12 - The Digital Condition: Subjectivity and Aesthetics in “Fe/males” by Eugenia Prado Bassi

Summary

In 2017, online tabloids and magazines, such as The Daily Mail, The Sun, and Forbes, spread the news of two chatbots created by researchers at the Facebook AI Research Lab that were able to develop their own “secret” language to communicate between themselves. As a result, the programmers lost control over the bots’ communication and were forced to disconnect them. Even though Facebook immediately declared that they had not disconnected the bots because they had lost control over them, the reality is that the news, a great example of the now popular post-truth, created panic and discussion about how machines were reaching a level of intelligence that was out of our control. Of course, I was impressed by the news, mainly because it reminded me of a passage from Ricardo Piglia's novel La ciudad ausente (The Absent City), published in 1992. The passage described a machine created by the Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández, for the purposes of translating stories. However, at some point, the machine started to modify and expand the stories:

It began to speak about itself, that is why they want to shut it down. It's not a machine we’re talking about, but a more complex organism. A system that is pure energy. In one of the latest stories there appears an island, at the edge of the world, some kind of linguistic utopia for future life. (36)

Of course, Piglia was not the first to imagine a thinking machine. The question whether machines can think has been present since intelligent machines were first in the process of being developed. However, way before that, automated machines were in the imaginations of writers, scientists, and even social theorists, such as Marx, who speculates in The Grundrisse (1857–58) that there will be a time where machines will replace human labor. Nevertheless, it is in literature, especially science fiction, where properly “thinking” machines have been a recurrent topic in imagining the future of humanity. Of course, this future is usually seen as a dystopia where machines, meant to be prostheses of humankind helping humanity to progress in a positive way, end up turning into robots rebelling against us. In some way, those ideas, which were considered nothing but speculation or fantasy, are now becoming a reality that sometimes goes beyond our understanding.