Michael Falk
The Robots are Coming! Anatomy of a Nightmare

Artificial Intelligence (AI) remains a dreamy technology. The dream has come perilously close to reality due to the outrageous success of deep learning, but computers remain trapped in a simplified micro-world, and we don’t yet live with the AI companions so familiar from page and screen. The dream of AI is intoxicating. AI companies seduce investors and customers with the delightful dream of a computer that just gets you, a computer that can understand you and help you like a friend. But this is a dream with a seamy underside, and for many people AI has become the heart-clenching nightmare of our age.

In this talk, Digital Studies scholar Michael Falk reveals the long history of our dreams about AI. Writers, artists, scientists and philosophers have wondered about the creation of artificial life for thousands of years, and they foresaw many of the debates we are having today about work, love, money, ego, human creativity and dehumanisation. Drawing from a host of references—from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene—Falk anatomises our contemporary hopes and fears by devolving into their literary precedents.