Chapter 6 - Machines, AIs, Cyborgs, Systems

Summary

Machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems arise as images of the posthuman within the discourses of posthumanism and transhumanism. From the side of technoscience, advances in cybernetics and systems theory have been the prime movers of the posthuman imaginary. AI and its elaboration in the cultural imaginary is particularly instructive with regard to transhumanist visions of transcendence. Where cybernetics spread across organic bodies, computational devices, and the social dynamics of communication, AI bypassed multiple cybernetic couplings to concentrate on the design, construction, and study of computational agencies. AI discourse ran alongside the development of SETI—the scientific program dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Both AI and SETI foreground how scientific modernity has entangled the matter of intelligence with the mediation of technology. The 2015 novel Aurora overcomes the AI imaginary as previously constituted by bringing ecological realism to the relations to machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems.