Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture PDF Author: Gregory Jerome Hampton
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739191462
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description
Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday's Slave with Tomorrow's Robot is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to investigate and speculate about the relationship between technology and human nature. It is a timely and creative analysis of the ways in which we domesticate technology and the manner in which the history of slavery continues to be utilized in contemporary society. This text interrogates how the domestic slaves of the past are being re-imaged as domestic robots of the future. Hampton asserts that the rhetoric used to persuade an entire nation to become dependent on the institution of chattel slavery will be employed to promote the enslavement of technology in the form of humanoid robots with Artificial Intelligence. Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture makes the claim that science fiction, film, and popular culture have all been used to normalize the notion of robots in domestic spaces and relationships. In examining the similarities of human slaves and mechanical or biomechanical robots, this text seeks to gain a better understanding of how slaves are created and justified in the imaginations of a supposedly civilized nation. And in doing so, give pause to those who would disassociate America’s past from its imminent future.

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture PDF Author: Gregory Jerome Hampton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498527583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
This book is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to investigate and speculate about the relationship between technology and human nature. It is a timely and creative analysis of the ways in which we domesticate technology and the manner in which the history of slavery continues to be utilized in contemporary society.--Publisher's description.

Robots in Popular Culture

Robots in Popular Culture PDF Author: Richard A. Hall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Robots in Popular Culture: Androids and Cyborgs in the American Imagination seeks to provide one go-to reference for the study of the most popular and iconic robots in American popular culture. In the last 10 years, technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have become not only a daily but a minute-by-minute part of American life—more integrated into our lives than anyone would have believed even a generation before. Americans have long known the adorable and helpful R2-D2 and the terrible possibilities of Skynet and its army of Terminators. Throughout, we have seen machines as valuable allies and horrifying enemies. Today, Americans cling to their mobile phones with the same affection that Luke Skywalker felt for the squat R2-D2. Meanwhile, our phones, personal computers, and cars have attained the ability to know and learn everything about us. This volume opens with essays about robots in popular culture, followed by 100 A–Z entries on the most famous AIs in film, comics, and more. Sidebars highlight ancillary points of interest, such as authors, creators, and tropes that illuminate the motives of various robots. The volume closes with a glossary of key terms and a bibliography providing students with resources to continue their study of what robots tell us about ourselves.

Robot Theology

Robot Theology PDF Author: Joshua K. Smith
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666710717
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
What is the relationship between artificial intelligence, robots, and theology? The connections are much closer than one might think. There is a deep spiritual longing in the world of AI and robotics. Technology is a prayer; it reveals the depth of our eschatology. Through the study of AI and robotic literature one can see a clear desire to both transcend human limitations and overcome the fallenness of human nature. The questions of ethics, power, and responsibility are not new to Christian anthropology. This book will introduce and examine some of the major ethical issues surrounding current AI and robotic technology from a theological and philosophical lens. In the study of AI and robot ethics, the Christian community has a chance to join the global efforts to build technology for good. Will we join them?

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities PDF Author: Melvin G. Hill
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498583814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture makes a series of valuable contributions to ongoing dialogues surrounding posthuman blackness and Afro-transhumanism. The collection explores the Black body (self) in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. These points of view convey the cultural, political, social, and historical implications that frame the space of Black embodiment, functioning as sites of potentiality and pointing toward the possibility of a transcendental Black subjectivity. In this book, many questions concerning the transformation of the Black body are presented as parallels to philosophical and religious inquiries that have traditionally been addressed from a hegemonic viewpoint. The chapters demonstrate how literature, based on its historical and social contexts, contributes to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, exploring interpretations of the “old” and visions of the “new” human.

Person, Thing, Robot

Person, Thing, Robot PDF Author: David J. Gunkel
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262375230
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Why robots defy our existing moral and legal categories and how to revolutionize the way we think about them. Robots are a curious sort of thing. On the one hand, they are technological artifacts—and thus, things. On the other hand, they seem to have social presence, because they talk and interact with us, and simulate the capabilities commonly associated with personhood. In Person, Thing, Robot, David J. Gunkel sets out to answer the vexing question: What exactly is a robot? Rather than try to fit robots into the existing categories by way of arguing for either their reification or personification, however, Gunkel argues for a revolutionary reformulation of the entire system, developing a new moral and legal ontology for the twenty-first century and beyond. In this book, Gunkel investigates how and why efforts to use existing categories to classify robots fail, argues that “robot” designates an irreducible anomaly in the existing ontology, and formulates an alternative that restructures the ontological order in both moral philosophy and law. Person, Thing, Robot not only addresses the issues that are relevant to students, teachers, and researchers working in the fields of moral philosophy, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), and AI/robot law and policy but it also speaks to controversies that are important to AI researchers, robotics engineers, and computer scientists concerned with the social consequences of their work.

AI and Popular Culture

AI and Popular Culture PDF Author: Lee Barron
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1803823275
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
AI and Popular Culture sheds light on how artificial intelligence has changed our world and helps you to understand where it might take us next.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Cinema

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Cinema PDF Author: M. Keith Booker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538130106
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 543

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Book Description
In the years since Georges Méliès’s Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) was released in 1902, more than 1000 science fiction films have been made by filmmakers around the world. The versatility of science fiction cinema has allowed it to expand into a variety of different markets, appealing to age groups from small children to adults. The technical advances in filmmaking technology have enabled a new sophistication in visual effects. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, films, companies, techniques, themes, and subgenres. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about science fiction cinema.

The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature

The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature PDF Author: Douglas A. Vakoch
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003857299
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature examines the intersection of transgender studies and literary studies, bringing together essays from global experts in the field. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of trans literature, highlighting the core topics, genres, and periods important for scholarship now and in the future. Covering the main approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of the core topics guiding contemporary trans literary theory and criticism, including the Anthropocene, archival speculation, activism, BDSM, Black studies, critical plant studies, culture, diaspora, disability, ethnocentrism, home, inclusion, monstrosity, nondualist philosophies, nonlinearity, paradox, pedagogy, performativity, poetics, religion, suspense, temporality, visibility, and water. Exploration of diverse literary genres, forms, and periods through a trans lens, such as archival fiction, artificial intelligence narratives, autobiography, climate fiction, comics, creative writing, diaspora fiction, drama, fan fiction, gothic fiction, historical fiction, manga, medieval literature, minor literature, modernist literature, mystery and detective fiction, nature writing, poetry, postcolonial literature, radical literature, realist fiction, Renaissance literature, Romantic literature, science fiction, travel writing, utopian literature, Victorian literature, and young adult literature. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, gender studies, trans studies, literary theory, and literary criticism.

Work: The Labors of Language, Culture, and History in North America

Work: The Labors of Language, Culture, and History in North America PDF Author: J. Jesse Ramírez
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 3823395025
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Like all fundamental categories, work becomes ever more complex as we examine it more closely. The terms "work," "labor," "job," "employment," "occupation," "profession," "vocation," "task," "toil," "effort," "pursuit," and "calling" form a dense web of overlapping and contrasting meanings. Moreover, the analysis of work must contend with how histories of class struggle, gendered and sexual divisions of labor, racial hierarchies, and citizenship regimes have determined who counts as a worker and qualifies for the rights, protections, and social respect thereof. And yet waged work is only the tip of an enormous iceberg that feminist theorists call "socially reproductive labor"—the gendered, mostly unpaid, and hidden work of caring for, feeding, nursing, and teaching the next generation of workers. This collection of essays explores the richness of work as a linguistic, cultural, and historical concept and the conjunctures that are changing work and its worlds.