Orga is not Mecha

How Literal Readings of Fiction are Damaging the World

Abstract

This paper traces the fictional roots of recent claims by those in the AI industry that superintelligent machines pose an existential risk. This irrational anxiety, given that fiction is not science, that grants AI agency is not only a distraction from real concerns, but a psychological displacement, an unconscious defense that substitutes a new object, autonomous machines, in place of one that cannot be acknowledged: responsibility for the environmental and societal damage caused by a resource-intensive industry that persists, despite the climate catastrophe, with a mechanistic worldview, one that treats nature, including humans, as a lucrative commodity. Initially seduced by the story of AI evolution, Stanley Kubrick consulted computer scientists when he was making 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released a year before the moon landing. In the problematic cycle of fiction directing science, the film’s depiction of AI has, in turn, shaped research in the field. Yet, if at first Kubrick embraced the scientists’ vision of evolving, intelligent, immortal machines, by the time he was working on A.I. Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s, the field was entering one of its many winters and environmental concerns had dampened faith in technological progress. Kubrick again consulted AI scientists, but this time he returned the field to its fictional roots and presented AI as a dark fairy tale about a corporation that persists with the myth that it can turn ’mecha’ into ‘orga’ despite the climate crisis.