AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines ed. by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon

Abstract

Reviewed by: AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines ed. by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon Ronald R. Kline (bio) AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines Edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 424. The strength of this edited volume, which grew out of a series of interdisciplinary workshops organized by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society of London, lies in its comprehensiveness. The book's twenty contributors, representing a wide range of disciplines, mostly in the humanities, consider an impressive spectrum of technologies and time periods. Part 1 ("Antiquity to Modernity") covers clockwork, self-regulated automata, and early robots in Europe from Ancient Greece to the industrial revolutions of [End Page 223] the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 ("Modern and Contemporary") focuses on the electronic computer systems, including neural-net machine learning, that came to be known as "artificial intelligence" in the United States and Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The variety of narratives is equally impressive. Part 1 deals with a wide range of texts, from Homeric epics to books on natural magic and experimental science in the Renaissance and early modern period, and from Victorian fiction to Karel Čapek's classic play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921. Part 2, organized by themes, focuses on the rise of modern science fiction in books, films, and television, often contrasting that with futuristic predictions, both utopian and critical, made by AI practitioners. AI Narratives thus resembles a scholarly handbook that summarizes recent work in a new field of study. As with most handbooks, its strength of being comprehensive contributes to its weakness of not presenting a unifying argument or perspective about these narratives. The history and sociology of science and technology is represented in the volume by references to such well-known scholars as Jessica Riskin, Simon Schaffer, David F. Noble, N. Katherine Hayles, Judy Wajcman, and Sheila Jasanoff. But the omissions are notable too, such as Adelheid Voskuhl on automata and fiction in eighteenth-century Europe and Donna Haraway on cyborgs. Although the editors state that the "work of this book contributes to establishing the importance of narratives as constituent parts of any sociotechnical imaginary" (p. 7), a concept introduced by Jasanoff, none of the authors engage with this concept, nor with historian of technology David Nye's influential work on technological narratives. In part 2, I would have liked to have heard more about the relationship between the writers of science fiction and AI researchers. Beth Singler mentions this mutual influence in her nice chapter on AI, anthropomorphism, and the parent-child narrative. But the fact that Marvin Minsky, a founder of computer-based AI, was a consultant to the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or that John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, corresponded with his former MIT professor Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics who is cited several times in AI Narratives, suggests that much more could be done to explore the permeable boundary between the creators of science fiction and the inventors of AI systems in the twentieth century. All of the chapters are well researched, well argued, and informative, whether they recount a recent book by the author or present new research. An idea of the richness of the topics and themes can be seen from the titles of some outstanding chapters. These include Minsoo Kang and Ben Halliburton's "The Android of Albertus Magnus: A Legend of Artificial Being," Julie Park's "Making the Automaton Speak: Hearing Artificial Voices in the Eighteenth Century," Kanta Dihal's "Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt," and Anna McFarlane's "AI and Cyberpunk Networks." [End Page 224] These virtues make AI Narratives a path-breaking book that surveys the important place of narrative in the long history of the interaction between humans and intelligent machines in Europe and the United States. Ronald R. Kline Ronald R. Kline is Bovay Professor of History and Ethics of Engineering, Emeritus, at Cornell University. He...