The Robotic Imaginary

Rhee, Jennifer. The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Described by the U of M Press:

Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.[1]

For AI, note that in a thread on the ListServ of the Science Fiction Research association, Brent Ryan Bellamy recommends this book highly, "esp. for direct discussion of the Turning test" (14 May 2021); and Bellamy offers an important review of Robotic Imagination in "Distance and Intimacy," Science Fiction Studies 46.3 (November 2019): pp. 655-657, available as of May 2021 on JSTOR;[2] when the issue has been sold out, available at Science Fiction Studies: "FULL TEXTS OF SOLD-OUT BACK ISSUES."[3]

Bellamy notes that

The sf texts under discussion here include Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and its sequel We Can Build You (1972), Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives (1972),[4] Bryan Forbes’s film The Stepford Wives (1975), Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2 (1995), Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina (2014), and Spike Jonze’s film Her (2014). But the book does not simply consider cultural texts. [...] (p. 655)

Robotic Imaginary also considers the (unfortunately) increasing importance of "the dehumanizing experience of Yemenis," who would be one example, "living under the threat of drone strikes with a related yet distinct manner of dehumanization exhibited by drone operators in the United States," one of whom asks, somewhat rhetorically, "'Ever step on ants and never give it another thought?'” (Bellamy pp. 655-56).

See also Labor and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century and, for drone warfare, GOOD KILL.

RDE, finishing, 15/16May21