AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines

  • 13h 10m 7s
  • Kanta Dihal - editor, Sarah Dillon - editor, Stephen Cave - editor
  • Recorded Books, Inc.
  • 2020

This audiobook is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed, and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue.

Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. These chapters explore the revealing pre-history of key concerns of contemporary AI discourse, from the nature of mind and creativity to issues of power and rights, from the tension between fascination and ambivalence to investigations into artificial voices and technophobia.

Part II focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerge alongside rapid developments in AI technology. These chapters reveal not only how AI narratives have consistently been entangled with the emergence of real robotics and AI, but also how they offer a rich source of insight into how we might live with these revolutionary machines.

The contributions, from leading humanities and social science scholars, show that narratives about AI offer a crucial epistemic site for exploring contemporary debates about these powerful new technologies.

In this Audiobook

  • 1. Homer's Intelligent Machines: AI in Antiquity
  • 2. Demons and Devices: Artificial and Augmented Intelligence before AI
  • 3. The Android of Albertus Magnus: A Legend of Artificial Being
  • 4. Artificial Slaves in the Renaissance and the Dangers of Independent Innovation
  • 5. Making the Automaton Speak: Hearing Artificial Voices in the Eighteenth Century
  • 6. Victorian Fictions of Computational Creativity
  • 7. Machines Like Us? Modernism and the Question of the Robot
  • 8. Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt
  • 9. Machine Visions: Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Control
  • 10. ‘A Push-Button Type of Thinking’: Automation, Cybernetics, and AI in Midcentury British Literature
  • 11. Artificial Intelligence and the Parent–Child Narrative
  • 12. AI and Cyberpunk Networks
  • 13. AI: Artificial Immortality and Narratives of Mind Uploading
  • 14. Artificial Intelligence and the Sovereign-Governance Game
  • 15. The Measure of a Woman: Fembots, Fact and Fiction
  • 16. The Fall and Rise of AI: Investigating AI Narratives with Computational Methods
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