Introduction

Originally conceived as a paired course with Humanities, this English course was developed and Beta-tested during the 2019-2020 academic year with the support of the AI Community of Practice. It grew out of an earlier iteration of a Reflections paired course in which Mari Heywood (Humanities) and I looked at theory and literature about travel, exploration, ethnography, and colonization of many kinds.

In the new, AI-inspired version of the English course, I wanted to continue to explore how we create The Other with language, storytelling, and imagination, with a view to recognizing this process in our relationship with AI. The idea was to look at examples of historical and fictional encounters — both between humans and with non-human intelligences (like non-human animals and Nature), then move into readings about speculative encounters with other life-forms and intelligences: microbial life, extraterrestrial life, and of course human-made intelligences like AI. By making connections between past encounters (historical and fictional), current theory, and speculative encounters, the class began to reimagine our relationship with technology and move towards new ways of thinking about non-human intelligences — be they new creations, extraterrestrial species, or fellow denizens of the world we live in right now.

Course Outline

Reading List

This list was partly aspirational as far as the course was concerned, but we did read and work with most of the texts you see here. Foundational to the course was Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, in which ideas around hybridization, separation from origins, and solidarity with the non-human provided a liberating field in which to explore empathy, non-anthropocentric thinking, and questions around social contruction of gender, race, and technology.

Texts dealing with fictional encounters with strangers, (Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey and excerpts from Robinson Crusoe) and texts dealing with Nature and non-human animals allow students to explore how the history of hierarchization (as in The Great Chain of Being) and anthropocentric definitions of intelligence and culture show the violence humans do to everything we understand as separate and different from ourselves.

Students highlighted the excerpts from Carl Jung on the Shadow, Jacques Derrida on non-human animals, short stories “Letters from the Samantha” and “The Sandman,” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as favourite texts for exploring Othering/Alterity.

Encountering the Other and AI Futures – reading list

PowerPoint Slides

These can be used as stand-alone lessons accompanying specific short stories or excerpts from longer texts (excerpts provided in the PP). All of the lessons here could be used in non-literature centred courses, using fiction as a way to get into discussions of the potentialities of our interactions with technology — and AI in particular.

Stand-alone lesson with embedded small-group activity

Themes: Ethics of creation; the uncanny; brainstorming ethical use of tech in various fields of study

Using this PowerPoint, a class can critically examine the Frankenstein Analogy to talk about AI Ethics and work in groups to develop ideas about shaping our interactions with technology going forward. This was designed with a BXE class in mind. (Accompanying handout provided as optional brainstorm for the group activity)

frankenstein-analogy-module-good

frankenstein-module-brainstorm

The following PowerPoints have final slides with questions for further thought and discussion. PDF links are provided for the stories.

Adaptable lesson on “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann

Themes: Freud’s ideas of the uncanny and the double; Romanticism vs. rationality; Gender roles and AI

This lesson uses the classic proto-AI fiction, “The Sandman,” (link to Project Gutenberg) an early examination of the relationship of humans to automata.

Assignments

Here are a few assignments that can serve as inspiration or be adapted to any course where human interactions with “other” intelligences come into focus.

Brief homework assignment

Themes: effects of anthropocentrism, what art can teach us about technology

This was assigned about 1/3 of the way through our course, and the students really ran with it. Their thoughts on these questions informed much of the discussion and further work in the course, and many students cited this small assignment as marking a shift in their thinking about the course and about human relationships with The Other (including other humans, Nature, non-human animals, and technological intelligences) in general.