Beyond the Robot: Myth, Metaphor, and Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is often understood through the narrative frames of myths and metaphors drawn from the imaginative worlds of twentieth-century science fiction. The sentient robot, the benevolent oracle, the rogue machine, and the digital god have all become ubiquitous speculative figures that mediate the ways in which contemporary algorithmic technologies are marketed and debated. Yet these frames increasingly obscure rather than illuminate the material realities of AI, especially given that many algorithmic systems are built upon vast infrastructures of extraction, invisible labor, statistical inference, and corporate power. This plenary introduces the collaborative book project New Metaphors for Artificial Intelligence (co-edited by Stina Attebery, Joshua Pearson, and myself) which argues that artificial intelligence in the current moment has become, above all, a problem of myth and metaphor. Drawing on my own chapter on the persistent myth of the robot as subaltern, I suggest that science fiction has long used artificial beings to render visible forms of human exploitation. In the ChatGPT era, however, this myth has become perversely literalized, redirecting ethical concern toward computational systems while obscuring the workers, communities, and ecologies that sustain them. Rather than rejecting myth or speculative genres, I argue that these are most valuable when they produce new forms of cognitive estrangement that reveal hidden structures of power. The task before us is therefore not to abandon myth but to cultivate new metaphors capable of demystifying algorithmic technologies and restoring attention to their material, political, and ecological realities.
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David M. Higgins is associate professor of English and American Studies and chair of the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Worldwide. He is also the president of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and he serves as a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to serving as co-editor for four edited collections of speculative fiction scholarship, David is the author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, which won the 2021 Science Fiction Research Association Book Award. He has also- published a critical monograph examining Ann Leckie’s science fiction masterwork Ancillary Justice, and his research has been published in journals such as American Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa, and Extrapolation. David serves as a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and as an editor for Climate Lit, an open-access compendium of environmental literacy resources for educators. In the public sphere, David has been a featured speaker on NPR’s radio show On Point, and his literary journalism has appeared in Public Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Guardian.