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This chapter examines how scientists working on Artificial Life have understood their practices as situated historically. It first considers the practice of finding genealogies for Artificial Life, arguing that such a search for ancestors carries acute historiographical and epistemological dangers. It then comments on computer simulations that fashion the computer as a kind of fish tank into which users can peer to see artificial life forms swimming about. It also discusses a different realm of modeling, that of cognition in Artificial Intelligence. The chapter concludes by suggesting a mode of imagining history that it calls an underwater archaeology of knowledge. In an underwater archaeology of knowledge, representational artifacts become mixed in with portraits of the world, requiring new sorts of narrative disentangling and qualification.

Artificial intelligence programs have increasingly entered public discourse in many diverse and overlapping ways. The various artificial intelligences are connected to our biologically based ones largely (though not solely) via the cyber network, which itself increasingly draws our species into its communicative framework. In this new, mediated, cyborg realm of culture there are no non-human animals, or plants, or any other natural forms of intelligence, but that does not mean we are all alone. Rather, there are new voices in our shared agora, now, and their voices do not necessarily attend to our own. This chapter explores the cultural overlaps of human and artificial intelligences online.

This chapter questions the underlying assumptions of both classic Artificial Intelligence, founded in the analogy between the brain and the digital computer, and the newer tradition that construes the mind as an emergent property of interacting, distributed, parallel processes. It specifically explores Gestalt psychology and its brief engagement with cybernetics to suggest that was perhaps a missed opportunitt, and additionally examines John von Neumann's influential automata theory. The structure of insight helped explain the complex, nonmechanical behavior of living, acting organisms. For von Neumann, the creative plasticity of the nervous system served only to highlight the rather simplistic, and inferior, mechanical structure of the early computers, something he was of course well positioned to notice. His terse conclusion was that the logical structures involved in nervous system activity must “differ considerably” from the ones that are familiar in logic and mathematics.

This chapter compares the sequel's memory-making registers with what Dominick LaCapra has called ‘secondary memory’. Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A. I. is explored to address the sequel's more complex registers of memory, repetition, erasure and history in three major contexts: cultural memory, the psychological development of memory and virtual memory. It persistently raises a number of psychoanalytic discourses and responses. Sequelisation in A. I. is a dominating feature of post-global warming, post-apocalyptic America. It then considers A. I. as a means by which a fuller understanding of both sequelisation and the Real can be obtained. The notion of the sequel organises the film's presentation of historical repetition. The repetition of the Real appears in David's case to create every experience and urge as a repetition of the ‘thing itself’, which is essentially himself. The sequel appears to problematise the experience, or memory, of the original.

Is ambiguity unavoidable? It is found in vision and everywhere in language. Semantic nets for disambiguation are realized in George Miller’s WordNet, a practical project helping disambiguate search strings using contextual disambiguation. Simple association using traditional passive memory is boring compared to complex association using active memory with multiple associative links active at the same time to perform a clearly defined task. A “mixer” is used to recognize items from a list, and generalization of the mixer is used for disambiguation. The chapter also discusses artificial intelligence, both its origins and currently ignored questions: Are biological intelligence and machine intelligence the same thing? Can digital computers really mimic in digital software a largely analog brain? The important question is not why machines are becoming so smart but why humans are still so good. Artificial intelligence is missing something important probably based on hardware differences.

Chapter 13 gives an impression of the development of the relatively young AI and computer science fields in Europe and China and how the current situation has developed over the past twenty years, where European and Chinese researchers are equal colleagues on an international stage and where diplomatic relations between the USA and China on the international stage have consequences felt directly by European AI researchers in their labs. In what ways are AI researchers in China and Europe competitors with each other, for example in terms of the global shortage of trained AI researchers and practitioners? At the same time, the AI research community collaborates globally, so how can we ensure that the field continues to benefit from open international collaboration?

This chapter uses the film Artificial Intelligence (2002) to set the stage for a discussion of the ethics of emerging technologies. The film focuses on an 11-year-old artificial boy, David (Haley Joel Osment), who was created to give love without demands: he would need no food, no rest, no love in return. The film addresses questions such as: What is our responsibility toward our own creations? How can society deal with enhancement technologies applied to the human body? The chapter reflects on these topics from a bioethical standpoint, and argues that responsibility and humility should guide medical activity, as illustrated in parts of the Hippocratic Oath. Emerging technologies and their applications to health care should not be subjected to wholesale legislative limitations, regardless of context or culture. Law-making must be interdisciplinary, intimately involved in the discussion of and reflection on bioethical issues, in order to deal with their complexity as well as their social aspects and peculiarities.

This chapter focuses on ELIZA, the first chatbot program, developed in the 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Joseph Weizenbaum to engage in written conversations with users of the MAC time-sharing system. The program’s alleged capacity for conversation attracted the attention of audiences in the United States and the world, and Weizenbaum’s book Computer Power and Human Reasons (1976) drew readers from well outside his discipline of computer science. In the process, the program presented AI in ways that sharply contrasted with the vision of human-machine symbiosis that dominated approaches to human-computer interaction at the time. Drawing on Weizenbaum’s writings, computer science literature, and journalistic reports, the chapter argues that the impact of this alternative vision was not without consequence, informing the development of critical approaches to digital media as well as of actual technologies and pragmatic strategies in AI research.

This chapter first considers the cinematic tropes of freezing and an off-screen voice present in The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2004), and Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979). It then turns to Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001), which utilizes the same tropes as it unfurls into a large-scale narrative. It also discusses how certain shots are impossible to declare living or dead. Simply frozen or definitively extinguished, numbed yet potentially mobile or petrified forever as bas-reliefs, they seem to tremble with cold as they hesitate between the life and death of their movement. They are in a sense living-dead, that is to say spectral through their filmic movement (and not through what they show). The exemplary ones are the ones from the beginning of Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011).

One reason it matters whether phenomenally conscious robots will soon be forthcoming is that such robots would have moral rights. The view that they are on the horizon often rests on a certain philosophical view about consciousness, one called “nomological behaviorism” in this chapter. The view entails that, as a matter of nomological necessity, if a robot had exactly the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as a phenomenally conscious being, then the robot would be phenomenally conscious. The chapter experimentally investigates whether the folk think that certain (hypothetical) robots made of silicon and steel would have the same conscious states as certain familiar biological beings with the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as the robots. The findings provide evidence that the folk largely reject the view that silicon-based robots would have the sensations that they, the folk, attribute to the biological beings in question.

The concluding chapter, The Black Stack, draws out the tangled implications of The Stack as a challenge to design and to geopolitical thought, one to be achieved and/or resisted. The figure of “The Black Stack” stands for the Stack-to-come that we know will arrive but which we cannot possibly recognize in advance. As a global platform, The Stack may represent an epochal closure of the planet under an absolutist regime of algorithmic capital, and/or the fragility of its totality may also bring radical breaks, as its universalism produces unexpected new cosmopolitan positions. What may at first appear as the apotheosis of The Stack’s worst tendencies may, in the long run, prove to be the basis of a far-better geopolitics. Design must be attentive to the role that these reversals play in how new technologies produce new accidents, and how accidents in turn produce new technologies.

In evaluating the interplay of biological and social interpretations of the incest taboo, most literary commentaries have used fiction to show how notions of incest have changed historically through the variable of culture; in these accounts, the biological body remains a constant, whilst society adapts its parameters for what counts as incest. However, science fiction introduces material embodiment itself as a variable, as it hypothesises bodies that can be altered (e.g. through genetics) or even eliminated (e.g. through virtualising the mind via a computer). Through comparing three science fiction novels, this chapter evaluates whether such changing types of embodiment will also change the way in which society approaches the incest taboo, or even remove it entirely.

This essay is the first in the book’s Science, Fiction and Reality section. It was originally a paper read at a conference held at the University of Teesside in April 1995 and was later published in The Governance of Cyberspace. The essay talks about the evolution of science fiction and how it’s easy to spot when it has been overtaken by the development of technology; specifically in computers, artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybernetics. In her discussion of technology and cyberspace, Jones alludes to the possibility of consciousness, self-awareness and freedom of information, and makes reference to the science fiction novels of William Gibson and Pat Cadigan.

When considering the further evolution of our species, or for that matter the creation of new species of creatures or of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for existing or future people, it is often assumed that where humans are concerned, those to be enhanced will be and will remain human persons like themselves. Moreover they tend to assume that those people will remain essentially themselves, even in the relevant enhanced state. In short that the modifications in powers and capacities will happen to “us” or those we currently happen to think of as “us”. Where we think about the creation of machines or robots with AI we tend to assume that they will remain at our service, literally machines we own and direct, like computers or lawn mowers, and not become persons in their own right. This final chapter considers a possible mechanical rather than organic future for creatures like us.

In late 1941, following my 18th birthday, a normal next phase would have been two further terms at boarding school, with an option for scholarship holders to proceed to a shortened University degree course before joining up. But over that Christmas my teenage imagination was fired by a tale from my father concerning a mysterious establishment at Bedford. He had it on the authority of the then War Minister, Sir James Grigg, that as preparation for doing something unspecified but romantic behind enemy lines there were opportunities to sign up for a Japanese course starting in a couple of months’ time. I duly journeyed to Bedford and presented myself at the address given. My request to enrol elicited from the Intelligence Corps officer at Bedford a somewhat puzzled reply: ‘Who told you that we have a Japanese course now? That particular exercise is planned for the autumn.’ Noting my confusion he added: ‘But we have courses on codebreaking. There’s a new intake just starting. Would that interest you instead? I’ll have someone find you a billet nearby. Be back here at 9 a.m. Monday.’ In the Second World War one did not mess about. Returning to the London suburbs just long enough to pack a suitcase, I was back and signed in to the School of Codes and Ciphers, Official Secrets Act and all, on the Monday morning. With the rest of the new class I was soon held in thrall by our instructor, a certain Captain Cheadle, and by the black arts of codes and ciphers. With nothing to occupy my evenings, I arranged to have my own key to the building and classroom. My habit became to return after hours to the texts and exercises. The resulting accelerated learning curve made my selection inevitable when a Colonel Pritchard arrived from Bletchley. He was on a mission to recruit for the new section that was being formed by Ralph Tester to follow up John Tiltman’s and William Tutte’s successive coups—the hope was that breaking and reading Tunny traffic could be placed on a regular basis.

Like many British children in my age g­roup I can pinpoint my first memory of my father to the particular day when he and I were reunited after being separated since my infancy. It happened in October 1943, at Poole Docks on the south coast of England. My mother Lyn, my older brother Edward, and I had spent three years as evacuees to the United States, and after a lengthy and hazardous journey by ship and flying boat had arrived back, exhausted. I remember a crowd of people on the dockside, from which a thin, bald, agitated man emerged and strode up to us saying, ‘Oh, there you are!’ This was my father, Max Newman. While I retain a clear image of that meeting, I was to discover almost nothing of what my father was doing at the time until many years later. I was placed in the same position as others in codebreakers’ families. During the war I knew of Bletchley only as the place where my father went to work. After the war ended I came to know it more as a railway station where we changed trains in order to travel between Cambridge and the North. Then a silver tankard appeared in our house, resplendent with the inscription: ‘To MHAN from the Newmanry, 1943–45’. After much pestering from me to know what this was about, my mother took me aside and whispered conspiratorially in my ear, ‘Codes . . . but you must never tell anyone!’ My father, although one of the most discreet of men, must have trusted my mother enough to tell her this much, and she must have trusted me. By the time the first account of Colossus and the Newmanry was published my father was nearing his eighties, and the habit of keeping quiet about these events was as ingrained in him as eating, sleeping, and solving crossword puzzles. Furthermore the authorities would allow him to mention only certain aspects of the Colossus work. He was obviously pleased to be free at last to talk about his war work, but he did so hesitantly, choosing his words carefully and sometimes describing things only by oblique reference.

This chapter was originally read at a postgraduate conference called Looking at the Future, held at the University of Sussex in May 1994. The main body of the essay focuses on the difference in the description used to define the physical body compared to the language used when describing human consciousness, and analyses what it means for the genre now that cyberspace isn’t mere science fiction anymore.