Stephen Cave

A lively narrative citing the activities of historical figures and leading modern scientists demonstrates how the innate desire to live forever has contributed to humanity's most significant achievements in science, medicine, religion and art.

The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization

Immortality

Jude Browne

Head of Department Frankopan Director of the Centre for Gender Studies Jude Browne

Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender and Technology Eleanor Drage

Eleanor Drage

Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender and Technology Kerry McInerney

Chapters 5, 12, and 18 of this work are available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International open access licence. These parts of the work are free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data and Intelligent Machines is the first volume to bring together leading feminist thinkers from across the disciplines to explore the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and related data-driven technologies on human society. Recent years have seen both an explosion in AI systems and a corresponding rise in important critical analyses of these technologies. Central to these analyses has been feminist scholarship, which calls upon the AI sector to be accountable for designing and deploying AI in ways that further, rather than undermine, the pursuit of social justice. This book aims to be a touchstone text for AI researchers concerned with the social impact of their systems, as well as theorists, students and educators in the field of gender and technology. It demonstrates the importance of an intersectional understanding of the risks and benefits of AI, approaching feminism as a political project that aims to challenge various interlocking forms of injustice, social inequality and structural relations of power. Feminist AI showcases the vital contributions of feminist scholarship to thinking about AI, data, and intelligent machines as well as laying the groundwork for future feminist scholarship on AI. It brings together scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, from computer science, software engineering, and medical sciences to political theory, anthropology, and literature. It provides an entry point for scholars of AI, science and technology into the diversity of feminist approaches to AI, and creates a rich dialogue between scholars and practitioners of AI to examine the powerful congruences and generative tensions between different feminist approaches to new and emerging technologies. It features original and essential works specially selected to span multiple generations of practitioners and scholars. These contributors are also attuned to conversations at industry-level around the risks and possibilities that frame the drive to adopt AI. This collection reflects the increasingly blurred divide between the academy, industry and corporate research groups and brings interdisciplinary feminist insights together with postcolonial studies, disability theory, and critical race studies to confront ageism, racism, sexism, ableism, and class-based oppressions in AI.

Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines

Feminist AI

Kanta Dihal

Chapters 16 and 19 from this book are published open access and are free to read or download from Oxford Academic AI is now a global phenomenon. Yet Hollywood narratives dominate perceptions of AI in the English-speaking West and beyond, and much of the technology itself is shaped by a disproportionately white, male, US-based elite. However, different cultures have been imagining intelligent machines since long before we could build them, in visions that vary greatly across religious, philosophical, literary and cinematic traditions. This book aims to spotlight these alternative visions. Imagining AI draws attention to the range and variety of visions of a future with intelligent machines and their potential significance for the research, regulation, and implementation of AI. The book is structured geographically, with each chapter presenting insights into how a specific region or culture imagines intelligent machines. The contributors, leading experts from academia and the arts, explore how the encounters between local narratives, digital technologies, and mainstream Western narratives create new imaginaries and insights in different contexts across the globe. The narratives they analyse range from ancient philosophy to contemporary science fiction, and visual art to policy discourse. The book sheds new light on some of the most important themes in AI ethics, from the differences between Chinese and American visions of AI, to digital neo-colonialism. It is an essential work for anyone wishing to understand how different cultural contexts interplay with the most significant technology of our time.

How the World Sees Intelligent Machines

Imagining AI

Immortality shows how the quest to live forever has driven the development of human civilisation, and how that quest is now coming to a climax through modern science. It argues that humans are hardwired to pursue eternal life - and that the way they have done so has stayed remarkably consistent through the ages. All the main beliefs on defying death, from freeing your soul to freezing your brain, fall into four simple categories - the four paths to immortality. Although all four paths are ancient, science is now showing us - for the first time in human history - which of them could really lead to infinity. Immortality uses the stories of ten exceptional characters, from Queen Nefertiti to the Dalai Lama, to show how these four paths have shaped our culture from ancient times through to today. Unlike most books on this hugely popular subject, Immortality does not argue from a particular religious viewpoint.

The Quest to Live Forever and how it Drives Civilisation

Sarah Dillon

This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. These chapters explore the revealing pre-history of key concerns of contemporary AI discourse, from the nature of mind and creativity to issues of power and rights, from the tension between fascination and ambivalence to investigations into artificial voices and technophobia. Part II focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first-centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerge alongside rapid developments in AI technology. These chapters reveal not only how AI narratives have consistently been entangled with the emergence of real robotics and AI, but also how they offer a rich source of insight into how we might live with these revolutionary machines. Through their close textual engagements, these chapters explore the relationship between imaginative narratives and contemporary debates about AI's social, ethical and philosophical consequences, including questions of dehumanization, automation, anthropomorphisation, cybernetics, cyberpunk, immortality, slavery, and governance. The contributions, from leading humanities and social science scholars, show that narratives about AI offer a crucial epistemic site for exploring contemporary debates about these powerful new technologies.

A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines

AI Narratives

If you could live forever, would you want to? Both a fascinating look at the history of our strive for immortality and an investigation into whether living forever is really all it’s cracked up to be. A fascinating work of popular philosophy and history that both enlightens and entertains, Stephen Cave investigates whether it just might be possible to live forever and whether we should want to. He also makes a powerful argument that it’s our very preoccupation with defying mortality that drives civilization. Central to this book is the metaphor of a mountaintop where one can find the Immortals. Since the dawn of humanity, everyone – whether they know it or not—has been trying to climb that mountain. But there are only four paths up its treacherous slope, and there have only ever been four paths. Throughout history, people have wagered everything on their choice of the correct path, and fought wars against those who’ve chosen differently. In drawing back the curtain on what compels humans to “keep on keeping on,” Cave engages the reader in a number of mind-bending thought experiments. He teases out the implications of each immortality gambit, asking, for example, how long a person would live if they did manage to acquire a perfectly disease-free body. Or what would happen if a super-being tried to round up the atomic constituents of all who’ve died in order to resurrect them. Or what our loved ones would really be doing in heaven if it does exist. We’re confronted with a series of brain-rattling questions: What would happen if tomorrow humanity discovered that there is no life but this one? Would people continue to please their boss, vie for the title of Year’s Best Salesman? Would three-hundred-year projects still get started? If the four paths up the Mount of the Immortals lead nowhere—if there is no getting up to the summit—is there still reason to live? And can civilization survive? Immortality is a deeply satisfying book, as optimistic about the human condition as it is insightful about the true arc of history.

Nicht nur die Mächtigen, Kaiser, Pharaonen und Päpste, wollen unsterblich sein, sondern in jedem von uns steckt die Sehnsucht nach dem ewigen Leben. Dieses Streben hat erstaunliche Kunstwerke, reiche religiöse Traditionen und den bewundernswerten Fortschritt der Wissenschaften hervorgebracht. Sein Ergebnis ist die menschliche Zivilisation. Vier Wege hat der Philosoph und Journalist Stephen Cave ausgemacht, von denen wir uns seit Jahrtausenden das ewige Leben erhoffen: durch die Wiederauferstehung des Körpers oder die Himmelfahrt der Seele, durch die Ausdehnung des Lebens via Medizin und Magie oder durch ein Vermächtnis. Mit den neuesten wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen untersucht Stephen Cave die entscheidende Frag, ob wir so tatsächlich unserer Endlichkeit entkommen können. Anregend, elegant und unterhaltsam offenbart er die verborgenen Triebkräfte unserer Kulturen – eine neue Sicht auf den ältesten Traum der Menschheit.

Stephen Cave

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