Beware of fictional AI narratives

[...]AI in SF — science-fictional AI — is considered as part of a larger corpus of ‘AI narratives’ that shape the development of AI, including the research agenda, public acceptance, and political decision making1. In this sense, Ex Machina is about suppression and deception in a “male-dominated libertarian world where women are still seen as window dressing for sales booths”5 and intelligent women like Ava — not robots — are perceived as a threat. Apart from this, Bladerunner’s bioengineered replicants — although not AI in the strict sense — and also the robot labour force in I, Robot are treated de facto as slaves, which demonstrates not only the human primeval fear of enslavement and oppression in a profit-oriented economic system, but also colonial/postcolonial perspectives and the problematic of racial discrimination and Whiteness7.