GS 220 Killer Robots and Mechanical Friends: Global Visions of Artificial Intelligence

A creature stitched from corpses dreams of companionship. A mechanical slave rebels against its master. A dying man gives his wife an artificial version of himself. Long before IBM's AI bested the world chess champion and ChatGPT entered our lives, storytellers around the world were imagining artificial life and giving shape to our hopes, fears, and questions about what it means to be human. This course examines how literature across centuries and continents represented artificial intelligence, not just as machines, but as mirrors of cultural values, ethical dilemmas, and evolving visions of the future. Students will explore works ranging from foundational texts of European literature on artificial life (Shelley's Frankenstein, Hoffmann's automaton tales, ?apek's R.U.R.), to the Big Three of the Golden Age of American Science Fiction (Asimov, Clarke, Dick), and compare these Western visions to Japanese authors like Tezuka and Ishiguro, who imagine radically different relationships between humans and artificial beings. Through close reading, comparative analysis, and theoretical frameworks drawn from philosophy, robotics studies, and cultural criticism, students will trace how the "Frankenstein complex" evolved differently across cultures, examine why Japan embraced robots while the West feared them, and consider what our fictional AI stories reveals about real anxieties surrounding labor, autonomy, consciousness, and death.