An interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collection that decenters
familiar narratives to provide a fresh perspective on what artificial
intelligence is today, and what it might become.
Historians, media theorists, science-fiction writers, philosophers, and
artists from China and elsewhere reexamine the nation's intense
engagement with AI, moving beyond the clichés that still dominate
contemporary debate.
Today, visions of the contested future of AI veer between common
planetary goals and a new Cold War, as culturally-specific models of
intelligence, speculative traditions, and thought experiments come up
against the emergence of novel forms of cognition that cannot be reduced
to any historical cultural tradition.
This uniquely positioned volume provides expert insight into this
tension, using China as a touchstone for rethinking "artificiality" and
"intelligence" as sites of difference in a way that is already present
in the difficulty of precisely translating the Chinese term 人工智能.
Tracking the history of Chinese AI from the pre-Cultural Revolution to
the post-Deng Xiaoping eras right up to contemporary debates surrounding
facial recognition, the writers in this collection draw on a mixture of
speculative thought experiments and cutting-edge use cases to offer
singular views on topics including AI and Chinese philosophy, AI ethics
and policymaking, the development of computational models in early
Chinese cybernetics, and the aesthetics of Sinofuturism.
Spanning borders between different worlds, histories, futures, and
foundational models, Machine Decision is Not Final is not only a
timely reappraisal of the stakes of AI development, but a tool for
constructing more global imaginaries for the future of AI.
Contributors
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Bo An, Benjamin Bratton, Shuang Frost, Vince
Garton, Steve Goodman, Yvette Granata, Anna Greenspan, Amy Ireland, Xia
Jia, Bogna Konior, Vincent Le, Lawrence Lek, Lukas Likavcan, Suzanne
Livingston, Iris Long, Bingchun Meng, Reza Negarestani, Chen Quifan,
Gabriele de Seta, Hongzhe Wang, Wang Xin, Mi You
