Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!
I like science fiction and I always have. Sci-fi and fantasy were more or less my introductory genres to reading beyond children’s books. I got Ray Bradbury collections for Christmas when I was 8 and I was hooked. One of the reasons I love science fiction is that the best of it asks a great existential question that really isn’t answered by other genres: what makes us human? The advent of AI has given us this theme more and more, and The Artifice Girl explores it in a way that is interesting and worth the time to consider.
This is a question that has been asked for a long time. It’s come up regarding aliens (The Man Who Fell to Earth, for instance, or Spock’s funeral in Wrath of Khan where Kirk says that Spock was truly human), but it comes up more commonly with robots, androids, and artificial intelligence. Sometimes those intelligences are benign (Her), amoral (Ex Machina), or actively evil (Upgrade), but the question is best asked by presenting us with an intelligence that seems to walk that tightrope between human intelligence and uncanny valley. If we start with the premise that the AI in question can pass the Turing test, then the question of its humanity becomes a real one.