I’ve been reading a book titled The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor, a leading AI ethicist, and chanced upon this hauntingly beautiful quote from a short story by E.M. Forster titled “The Machine Stops”:

“Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven.”

Forster envisions a dystopian future where humans are forced to live in underground pods by a superintelligent computer called ‘The Machine’. It is the sole dictator of all civilizations, and the only medium by which humans see and speak to each other. With the prevalence of and sometimes reliance on online modes of communication, Forster’s picture may not be as far from the truth as it may initially appear.

The future is inherently vague. Precisely because it is unpredictable, we may mold it in any shape we see fit. The imagination may operate at its fullest capacities. Ideas of the imagination may not always be right, but it is certainly because of the imagination that these predictions of technological reliance by Forster were materialized in the first place back in 1909. More than a century ago, he lived in an era with none of the technology we are so familiar with.

This brings me to my main point: AI Ethics is often praised as a new field with refreshingly novel problems, but although the technologies may be new, the thoughts behind the field are not. People have been projecting humanity onto various entities since the dawn of time. Even natural forces such as thunder and wind were impersonated into deities by many cultures such as the Greek and Chinese. Many of the risks posed by AI (world domination, posing threats to human society) can be similarly attributed to the automatons of the ancients.

In Homer’s epics, automatons fully made of bronze forged by Daedalus, the ancestor of sculptors, possessed human capabilities and movements. The influential (huge understatement) philosopher Socrates, whose father was a sculptor and himself trained to be a sculptor, evokes the name of Daedalus’ swift automatons in the dialogue Euthyphro to emphasize the evasiveness of ideas when one tries to verbalize them. The act of creating artificial intelligence is therefore as intimate with philosophy as possible.

This embodiment is a way for humans to understand the world. After all, we see the world through human eyes, easily susceptible to anthropomorphizing things. The imagery and symbolism we apply to the AI of today are fundamentally inseparable from the cultural tropes of the past.

Technofuturism, what I take to be the largely speculative project of constructing future societies and their technological advancements in literature, is thus a special type of history-telling which attempts to disguise itself in originality.

But, as man strangles himself in his silicon garments, so did Icarus, son of Daedalus, kill himself with his artificial wings. It was his own hubris which led him to fly too close to the blazing sun. AI cannot magically destroy the world in its current state. We must do something wrong first.

Mythical technologies, whether it be wings or automata, have a long cultural legacy and serve as valuable warnings. As Iocasta in Oedipus Rex laments that the greatest tragedies are self-made, we must seek self-knowledge as AIs are ultimately mirrors of humanity. Only with a comprehensive understanding of the rich legacies of literature and philosophy can we more readily deal with questions in AI Ethics and uncover the origins of our intuitions.