Science Fiction Tried to Warn Us about AI. Or Did It?, by Tom Gammarino Essay [email protected] Wed, 03/01/2023 - 03:46 Photo by NASA / Unsplash “All our AI Frankenstein stories,” the author writes, “warn us that AI will destroy us, but far louder than that, they promise that the future is going to be mind-blowing and epic.” Will we heed the warnings? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the literary work that most clearly established the conventions of science fiction as we know it. Not only did the 1818 novel pioneer the archetype of the mad scientist, it also established one of the genre’s most important cultural roles: to warn us about ways humans, through our hubris, might create the very beings that eventually undo us. In subtitling the novel The Modern Prometheus, Shelley harked back to the Titan who stole fire from the gods and was punished by having his regenerating liver devoured every day by an eagle (since the liver was the seat of the emotions for the Greeks, we might as well translate it as “heart”). Inspired by the experiments of Luigi Galvani, who used electric current to stimulate the leg of a dissected frog, and his nephew Giovanni Aldini, who ran a similar experiment on a hanged criminal, Shelley had her mad scientist play God by endowing a patchwork of human remains with the spark of life. Two centuries later, the resulting monstrosity serves as a stand-in for any of our runaway technologies — the internal... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2023-03-01 09:46:57 UTC ]
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Bluemoose Books publisher Kevin Duffy has decided to abandon plans to publish The Secret Life of... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-08-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Apple has held talks with the organisers of the Women's Prize for Fiction with a view to... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-08-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The rise of ebooks will "fundamentally change" the types of stories that are written and who they are written by, award-winning author Denise Mina predicts. Continue reading at BBC News
[ BBC News | 2012-07-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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US publishers' sales of ebooks more than doubled in 2011, meaning that the digital book is... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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All publicly funded scientific research will be made freely available by 2014 according to a... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Directors of learned societies say clarity over the timing of transition to open access... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The European Commission has launched an "infringement procedure" against France and... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Fiction Uncovered will be running a four-day pop-up radio station, Fiction Uncovered FM at Foyles... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-06-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Hay Festival founder Peter Florence has warned that it is “almost impossible” to make... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-06-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A title from crowd-sourcing publisher Unbound has been chosen for Fiction Uncovered’s... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-05-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Orange will not renew its title sponsorship of The Women's Prize for Fiction after this year... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-05-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Octogenarian Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-05-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Phoenix Yard Books, which launched in 2011, is to expand its fiction publishing in 2013 with... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-05-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Raintree has acquired the first titles for its fledgling fiction list, Curious Fox, from Fiction... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-05-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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An unconventional collection of novels failed to generate a consensus among the Pulitzer board members. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2012-04-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The late Manning Marable won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for history, honored for a Malcolm X book. But no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2012-04-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A mob wife fleeing her past — and a dirty U.S. marshal — gets a little help from a mysterious stranger in Epperson's modern noir tale of revenge and greed.If I were a damsel in distress fleeing a past and people who wanted me dead, like Gina Cicala in the modern noir thriller "Sailor" by Tom... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2012-04-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The literary genre is white-hot in Hollywood, with filmmakers bidding on unpublished books and paying as much as $1 million for the rights to relatively modest sellers.The back-to-back blockbuster successes of "Harry Potter," "Twilight" and now "The Hunger Games" have turned the hunt for fresh... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2012-03-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Publishers Association has repeated its warnings over government proposals to limit licensing... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-03-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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By encouraging readers to tackle longer, more sophisticated novels, the queen of daytime TV may have hurt overall fiction sales. Continue reading at The Atlantic
[ The Atlantic | 2012-03-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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