Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go examines the boundaries of the human and tests the limits of empathy by introducing narrator Kathy H and her friends Ruth and Tommy, students at the boarding school Hailsham. What starts as a typical campus novel quickly takes on an uncanny quality as the reader slowly realizes that Kathy and her friends are clones, created to grow up and “donate” their essential organs for “real” humans. The novel and the narration turns on the question of the clones’ humanity. Can the reader believe that the clones are really human? Does their humanity matter to them or anyone else if they are slated for death?  I read the novel as existing at a fruitful point of intersection between many concerns of the conference, particularly the legacies of the Enlightenment and the role of the humanities in inventing the human.

While a contemporary novel of speculative fiction, the text has much kinship with the concerns and the investments of the Enlightenment and Romantic period. Karl Shaddox, for instance, argues that this novel is more comfortably classified alongside sentimental and abolitionist literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. While Kathy and her friends quietly assert their humanity, they also constantly feel the pull of the things around them, forming deep connections with non-human stuff. For instance, the clones’ concept of Norfolk as a “lost corner” functions as both a cosmic lost and found and their version of an afterlife. As such, Kathy herself begins to take on the qualities of an it-narrator, from the popular eighteenth-century genre featuring talking objects like coins or shoes. I examine the text’s roots in older literary forms to argue that the clones’ status as human or non-human objects is constantly adjudicated by their relationships with stuff. 

Indeed, Kathy and her friends have little contact with actual humans, who view the clones as distasteful and repulsive. Instead, they surround themselves with the material culture of the outside world, and particularly art. The novel seems as preoccupied in the fate of humanistic study as it is in the clones’ own humanity. Ultimately, I argue that Ishiguro is conflicted and ultimately pessimistic about the ability of the humanities to teach us about being human. 

Considered to be one of the first science-fiction novels of the modern era, Mary Shelley’s famous novel Frankenstein is, among other literary genres, a modern myth of Biblical proportion; when the central character, Victor Frankenstein, pieces together a dead corpse and, by virtue of his scientific method, successfully creates a living creature, he effectively performs an act of God. But what the mad scientist never expected was that rather than inventing a new breed of human being, he had in fact created a demon so monstrous that he immediately wishes to “extinguish” the life which he had “thoughtlessly bestowed” in the creature. Born without a mother, immediately rejected by its father, hideous in appearance and desperate for a partner, Frankenstein’s creature is a rational, sentient, and intelligent creature who becomes possessed by an “unparalleled malignity and selfishness [and] evil” and whose power for destruction, murder, and vengeance brings Frankenstein to the conclusion that his creature “ought to die.” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is thus a precautionary tale that warns us against the quixotism of certain scientific pursuits and technological developments, perhaps none more so than what we are now witnessing with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies. It’s no secret that some technologists are working hard to create what they call Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - an artificially intelligent computer system that possesses a mind (or psyche) of its own in much the same way that human beings possess minds of their own. In this paper I examine the imminent creation of a new kind of life-form which I will call Frankendroid. Computational in nature, this Frankendroid is very similar to but also strikingly different from Victor Frankenstein’s biological creation, thus raising important philosophical questions: Similar to Frankenstein’s creature, Frankendroid will be born without a mother, but will it recognise its “father”? Can Frankendroid possess maternalist/ paternalistic bonds? If not, then how might Frankendroids relate to human beings? Will they possess the capacity for love? Will they fear death? And how might they develop their own sense of self and self-identity? These questions are critically important to consider in light of the tragedy witnessed in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Exploring these questions prior to the creation of AGI will thereby give us the ability to ask whether or not Frankendroids “ought to live” – lest we find ourselves living in horror and with deep regret like Victor Frankenstein. 

This presentation concerns a re-reading of Alan Turing’s queer self-presentation alongside a re-reading of his contributions to the scientific field of artificial intelligence. Turing was highly engaged with the intersubjectivity and embodiment of his thinking machine. Thus, from the very beginnings of its artificial inception he was aware of the risks involved should it be fundamentally denied its claim to proper intelligence and appropriate response. As such, his modelling of the human mind was always conducted with a view to making room for its artificial counterpart to be intellectually and emotionally companions to it in ways that mimicked the homosocial norms of his privileged youth as a product of both England’s public schooling and imperial administration. Essentially, this means that Turing was all over the place with his loyalties and affections and as a consequence, he believed it wholly possible to share out his liminal desires amongst genders, humans, and machines. 

At the same time, Turing understood that the sentimental capacity for love, rather than the biological act of sexual intercourse, was the feature previously held up to deny full claims to humanity to those differentially raced, abled, and gendered within society. Affinity amongst these categories comes through an assumption at one level that they share a type of social disability. In contrast, at another that they share a kind of potential that accedes towards the possibility of emergent instantiations of being. The computer analytics that Turing introduces into the world fundamentally disrupts and alters the location of gender so that it assumes the position of the posthuman. In many senses, this becomes the source of what could effectively become a postgender reality due to the conjoining of artificial intelligence and mathematical biology.