Projecting life onto machines

Public discussions and imaginaries about AI often center around the idea that technologies such as neural networks might one day lead to the emergence of machines that think or even feel like humans. Drawing on histories of how people project lives onto talking things, from spiritualist seances in the Victorian era to contemporary advances in robotics, this talk argues that the “lives” of AI have more to do with how humans perceive and relate to machines exhibiting communicative behavior, than with the functioning of computing technologies in itself. Taking up this point of view helps acknowledge and further interrogate how perceptions and cultural representations inform the outcome of technologies that are programmed to interact and communicate with human users.