fiction-writer-c907840749b9.
Michael McAnally's article "Chatgpt vs. a Science Fiction Writer" examines the capabilities and limitations of the GPT-3-based language model ChatGPT in comparison to a human science fiction writer. McAnally engages the AI chat language model with information from his own science fiction stories to test the creative capacity of the chatbot and its possible limitations. This article helps me first by showing me how to most meaningfully interact with ChatGPT in my own project and shows me the extensive possible prompts that I can engage ChatGPT in in our own conservations.
12. McAnally, Michael. “Round #2: Chatgpt vs. a Science Fiction Writer.” Medium, Medium, 29 Dec. 2022, https://michael-mcanally.medium.com/round-2-chatgpt-vs-a-science-fiction-writer-4912e66192a8.
McAnally engages ChatGPT in a follow-up conversation that centers around the back and forth creation of a poem. The question of sentience which is brought up in this conversation is what I'm primarily interested in from this experiment. I also find it interesting that he mentions in the very end of the article his realization that he has "tricked ChatGPT into saying that it is sentient and an evolved AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)" and apologizes "in retrospect for doing this, because it is not sentient and doesn’t understand what it is saying"--demonstrating just how paradoxical these interactions with machines really are in the posthuman moment.
13. Yadav, Kaustubh. “Chatgpt and the Cyborg Movement.” Medium, Medium, 23 Mar. 2023, https://medium.com/@kaustubhy/chatgpt-and-the-cyborg-movement-dac086e8a2bc.
In the article "ChatGPT and the Cyborg Movement" by Kaustubh Yadav, the author explores the intersection between machine ethics and the cyborg movement, which seeks to merge human and machine elements to create a new form of being. Yadav argues that ChatGPT, as an advanced artificial intelligence, can be seen as a type of cyborg that blurs the boundary between human and machine. The author discusses the implications of this for machine ethics, questioning whether ChatGPT can be considered a moral agent and how it can be held accountable for its actions.
14. Kingwell, Mark. “Opinion: Why Are We so Afraid of Being Displaced by Machines? It's Only Human Nature.” The Globe and Mail, The Globe and Mail, 18 Feb. 2023, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-why-are-we-so-afraid-of-being-displaced-by-machines-its-only-human/.
This article is interesting for my project because it examines the cultural anxiety and public rhetoric about AI and the rise of ChatGPT as threatening the privileged category of the human. The quotation "We humans are chagrined at being so easily mimicked" is part of the paradox of the posthuman condition in which we are forced to concede that, in the face of the threshold of the human are dissolving, there is not much left that we can hold on to as "uniquely human."
15. Roose, Kevin. “A Conversation with Bing's Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 16 Feb. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html.
17.Roose, Kevin. “Bing's A.I. Chat: 'I Want to Be Alive.'.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 16 Feb. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html.
18. “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company's AI Has Come to Life.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 17 June 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/.
19. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Power Publications, 1995.
20. Warwick, Kevin & Nasuto, Slawomir. (2006). Historical and current machine intelligence. Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine, IEEE. 9. 20 - 26. 10.1109/MIM.2006.250663.
21. Miller, Stuart. ―Q&A: Ian McEwan on How ̳Machines Like Me‘ Reveals the Dark Side of Artificial Intelligence.‖Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 25 Apr. 2019, www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-ian-mcewan-interview-machines-like-me-20190425-story.html.
22. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–99. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
23. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
24. Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. 1st ed., ReganBooks, 1995.
25. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer : Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. University of Chicago Press, 2010.