AI is now a global phenomenon. Yet Hollywood narratives dominate perceptions of AI in the English-speaking West and beyond, and much of the technology itself is shaped by a disproportionately white, male, US-based elite. However, different cultures have been imagining intelligent machines since long before we could build them, in visions that vary greatly across religious, philosophical, literary and cinematic traditions. This book aims to spotlight these alternative visions. Imagining AI draws attention to the range and variety of visions of a future with intelligent machines and their potential significance for the research, regulation, and implementation of AI. The book is structured geographically, with each chapter presenting insights into how a specific region or culture imagines intelligent machines. The contributors, leading experts from academia and the arts, explore how the encounters between local narratives, digital technologies, and mainstream Western narratives create new imaginaries and insights in different contexts across the globe. The narratives they analyse range from ancient philosophy to contemporary science fiction, and visual art to policy discourse. The book sheds new light on some of the most important themes in AI ethics, from the differences between Chinese and American visions of AI, to digital neo-colonialism. It is an essential work for anyone wishing to understand how different cultural contexts interplay with the most significant technology of our time.

The increasing role and power of artificial intelligence in our lives and world requires us to imagine and shape a desirable future with this technology. Since visions of AI often draw from Christian apocalyptic narratives, current discussions about technological hopes and fears present an opportunity for a deeper engagement with Christian eschatological resources. This book argues that the Christian apocalyptic imagination can transform how we think about and use AI, helping us discover ways artificial agency may participate in new creation.

This book argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms. On the basis of this study, Steinhoff develops a Marxist analysis to argue that the popular theory of immaterial labour, which holds that information technologies increase the autonomy of workers from capital, tending towards a post-capitalist economy, does not adequately describe the situation of high-tech digital labour today. In the AI industry, digital labour remains firmly under the control of capital. Steinhoff argues that theories discerning therein an emergent autonomy of labour are in fact witnessing labour’s increasing automation.

Would you read this book if a computer wrote it? Would you even know? And why would it matter? Today's eerily impressive artificial intelligence writing tools present us with a crucial challenge: As writers, do we unthinkingly adopt AI's time-saving advantages or do we stop to weigh what we gain and lose when heeding its siren call? To understand how AI is redefining what it means to write and think, linguist and educator Naomi S. Baron leads us on a journey connecting the dots between human literacy and today's technology. From nineteenth-century lessons in composition, to mathematician Alan Turing's work creating a machine for deciphering war-time messages, to contemporary engines like ChatGPT, Baron gives readers a spirited overview of the emergence of both literacy and AI, and a glimpse of their possible future. As the technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and fluent, it's tempting to take the easy way out and let AI do the work for us. Baron cautions that such efficiency isn't always in our interest. As AI plies us with suggestions or full-blown text, we risk losing not just our technical skills but the power of writing as a springboard for personal reflection and unique expression. Funny, informed, and conversational, Who Wrote This? urges us as individuals and as communities to make conscious choices about the extent to which we collaborate with AI. The technology is here to stay. Baron shows us how to work with AI and how to spot where it risks diminishing the valuable cognitive and social benefits of being literate.

American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Winner for 2018 (Theoretical Category) We have entered the age of perversion, an era in which we are becoming more like machines and they more like us.The Age of Perversion explores the sea changes occurring in sexual and social life, made possible by the ongoing technological revolution, and demonstrates how psychoanalysts can understand and work with manifestations of perversion in clinical settings. Until now theories of perversion have limited their scope of inquiry to sexual behavior and personal trauma. The authors of this book widen that inquiry to include the social and political sphere, tracing perversion’s existential roots to the human experience of being a conscious animal troubled by the knowledge of death. Offering both creative and destructive possibilities, perversion challenges boundaries and norms in every area of life and involves transgression, illusion casting, objectification, dehumanization, and the radical quest for transcendence. This volume presents several clinical cases, including a man who lived with and loved a sex doll, a woman who wanted to be a Barbie doll, and an Internet sex addict. Also examined are cases of widespread social perversion in corporations, the mental health care industry, and even the government. In considering the continued impact of technology, the authors discuss how it is changing the practice of psychotherapy. They speculate about what the future may hold for a species who will redefine what it means to be human more in the next few decades than during any other time in human history. The Age of Perversion provides a novel examination of the convergence of perversion and technology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, mental health counselors, sex therapists, sexologists, roboticists, and futurists, as well as social theorists and students and scholars of cultural studies.

In the past twenty years Quebec women writers, including Aline Chamberland, Claire Dé, Suzanne Jacob, and Hélène Rioux, have created female characters who are fascinated with bold sexual actions and language, cruelty, and violence, at times culminating in infanticide and serial killing. Paula Ruth Gilbert argues that these Quebec feminist writers are "re-framing" gender. Violence and the Female Imagination explores whether these imagined women are striking out at an external other or harming themselves through acts of self-destruction and depression. Gilbert examines the degree to which women are imitating men in the outward direction of their anger and hostility and suggests that such "tough" women may be mocking men in their "macho" exploits of sexuality and violence. She illustrates the ways in which Quebec female authors are "feminizing" violence or re-envisioning gender in North American culture. Gilbert bridges methodological gaps and integrates history, sociology, literary theory, feminist theory, and other disciplinary approaches to provide a framework for the discussion of important ethical and aesthetic questions.