Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power

Abstract

viduals respond to environmental traumas. Botting also sees value in Shelley’s wide view of artificial intelligence as far more complex and relational than a doomsday bringer. Thinkers such as Nick Bostrom and the late Stephen Hawking are generally concerned with the possibility that AI could be the worst thing to happen to humans (e.g., artificial life would become a superintelligence that would subjugate and eliminate humans). However, placed beside modern political sci-fi’s position that artificial intelligence is made in the image of humanity, it becomes clear that philosophies such as Hawking’s and Bostrom’s say more about the philosopher than the AI. Put differently, if we want artificial life to empathize with, love with, and productively live with humanity, then we need to draw from a more sensitive and relationally complex ethics. And, according to Botting, we need to develop the kind of virtues or character that will make us more empathetic and humane in our treatment and understanding of artificial creatures. Rather than turn to the narrow views of AI and paternalistic prejudices of Bostrom’s politically realist superintelligence, Botting asserts that we ought to draw from the moral philosophies about how to live compassionately with artificial creatures that Mary Shelley and the writers she inspired offer us. Botting’s call is for a more complex ethics for dealing with artificial creatures as she considers what we owe these current and future beings. According to her, we owe artificial creatures a vindication of their rights to respect, love, care, acceptance, and tolerance, and therefore we ought to treat them accordingly.