My PhD project is a retrospective study of fictional depictions of AI in American science fiction of the third industrial revolution (ca. 1935-2001). A central goal of this project is to further understand the literary figure of AI as it was formed in the cultural imagination, and how this may have shaped our expectations and approach to the real technologies we are facing today.

 

The time period is chosen for its position between the rise of computer technology and cybernetics (which gave machine intelligence a foothold in the plausibly realistic), and the rise of "real" AI technologies (marking the beginning of what is sometimes called the Fourth Industrial Revolution), making the works studied decidedly speculative in their depiction of these technologies.