For the last several years, following on a number of significant “machine learning” breakthroughs, talk of “artificial intelligence” (AI) has made a comeback. Especially strong in business and technology circles, discussion of an AI-powered fourth industrial revolution now ripples through the popular imagination. Fictions of Artificial Intelligence, which blends narrative fiction in several media—literature, film, serial television—with readings by leading AI thinkers, will help students to critically engage this new cultural and technological phenomenon. Designed to hone critical thinking, ask big questions, spark innovative research questions, sharpen effective communications across disciplinary divides, and cultivate appreciation of narrative art, Fictions of Artificial Intelligence will provide students with an inviting introduction to urgent topics of ethical, cultural, scientific, and humanistic concern.
From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to HBO’s Westworld and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me a century later, narrative storytelling provides a crucial means of contemplating the intellectual, social, and moral consequences of new technologies that pressure boundaries between human and machine. Fictions of Artificial Intelligence will combine non-fiction readings from interdisciplinary experts with these and other fictional works including Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, Blade Runner; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine; Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein. As they read and explore this powerful selection of storytelling art, students will develop the ability to speak intelligently about new technologies, understand key research challenges for computer scientists and others, and grasp some of the most important ethical questions of our century.
About Professor Goodlad
Lauren M.E. Goodlad is Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as a faculty affiliate of the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), the Rutgers British Studies Center, and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. At the University of Illinois, where she taught until 2017, Goodlad was a Kathryn Paul Professorial Scholar, University Scholar, Provost Fellow for Undergraduate Education, and the director of the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory (2008-14). At Rutgers, she is now Associate Chair of English, a member of the executive committees for Graduate Studies, the CCA, and RBSC, as well as chair of a new interdisciplinary initiative on Critical Artificial Intelligence. She is currently completing a book that includes a chapter on literature and artificial intelligence.