BIO
Yi-Jen Chang received her Ph.D. in English & American Literature from National Taiwan Normal Univeristy in 2012, with the dissertation Hospitality and the Other: Cosmopolitan Novels and September 11. Her academic interest focuses on cosmopolitan, ethics and biopolitics, discourse on human rights, disaster and apocalypse study. She is currently an assistant professor at Fo Guang University. Her recent research shifts to the study of apocalyptic literature and its biopolitical implication in Japan’s contemporary popular culture, in particular cybernetics animation and manga.
TITLE
“Less than Human: On the Kinship between Human and Nonhuman in Ian Mcewan’s Machines like Me”
ABSTRACT
What would it be like in a 1982 London when Alan Turing is still alive and creates twenty five androids based upon his research on artificial intelligence? British writer Ian McEwan portrays the hostile, competitive and yet interdependent relationship between human and android in this alternative London. In the sci-fi context, human anxiety and hostility toward his own creation-android is candidly palpable in McEwan’s Machines like Me. The messiness of being human can be perceived in a subplot, in which Adam, the android, aspires that a future of “the marriage of men and women to machines” would be made possible to provide “the end of mental privacy” by “community of minds” (160). The seeming celebratory note on the transparency of information is not surprisingly a disguise of prevalent digital surveillance. escalated to a higher level of ethical concern by three subplots in Machines like Me: the consciousness of android, sexual violence and justice, and the abandoned child from a dysfunctional family). Central to the novel are questions asks its reader to think: What does artificial intelligence-powered android mean to his human creator? Property, creation, or kin? Is it crime to end android’s “life”? Do human beings have the right to end and exploit android’s life/consciousness? Is bare life the secret connection between human and android? Is it death if one “lives” in Agamben’s “comatose body”? If so, how do we conceptualize if androids produce their own death like “accelerated form of Alzheimer’s) by rewriting its program to terminate its consciousness? If brain death is “real” death, how do we think about various life forms that slip out of this definition? The paper expects to propose ethical inquiry on the relationship between human and nonhuman, artificial intelligence in particular, to understand to what extent the technological nonhuman would reshape our life and disrupt the meaning of being human.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
Yi-Jen Chang received her Ph.D. in English & American Literature from National Taiwan Normal Univeristy in 2012, with the dissertation Hospitality and the Other: Cosmopolitan Novels and September 11. Her academic interest focuses on cosmopolitan, ethics and biopolitics, discourse on human rights, disaster and apocalypse study. She is currently an assistant professor at Fo Guang University. Her recent research shifts to the study of apocalyptic literature and its biopolitical implication in Japan’s contemporary popular culture, in particular cybernetics animation and manga.
TITLE
“Less than Human: On the Kinship between Human and Nonhuman in Ian Mcewan’s Machines like Me”
ABSTRACT
What would it be like in a 1982 London when Alan Turing is still alive and creates twenty five androids based upon his research on artificial intelligence? British writer Ian McEwan portrays the hostile, competitive and yet interdependent relationship between human and android in this alternative London. In the sci-fi context, human anxiety and hostility toward his own creation-android is candidly palpable in McEwan’s Machines like Me. The messiness of being human can be perceived in a subplot, in which Adam, the android, aspires that a future of “the marriage of men and women to machines” would be made possible to provide “the end of mental privacy” by “community of minds” (160). The seeming celebratory note on the transparency of information is not surprisingly a disguise of prevalent digital surveillance. escalated to a higher level of ethical concern by three subplots in Machines like Me: the consciousness of android, sexual violence and justice, and the abandoned child from a dysfunctional family). Central to the novel are questions asks its reader to think: What does artificial intelligence-powered android mean to his human creator? Property, creation, or kin? Is it crime to end android’s “life”? Do human beings have the right to end and exploit android’s life/consciousness? Is bare life the secret connection between human and android? Is it death if one “lives” in Agamben’s “comatose body”? If so, how do we conceptualize if androids produce their own death like “accelerated form of Alzheimer’s) by rewriting its program to terminate its consciousness? If brain death is “real” death, how do we think about various life forms that slip out of this definition? The paper expects to propose ethical inquiry on the relationship between human and nonhuman, artificial intelligence in particular, to understand to what extent the technological nonhuman would reshape our life and disrupt the meaning of being human.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
