“Are you alive?” Issues in Self-awareness and Personhood of Organic Artificial Intelligence
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Valeria Franceschi,
Valeria Franceschi is a PhD student in English Studies at the University of Verona. Her research interests include English as a Lingua Franca, language and the internet, and phraseology, as well as the bioethical and identitarian implications of posthumanism in science and speculative fiction.
Abstract
The topos of artificial intelligences – robots, cyborgs and androids – has been well-explored extensively throughout the past century in science fiction literature and cinema, building upon contemporary scientific developments and transcending them to fulfil man's Promethean impetus. Speculation about the impact of such liminal beings in human society has raised a number of issues in relation to their position within the social and legal systems. As the man-machine divide is eroded by the appearance of sophisticated machines, almost indistinguishable from humans, the very definition of personhood is called into question. Issues of self-awareness, free-will, and their influence on the legal categorization of humanoid machines is here explored in two science fiction texts: Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and the television series Battlestar Galactica (reimagined, 2003–2009). The legitimacy of the social and legal inequalities reinforcing the human-android divide is challenged in both narrations as artificial intelligences appear to fulfil the Lockean definition of person. A closer focus on twin androids, Pris Stratton and Rachael Rosen in Dick's novel and Boomer and Athena in Battlestar Galactica, shows indeed that androids may develop the capability to exceed their programming and evolve into unique personalities, shaped by their own individual choices and experiences.
About the author
Valeria Franceschi is a PhD student in English Studies at the University of Verona. Her research interests include English as a Lingua Franca, language and the internet, and phraseology, as well as the bioethical and identitarian implications of posthumanism in science and speculative fiction.
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Focus: Identity
- In Search of a Legal Identity: Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta
- A Biojuridical Reading of Dracula
- Women's Legal Identity in the Context of Gothic Effacement: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria or The Wrongs of Woman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
- Voice and Identity in the Fairy Tale: Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch
- “Are you alive?” Issues in Self-awareness and Personhood of Organic Artificial Intelligence
- Between Bioethics and Literature: Representations of (post-)human identities in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of The Flood
- Law and Literature: Jewish and Christian models
- The Vitality of Emotional Background Knowledge in Court
- Corpus delicti: The evidence of the body as body of evidence in Thomas Hobbes's political imagination
- Book Reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Focus: Identity
- In Search of a Legal Identity: Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta
- A Biojuridical Reading of Dracula
- Women's Legal Identity in the Context of Gothic Effacement: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria or The Wrongs of Woman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
- Voice and Identity in the Fairy Tale: Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch
- “Are you alive?” Issues in Self-awareness and Personhood of Organic Artificial Intelligence
- Between Bioethics and Literature: Representations of (post-)human identities in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of The Flood
- Law and Literature: Jewish and Christian models
- The Vitality of Emotional Background Knowledge in Court
- Corpus delicti: The evidence of the body as body of evidence in Thomas Hobbes's political imagination
- Book Reviews
