Intelligent Machines as Racialized Other

सत्यमेव जयते
Satyameva Jayate

‘Truth alone triumphs’

~ from Mundaka Upanishad

Our narratives about intelligent machines reprise the same modes in which humans have historically dealt with “other” groups of humans, especially during the era of colonialism. Intelligent Machines as Racialized Other invites the reader into the world of new technology, to travel many paths, and explore the many routes that traverse historical narratives of racialization and colonization with our perspectives on intelligent machines.

In a world where we are all coming to terms with our unconscious assumptions about racism, sexism, imperialism, and capitalism, this book points out that our cultural representations of intelligent machines have much to do with colonial attitudes and mindsets. Cultural narratives of a racialized Machinic Other, with all its complexities, and colored by ideological and cultural biases, influence individual human attitudes toward intelligent machines. Humans’ relations with intelligent machines are like two peas in a pod with the relations between erstwhile colonial overlords and colonized peoples. I apply a colonial/postcolonial perspective to illustrate how the dynamics of control, and attendant power relations, are reproduced in the discourse on intelligent machines, leading us to question the usual human attitudes.

The colonial control mindset is not dead and buried in the past. This book explores how examining the emotions underlying our narratives about intelligent machines leads to the realization that our human narratives about machines are projected from within our own selves—they are our own internal dramas. This realization can not only provide insights into the human psyche but also help us progress toward authentic encounters with intelligent machines.

This book is structured in four parts. Part I gives perspective on the supposed ontological divide between humans and machines by tracing back the historical “demolitions” of the human ego initially presented by Freud: with respect to the cosmos, the animal world, and the subconscious. The ontological divide associated with the uneasy sense of separation between the self and the rest of the world is the one dividing humans from the non-human mechanical Other.

Part II asks how humans feel about machines that appear to act, think, and even look like humans. Many phantasmagoric narratives about intelligent machines are rooted in human emotions—fears, hopes, and many in between—about the future and about our own identities. The narratives regarding intelligent machines seem to be dominated by six basic emotions: (1) Machines as the Frightening Other (fear): metaphorically, while humans are created in “God’s” image, intelligent machines are the monstrous spawn of laboratories; (2) Machines as the Subhuman Other (disdain): a view based on the “master-slave’ metaphor of human-robot relationships; (3) Machines as the Substitutive Other (indifference): this narrative emphasizes the robot’s utility as a mass-produced tool for people, not much more than an “intelligent hammer”; (4) Machines as the Sentient Other (empathy): since an AI appears intelligent, it does not matter whether it is “really” alive; an intelligent machine must be treated as a sentient being with the ability to feel like humans; (5) Machines as the Divine Other (wonder/awe): self-improving intelligent machines will inevitably evolve into beings that we may not have words to describe other than as “god-like”; and (6) Machines as Salvific Other (death anxiety): seeking salvation via technology, and dreaming of eternal life, humans imagine their individual or communal consciousness re-embodied into a corporeal or incorporeal form sustained by technology. These six narratives are examined in Part II.