MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

From Shelley to Spielberg, the promise and danger of artificial intelligence has long captured the popular imagination. Fiction has always run far ahead of technological development, but as “intelligence” is increasingly programmed into many of the technologies we use everyday, the possibilities of A.I. are becoming very real — and so the ethical questions raised by science fiction texts are taking on increasing urgency.

Our collaborative project is centered on two recent sci-fi texts that engage with these ethical, gendered, and sociotechnical questions: the 2014 Spike Jonze film Her, and the recently concluded comic book series Alex + Ada, created by Sarah Vaughn and Jonathan Luna. Both works consider the ethics of human interaction with artificial intelligence systems, as well as the possible benefits and consequences of these relationships.

In a series of alternating conversational essays, we identify, explore, and debate several questions that emerge from these texts, including: What, if any, are the moral obligations of humans to sentient or artificial intelligent systems (are robots our slaves or our moral equivalent?)? Do those obligations change based on the embodied form of that system (i.e. an android vs. a disembodied voice)? How do these texts illuminate human relations and human ethics?

To answer these and other questions, we describe the evolving zeitgeist around robots and automated systems and discuss how each work is shaped by it. Our arguments are shaped by our unique perspectives and grounded in the emerging literature of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and the ethics of anthropomorphic robot design, as well as more established research on questions of sex, gender and embodiment. Despite similarities in narrative, character, and setting, the two texts point to different conclusions and possible lessons for a future where this sort of technology is pervasive.