By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be on everyone's lips these days, and not surprisingly, given the widely divergent opinions about it. Some say it's a welcome helpmeet for humans, while others – including the late Stephen Hawking and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk – have warned against its potential to destroy the human race. Such warnings have also come from science fiction, arguably going back to the young Mary Shelley's 'Gothic' (proto-) medical science fiction novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, of 1818, in which she relates a tale of scientific and technological hubris, concerning the artificial creation of an intelligent living being by a scientist (the eponymous Dr Frankenstein), that gives rise to a monster which eventually turns on its creator.

Since then, many such cautionary tales have appeared in the realm of literary and cinematic science fiction. Relatively recent ones include James Cameron's Terminator films (see Chapter 9 of book linked here) and Ronald D. Moore's long-running television series, Battlestar Galactica, in both of which the AI robots created by humans set out to destroy their progenitors. In fact, Musk recently reiterated his earlier warning about AI when he invoked the Terminator scenario during a court case, when he stated that 'humanity may be heading toward a "Terminator situation"' where AI could eventually 'kill us all.'

It should not be surprising that creative speculation concerning AI's 'relations' with people often focus on its possible hostility towards human beings. Why? Simply because AI's behaviour or 'actions' towards people cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty, or even probability, because it is not human. One way of putting this is to say that AI is radically other compared to humans.

Such radical alterity can assume many guises, some of which have been imagined in the works of fiction mentioned earlier – which are ways of anticipating (and influencing) what AI in the real world might look like, and how it might 'behave.' The question that arises from this is whether the 'otherness' of AI can be imagined exhaustively – that is, whether in fiction, or in the design manuals of AI-engineering companies, it is possible to reach a point where one could say conclusively that the ways in which AI could possibly differ from human beings have reached their imaginative or conceptual limit.

Personally, I doubt whether this is possible, and I would like to demonstrate why this is the case with recourse to three science-fictional instances of the inscrutability of AI, as marked by its alterity. Paradoxically, while they are creatively imagined, the very terms of their (respective) projected otherness, or AI 'being,' indicate that it could well surpass the manner in which they are imagined.

One might say that they are depicted in such a way that, how they come across, clearly does not exhaust their supposed character. Furthermore, I would like to show that the aesthetic category of the sublime, as opposed to the beautiful, enables one to come to grips with such ineffable otherness, while serving, at the same time, as a salutary reminder that human beings cannot grasp the distinctive being of AI once and for all.

The three science fiction embodiments of AI inscrutability or otherness are encountered in Spike Jonze's film, Her, William Gibson's novel, Agency, and Dan Brown's novel, Origin. The eponymous AI character in Her, named Samantha (by 'herself' – already a clue to her otherness; 'she' could have named 'herself' anything, without detracting from who, or what, she is), is a newly installed OS or Operating System on a computer used by Theodore, a lonely man who writes letters online on behalf of people who cannot really write. In Gibson's novel, the AI is called Eunice (which, etymologically, means 'good victory'), and the novel addresses the question, whether, and how, a disembodied AI can have agency; that is, act, in the ...