Reading Robots: Artificial Intelligence and Ethical Criticism

The development of artificial intelligence brings with it a host of unsolved ethical questions, and the development of solutions to these problems is lagging behind the development of the technology. The ANU School of Cybernetics was founded on the premise that these ethical solutions need to come from interactions between disciplines, including those in the humanities. The proposed project will ask how representations of artificial intelligence in literary works might offer new ways of seeing and understanding ethics in AI. To do this, I will draw on the methodologies of Ethical Criticism, which involve asking how works of literature can communicate ethical ideas in ways that would be impossible in discursive philosophical writing.