“Artificial intelligence” is no more intelligent than a pocket calculator or a library: just because both can be used to quickly find something out, it does not mean that there is an intelligence there that understands something.
‘What constitutes human nature?’ or ‘What does it mean to be human?’ have thus been a central concern of science fiction exploration.
Lars Schmeink, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Liquid Modernity, p. 33
Consequently, pondering his own state of being, he asks: ‘Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?’ (Shelley 128). His questions point to the central motif of the story: the question of human nature, a human essence, and what to include in the definition of this essence.
Lars Schmeink, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Liquid Modernity, p. 33
For all intents and purposes, then, the monster represents what we might name the posthuman: a being replacing the human, coming after the human, and existing beyond human capacity. Frankenstein’s creation anticipates the posthuman condition.
Lars Schmeink, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Liquid Modernity, p. 34
The human as category is a fleeting and historically specific concept, as Foucault famously argues at the end of his book The Order of Things, that could just as easily disappear, should the ‘fundamental arrangements of knowledge’ (387) shift once more as they did at the end of the eighteenth century, when the era of humanism as we understand it began.
Lars Schmeink, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Liquid Modernity, p. 29
‘Science Fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science)’ (8).
Lars Schmeink, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Liquid Modernity, p. 33
As Csicsery-Ronay points out: sf ‘is not a genre of aesthetic entertainment only, but a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future’ (Seven Beauties 4). As such, sf is a direct interaction with contemporary culture that lies at the nexus of technological, scientific, critical, and social thought in that it determines what we conceive of as possible in and for our future.
Lars Schmeink, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Liquid Modernity, pp. 19-20
Humanism claims that there is a unique and absolute difference that sets humans apart from the rest of creation: the difference of Cartesian reason.
Lars Schmeink, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Liquid Modernity, p. 30
This seems wrong. But why? The first reason that comes to mind is that AI is not as passive as a calculator or library. In contrast to a calculator, an LLM’s outputs are underspecified by human inputs. In contrast to a library, AI can produce things. A library merely stores things. LLMs are not merely compressed versions of their training data.