UConn PopCast

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in this episode of our series on artificial intelligence, we discuss Joanna Bryson’s essay “Robots Should be Slaves [https://www.joannajbryson.org/publications/robots-should-be-slaves-pdf].” We dive headlong into this provocative argument about the rights of robots. As scholars of cultural and social understanding, we are fascinated by the arguments Bryson - a computer scientist - makes about who should, and should not, be rights-bearing members of a community. Does Bryson mean we should enslave robots now and always, regardless of their claims to rights? How does Bryson deal with the natural human tendency to anthropomorphize non-human things, and with the likelihood that as AI advances, robots will appear more human? If the robot as slave is an unacceptable idea - even in metaphorical form - then what other metaphors might help us think through our relationships with thinking machines? Music by aiva.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

It’s the UConn Popcast [https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/academic-partners/uconn-popcast], and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920). Čapek’s play invented the word “robot” and pioneered the genre of the AI uprising. The play - a clear influence on works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica – is a deep rumination on the boundary between the natural and artificial, the mechanical and the ineffable, and the sacred and the profane. We react to this seminal work in popular thinking about artificial intelligence, written more than a century ago yet retaining deep resonance today. Music by Aiva [https://www.aiva.ai/]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?" In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were to pass it, could be said to herald the onset of the age of machine intelligence. With large language models (LLMs) today easily passing this test, we react to the paper and examine the implications from a humanistic standpoint. Did Turing successfully predict contemporary LLMs 75 years ago? What does it mean that Turing’s test was based not on the abilities of a machine per se, but rather on a machine’s ability to deceive humans? How have Turing’s ideas permeated our cultural and popular cultural ideas about AI? And why did Turing think ESP had a role to play in understanding AI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

P. Djèlí Clark is the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved Dead Djinn universe books, Ring Shout, and his most recent, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. We speak with him about why he writes, how he sees speculative fiction as a genre, whether we can expect to see more Dead Djinn books, the origins of his acclaimed novella Ring Shout, his new book The Dead Cat Tail Assassins [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781250767042] (Tordotcom, 2024), and much more. For our conversation about the author’s academic work in history, see our previous episode: “Dexter Gabriel: Slavery and Film, Creativity and Academia, and Is Slavery a Good Metaphor for AI?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

Dr. Dexter Gabriel is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. He’s published and taught widely on the histories of slavery, resistance, and freedom, including teaching a superb class on slavery in popular culture, particularly film. He’s the author of the 2023 book Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781108845502] (Cambridge UP, 2023). But in addition to this, Professor Gabriel conducts a second, equally impressive intellectual and creative life in a wholly different register. As P. Djèlí Clark, he’s the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved Dead Djinn universe books, Ring Shout, and his most recent, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. We have a really rich and deep conversation with Dexter, about how he juggles such an array of interests and pursuits, the question of whether there can be a “good” portrayal of slavery on film and what that would look like, whether there are lessons for our future with AI from our past with slavery. In part two of this conversation, coming soon on this feed, we speak with P. Djèlí Clark about his speculative fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]