Artificial Neurosis:
AI & Psychopathology

Instructor: Aaron Schuster Date & Time: Monday, September 24, October 1, 8, 15 1 - 3:30 EST

DESCRIPTION If we succeed in creating intelligent machines, machines that can learn and are self-aware, machines that possess freedom and desire, will we also not necessarily create neurotic, psychotic, and perverse machines? In other words, won’t intelligent machines also suffer from mental illnesses? Though there is a lot of talk today about using AI to treat human mental illness, less attention has been given to the prospect of non-human psychopathologies, the maladies that might befall hyper-advanced computer systems: artificial neurosis. Where is Freud for the digital age? If the idea of engineering general intelligence and even consciousness inspires contemporary research programs, what about the prospect of a computer unconscious? The Seminar will explore the maladies of artificial intelligence through a philosophical and psychoanalytic lens, with a focus on depictions of AI in popular culture: films, television, and science fiction literature. We will examine how the presentation of “machines gone mad” illuminates deadlocks of contemporary society and subjectivity, while also asking how emerging technologies affect the very notion of the desiring subject. Materials may include, among others, episodes from Black Mirror; Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects; Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville; Ridley Scott, Blade Runner and Denis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049; Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Westworld series; Casper Kelly and Nick Gibbons, Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough; Steven Shaviro, Discognition; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Max Tegmark, Life 3.0; Jean Pierre Dupuy, On the Origins of Cognitive Science and “Cybernetics is an Anti-Humanism.”

Image: Machine Torture, 1975. After the narration of ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1914) by Franz Kafka, realized for the exhibition ‘Machines Celibataires’ (1975-1977)

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