Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019) rewrites the past: Alan Turing did not commit suicide but lived to develop the technology needed to create human-like robots “with plausible intelligence and looks” – machines who are like us. In Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), a programmer wins a contest and gets to test his firm’s latest development, a female humanoid robot. His task is to assess just how ‘human’ artificial intelligence can be. Mark Romanek’s film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2010) is set in an alternative version of the 1970s, in which questionable medical advances have made it possible to prolong the human lifespan.
All three texts raise questions which can be subsumed under the heading “posthumanism”, such as what is human? and what is the difference between human life and non-human life? Rosi Braidotti describes the posthuman condition as “a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity, and our relationship to the inhabitants of this planet.” (The Posthuman, 6). This course will provide an introduction to posthuman theory and explore these questions based on the three texts mentioned above. You have to have read McEwan’s novel before the start of term.
Text:
Ian McEwan. Machines Like Me. Vintage: 2020.
ISBN-10: 1529111269 / ISBN-13: 978-1529111262 |
