Ethics Ex Machina: popular culture and the plural futures of politics

ABSTRACT

The articulation of ethical responsibility can be conceived as a condition of ethical practice that brings into being a human subject to whom we owe consideration, and the reverse must also hold: we are brought into being – subjectified – through these relational connections. But can these connections exist between human and non-human subjects? In this short paper, we analyse the representation of artificially intelligent machines in the popular television series Westworld and the movie Ex Machina and elaborate on the boundary between human and non-human as a complex and contested ethical space. We argue that taking popular cultural representations of machine learning seriously can offer significant insight into how futures of human subjectivity and ethicopolitical responsibility might unfold. (117 words)

表达伦理责任可谓伦理实践的条件，它造就了一个我们需要考虑的人类主体，反之亦然：我们也通过这些关联而被造就——主体化。这种关联可以存在于人类和非人类主体之间么？笔者在这篇短文中分析了电视连续剧⟪西部世界⟫、⟪机械姬 ⟫中表现的人工智能机器，并探讨了作为一个复杂、有争议的伦理空间的人与非人之间的边界。认真思考 通俗文化对机器学习的呈现，可以让我们洞见人类主体性以及伦理政治责任在未来如何展开。

KEYWORDS:

• Popular culture
• ethics
• ethicopolitics
• ethical responsibility
• artificial intelligence
• machine learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

William Clapton is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at UNSW Sydney. He is the author of Risk and Hierarchy in International Society: Liberal Interventionism in the Post-Cold Era (Palgrave, 2014) and has published articles in International Relations, International Politics, Politics, and the Australian Journal of International Affairs.

Laura J. Shepherd is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. Laura is author/editor of several books, including, most recently, Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space (Oxford University Press, 2017) and the Handbook on Gender & Security (co-edited with Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg; Routledge, 2019).

ORCID

William Clapton http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5667-3413

Laura J. Shepherd http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3069-8596

Notes

1 #GamerGate was a targeted campaign of harassment and intimidation against a female video games developer, Zoe Quinn, her allies, and video games critics and journalists perceived as ‘feminist’ or ‘left-leaning’. It began in 2014 after Quinn was accused online by an ex-boyfriend of trading sexual favours for positive reviews of her games in video game publications. So-called ‘Gamergaters’ were ostensibly focused on ‘ethics in video games journalism’. However, the campaign was also a violent reaction to what gamers perceive as attacks by critics who have highlighted the lack of female representation in games or participation in the video games industry, and the toxic misogyny that defines gaming culture.

2 As Stuart Hall reminds us, ‘what we call “the West” did first emerge in Western Europe. But “the West” is no longer only in Europe, and not all of Europe is in “the West”’ (1996, 185). We use ‘the West’, therefore, to represent the areas of the world also captured by descriptors such as ‘Global North’ and ‘minority world’.

3 A quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, ‘These violent delights have violent ends’ is a recurrent dialogue motif in Westworld that apparently performs the function of shifting the hosts between different modes of consciousness (Rochke 2016).