Frankenstein and the rise of Artificial Intelligence
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We consider ourselves fashionably behind the times, after all bookpo.st is about reading books someone else has read first. So it is fitting that this post is about a novel that celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2018, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.
Or rather it is not about Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, but other people's. I came across a blog post on the feminist implications of the original Frankenstein — "'A female, equal companion': Frankenstein and Shelley’s Feminist Advocacy" by The Literary Pen — which coincided with two of the books on the current reading list.
Jeanette Winterson's "Frankissstein" and "Sex Robots & Vegan Meat" by Jenny Kleeman. The first is a novel simultaneously updating the Frankenstein trope to the AI age, whilst reexamining Mary Shelly's place as a woman writer in a competitive male circle (I'm not going to call Shelley and Byron macho). The second is non fiction looking at the emerging robotic, and soon artificial intelligence, sex dolls (there's vegan meat too but for our purposes it's the sex dolls we're interested in).
They are a perfect companion read. In fact at least once I had to remind myself that a subject wasn't a character from the other book so intwined are the fiction and fact. It occurs to me that the revival of Frankenstein is a perfect metaphor for our fear of AI, as Godzilla was for the nuclear cold war, zombies for global consumerism, and vampires for arrival of AIDs. We chose a monster for our times. Or, before anyone objects, in the case of Frankenstein, we chose a creature for our times.
In my to-be-read pile is "Frankenstein in Baghdad" by Ahmed Saadawi, a dark comedy using the assembled body as a metaphor for the madness of war. There has been recent spate of books examining AI replicants, or gynoids — the slightly creepy term adopted by female sex doll enthusiasts — including Ian McEwan's "Machines like us" which use consciousness-aware robots as a device for examining what it is to be human. What particularly interests me about "Frankissstein" is Winterson's marrying of the clinical threat from AI systems to the flesh bound paradigm of the man-made creature. Unlike vampires it appears mankind is actually trying to bring about the creation of one of it's monster myths.
Like the recent feminist reversals of Maleficent, I wonder how long it is until we see a story of the female sex doll as protagonist, not a means of destruction.
What this little mediation doesn't imply is "Frankissstein" is very funny. It is.
A tip of the hat to Louisa Hall for "Speak: A Novel" which also riffs on feminism and AI dolls, but does consider the robot as an equal character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynoid
https://frankenreads.org/
And then one step further to The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells ... highly recommended 6 book series with an eagerly anticipated new addition next year.
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