This paper asks ethical questions about the cyborg-human relationship that emerge from readings of Eastern and Western cyborg literature. The works under examination here include the following contemporary Canadian works: Larissa Lai’s Automaton Biographies (2009), Genki Ferguson’s Satellite Love (2021), and the short story “The Pit” in David Huebert’s Chemical Valley (2021). The Japanese works under consideration include Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) and Rokuro Inui’s Automatic Eve (2014; 2019 trans.). The works selected for this study all ask questions about the responsibilities of humans in the making, maintenance, and relationship to AI. What are the implications for humans in creating artificial intelligence that can provide companionship for the lonely and care for the sick and elderly? Can the pain of human loneliness be solved in part by creating cyborgs to become intimate partners and caretakers? Could cyborgs help with the grief of losing loved ones by becoming and replacing the dead person? 

However, these works push far beyond questions of what the cyborg can do for the human to ask necessary ethical questions about reciprocity in the AI-human relationship. Even further, these works ask what it means to be a learning machine or cyborg. How do machines feel about humans? Can cyborgs feel contentment and fulfilment in their lives?  What are the ethical implications of creating machines that have a capacity or even need for definitions and understanding of their own nature and selfhood? How should humans treat, employ, love, respect, and care for the cyborg? What happens to the cyborg or AI when they inevitably begin to decline? 

Informed by the radical posthumanism of Rosi Braidotti and Cary Wolfe, this paper will seek to explore how these various ethical questions about cyborg identity inform a philosophy of reciprocal care for cyborg and human that approaches the selfhood of the other with a careful sense of wonder and respect. Further, how do the national histories and identities of the authors and the Canadian and Japanese, Western and Eastern, perspectives on the role of self and other, and the responsibility of the individual to the community, inform the literary creations of these cyborg identities.

Biography

Shoshannah Ganz is an associate professor of Canadian literature at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University. In 2008 she co-edited a collection of essays with University of Ottawa Press on the poet Al Purdy. In 2017 she published Eastern Encounters: Canadian Women’s Writing about the East, 1867-1929 with National Taiwan University Press. Shoshannah just completed a manuscript entitled Now I Am Become Death: Industry and Disease in Canadian and Japanese Literature. This book is currently being revised for McGill-Queen’s University Press.

While making some journalists redundant, OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3 have also fired the journalistic imagination: In September 2020, The Guardian attempted to scare its readers with a paper purportedly written by the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT-3 2020) and in April 2022, an elaborate New York Timesarticle declared that “machines have acquired language” (Johnson 2020).

In view of my earlier attempt to cast GPT-2 as an adaptation machine (2020) and noting that other commentators have also resorted to concepts of imitation, emulation, remix and pastiche (Gary Marcus), we can describe the machine intertextuality of these “stochastic parrots” (Bender et al. 2021) as derivative; their output is a mere semblance of consciousness. 

In this paper, I would like to reconsider the aesthetic potential of Large Language Models in NLP and confront it with (a) concepts of “AI-powered creativity” (Miller 2019), (b) previous aesthetic practices of generative writing involving language – in principle largely unchanged since Strachey’s “Love Letters” (1952) and involving literary coders such as (but not limited to) Montfort 2014, Bajohr 2018, Navarro 2020), and (c) the recent cultural imaginary of robots in literature (Winterson 2019, McEwan 2019, Ishiguro 2021, Kehlmann 2021). 

A tentative conclusion will be based on the German term Verfahren (‘practice’, ‘method’, ‘process’, ‘protocol’) in order to suggest a more holistic, performative, procedural and paratextual, but less formal and textual concept of literary aesthetics than is frequently allowed for. 

Biography

Eckart Voigts is Professor of English Literature at TU Braunschweig, Germany. He has written, edited and coedited numerous books and articles, such as Introduction to Media Studies (Klett 2004),  Janespotting and Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions since the Mid-1990s (Narr 2005), the special issue of Adaptation (vol. 6.2, 2013) on transmedia storytelling, Reflecting on Darwin (Ashgate 2014), Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse (WVT 2015), Companion to Adaptation Studies (Routledge 2018, with Dennis Cutchins and Katja Krebs). His paper "Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Adaptation: Adapting as Cultural Technique" was published in Adaptation (2021) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apaa013. Since 2020, he has been co-heading the interdisciplinary research group “Automated Creativity” (funded by NMWK) https://www.tu-braunschweig.de/en/anglistik/seminar/liku/research/automated-creativity

One recurring problem posed by contemporary poetry is the way in which distance alters and contorts perception. In Ken Babstock’s On Malice, a computer-mediated reality observes human beings in a way that is at once perverse and predatory. In The Garden: A Poem and an Essay, AF Moritz implies and even dwells on the helplessness of viewers who are exposed to near constant mediated violence. Both texts communicate underlying problems in relation to distance and surveillance. In contrast, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s poetry might offer a way of rethinking these issues and offer potential benefits to observing and communicating from a distance. In Automoton Biographies, Lai writes on everything from female cyborgs in Blade Runner to her own childhood growing up in Newfoundland. Distance is not a dilemma; it is an escape and an opportunity to speak back from a position of safety. In Sybil Unrest, Lai writes alongside Rita Wong in a text that was originally composed via email. Once again, distance contributes to the poet’s ability to communicate with like-minded people and to speak back to the powerful. Lai’s speaker longs for “electric release” (21) in which giving oneself over to technology might provide an escape from the terrible quotidian she experiences. Lai and Wong suggest that one way to counter the problems created by distance are to accept the self as cyborg and to take advantage of the opportunities that technology creates. 

Biography

Tom Halford lives in Corner Brook, NL with his family and works at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has published a novel and a book of poetry. He studies representations of surveillance in literature.

To decode the sci-fi title’s “algorithm,” Klara and the Sun reads as K. Ishiguro’s K and Japan’s Sun Goddess. Why else would each of the Nobelist’s books carry the blurb or Author’s Note that invariably opens with “Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of five”? This “genesis” anchors decades of creativity in a birthplace soon replaced. To quote the title of a previous novel, out of this “Buried Giant” of childhood trauma of dislocation, albeit not exactly a classic Freudian definition of trauma, sprouts the Nobelist’s oeuvre that continues almost as a repetition compulsion. Throughout the gallery of his misfit protagonists, from Japanese expatriates and failed artists to British butlers and apparently white clones and bots with AI, Ishiguro remains driven by the five-year-old Japanese boy’s coming to terms with mourning and melancholia. Indeed, the Japanese child from Nagasaki must be retired for the substitute of the Anglophone Nobelist to emerge, the paradigm for his fictional universe. “Girl AF,” Artificial Friend, Klara, arrives as the most recent, sci-fi manifestation of the Kafkaesque Everyman “K,” the universality of whom secretes the particular disappearance of Japaneseness. However, guilt haunts the trade-off: the more the Nobelist recycles the human condition via whiteface characters, the more repressive the psyche is of off-whiteness, yellowishness. The Nobelist honors these aging, “completed,” and discarded butlers, clones, and bots as more human than human, more British than the British, more white than whites, while leaving a bread-crumb trail of Yasujiro Ozu’s family dramas, Chinaman figurines in Darlington Hall, samurai duels, all the way back to the future of the Shinto Sun Goddess that solar powers Klara. It is in the nature of fetishism that the fetishist and fans, simultaneously, acknowledge the loss and disavow any such knowledge.  

Biography

Sheng-mei Ma (馬聖美mash@msu.edu) is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specializing in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012);Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998); and memoir Immigrant Horse’s Mouth (2023). Co-editor of five books and special issues, Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile (2018) among them, he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右).