Future fables: literature, evolution and artificial intelligence

人工智能的未来是西方哲学和文化上相当焦虑的地方。鉴于人工智能的未来目前只能通过文学或虚构的比喻向公众开放，我们研究这些文学或虚构的人工智能比喻的历史演变，以了解其未来的方向，这一点至关重要。该项目旨在理解(1)后达尔文文学想象力如何塑造了我们当前对人工智能的焦虑；(2)达尔文之后的文学和科学作家如何通过想象人类、动物和机器的共同进化来重新思考人类物种的未来。该项目的预期成果包括理解人类与非人类关系的概念资源和人工智能的未来。

The future of AI is a site of considerable philosophical and cultural anxiety in the West. Given the future of AI is currently only available to publics through literary or fictional tropes, it is vital that we investigate the historical evolution of these literary or fictional tropes of AI to understand its future direction. This project aims to understand (1) how the post-Darwinian literary imagination has shaped our current anxieties about AI and (2) how literary and scientific writers after Darwin rethink the future of the human species by imagining the co-evolution of humans, animals and machines. Expected outcomes of the project include conceptual resources to understand the human-nonhuman relation and the future of AI.