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Publication details

Publisher: Springer

Place: Berlin

Year: 2015

Pages: 120-129

ISBN (Hardback): 9781349577019

Full citation:

Sherryl Vint, ""Change for the machines"?", in: The Palgrave handbook of posthumanism in film and television, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

Representations of digital sentience in film and television are ambivalent about the prospects of sharing the world with such entities. Like popular discourses of transhumanism, they participate in fantasies of extended life and superhuman abilities, but simultaneously express fears of human obsolescence. Such texts illuminate questions raised by the Turing test regarding how one distinguishes "real" from 'simulated" intelligence, explore the criteria for being considered "alive" rather than a machinic thing, and examine the blurred boundary between human and machine that seems the inevitable consequence of digital sentience. Filmic representations of digital sentience can be organized into two categories — supercomputers and distributed network artificial intelligences (AIs)1 — with inevitable overlaps between these loose boundaries. This chapter focuses on representations of digital entities that are designed to have or evolve sentience, and traces the shifting cultural anxieties they articulate in tandem with a changing technocultural context.

Publication details

Publisher: Springer

Place: Berlin

Year: 2015

Pages: 120-129

ISBN (Hardback): 9781349577019

Full citation:

Sherryl Vint, ""Change for the machines"?", in: The Palgrave handbook of posthumanism in film and television, Berlin, Springer, 2015