AI – here for longer than we think
Rose Roberto argues that AI has been a feature of YA fiction for some time and looks at some notable examples.
Artificial Intelligence or AI seems to have emerged as the big topic in 2023. Hollywood writers have gone on strike over it, and in secondary schools and universities throughout the UK, teachers, lecturers and professors have widely discussed how to teach students (who are undoubtably using ChatGBT for their papers and projects) and assess them fairly and ethically. Is this sudden surge in attention and anxiety justified, given how ubiquitous AI has been already? Think of our email spam filters, our music playlist recommendations, our fitness trackers, our bank’s online chatboxes, and in our home smart security cameras. In the decades since online purchases have been possible, we have seamlessly interacted with AI in the form of product recommendations, autofill, and predictive words and keystrokes. Is this newfound manifestation of social anxiety actually about something else?
In 2018, author Judith Shulevitz asked, ‘Alexa, should we trust you?’ Her piece in a November issue of The Atlantic that year described human-machines dialogues and how the experience of an AI conversing with the same prosody (intonation, vocabulary, rhythm) that native-language human speakers have in spontaneous exchanges with Alexa or Siri grants them a special social presence in our lives. By communicating with devices and not only through them, Shulevitz concludes the ‘personalities’ of these sentient programmes have evolved to be more than just high-tech genies or ideal servants in a Victorian manor. They now matter to us. Furthermore, the way we speak to AI reveals some low-brow habits of humans. These human-machine interactions have become a vehicle for us to express our self-centred natures and banal desires. AI allows us to gain immediate gratification, without actually feeling shame for our baser, more id-like instincts.
Three authors, Malorie Blackman, Neal Shusterman and Kazuo Ishiguro have created futuristic worlds populated by AI which also extend other 21st-century medical, telecommunication, and high-speed transportation technologies. Robot Girl (2015), Scythe (2016), Thunderhead (2018), The Toll (2019), Klara and the Sun (2021) and Gleanings (2022) each discuss existential questions: Should humans play God? What do people owe sentient beings that we create? How does technology and interaction with it change society and the human condition? While each novel takes a contemporary and creative twist, arguably these themes can be traced back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1812. Shelley explored ethical and existential questions about the role of science and what if any moral upper limits should be put upon it.
Neither Robot Girl and Klara and the Sun by Malorie Blackman and Kazuo Ishiguro respectively, are classified as YA novels. Robot Girl was originally published in 1997 as a short story, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ a final chapter in the anthology, Sensational Cyber Stories, edited by Tony Bradman. Now re-issued as a stand-alone, dyslexia friendly reader, with illustrations by Matthew Griffin, it follows the life of Claire, the daughter of an inventing genius. Claire’s story is mainly revealed to the audience through a series of email exchanges with her friend Maisie. At the end of the short novel, a very Victor Frankenstein plot twist is revealed. Likewise, Klara is the main protagonist and narrator in Klara and the Sun. Also told from Klara’s point of view as an artificial friend or AF, readers must piece together a plot based on conversations with humans and Klara’s limited understanding of the world around her. Although Ishiguro does not have a reputation as a YA novelist and has previously written other science fiction works set in a dystopian world, through the character Klara, readers feel a personal sense of empathy and hope, that overcomes the sadness of the novel. This hope often characterises the YA genre. Claire, Maisie, or Klara could qualify as young adults, if Earth years were used to tally their ages. While time does pass in all these novels, Claire and Klara and do not seem physically to age during the course of their stories, although they are both transformed. Notably, several characters in both these books have an obsessive personality, driving them to understand or conquer the world similar to Victor Frankenstein from Shelley’s novel, who buries himself in his experiments to deal with grief. Several of the parental characters in Robot Girl and Klara and the Sun end up questioning the time, effort and faith they had placed in technology. A disillusioned Dr Frankenstein laments, ‘…but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room’
In contrast to these two stand-alone novels, there are two AI protagonists, Thunderhead and Cirrus, in the four books comprising the Arc of the Scythe series by Neal Shusterman: Scythe, Thunderhead, The Toll and Gleanings. Readers are gradually introduced to the AI through other characters, instead of meeting them upfront. We are told that in this universe, set more than 300 years from our own time, humanity’s fate has been improved. The Thunderhead, which evolved from the Cloud, made advances in medicine, engineering, and education. It solved all the major problems in our own time, such as Climate Change, global war, economic inequality, disease and even death, and it now leads the entire Earth-bound population through benevolent utopian governance. The AI is a servant to humans, so it chooses not to hold the power over human life and death, or to curtail the free will of humanity.
Power, in the Scythe universe, is wielded by the Scythe, an order of elite men and women whose job is to keep Earth’s population under control, through ‘gleaning’ or permanent death. The AI is not allowed to revive a person gleaned by a scythe. Paradoxically, the Scythe not only choses who will die, they have an ethical obligation to make all their selections in an ‘unbiased manner’ while also fulfilling a required yearly-kill-quota, set at regular Scythe conclaves (meetings) through the year. Furthermore, an individual Scythe must grant immunity from gleaning to family members of the deceased for 12 months following that Scythe’s gleaning action. Scythe introduces readers to two 16-year-olds, Rowan Damisch and Citra Terranova, who at the beginning of the series are apprentices competing with each other to join the next generation of Scythe in what used to be St Louis, Missouri. Through these two characters, we are situated into this futuristic world, which like the ancient epic narratives, battles between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ play out, only now incorporating sophisticated technology.
In Thunderhead, readers properly meet the AI, itself, and see how it works through its world-wide network of Nimbus Agents (futuristic civil service). We see Thunderhead act as a key player working behind-the-scenes to shape human events and witness it interacting directly with everyone via their nanites, micro-robots medically inserted into the blood of all people to fight disease, heal pain, mend broken bones, and reanimate the accident victims. We eavesdrop on daily conversations between the AI and anyone who is not a Scythe. However, since the AI cannot interfere with Scythe business, the AI goes silent in the presence of a Scythe, foreshadowing a gleaning or Scythe action. A new character introduced in this book is Agent Greyson Tolliver, who leaves Nimbus and begins to operate in a space between Scythe and Thunderhead spheres. The Thunderhead tells Tolliver he is important, and when a cataclysmic event happens, Tolliver becomes the only person on Earth with whom the Thunderhead can communicate.
In The Toll, a pacifist-religious order known as the Tonists, become the centre of Scythe intrigue. In this final instalment, there is an interesting mix of characters thrown together from Scythe, Nimbus and Tonist factions, that need to work together to restore the world for future generations. The Thunderhead inhabits the body of a gender fluid person for the first time in its existence to gain an understanding of the physical world, thereby enabling Cirrus, a better and less limited version of itself, to be created. In Gleanings, a collection of stories that take place prior to, during, and after the main trilogy, Scythe Marie Curie states, ‘Scythe and Thunderhead are two sides of the same coin. If one is threatened, so is the other.’ We also learn Cirrus has been replicated into the Cirri and continues to look after humans.
While the original Dr Frankenstein becomes horrified with his work, and then labours to destroy it, the so-called monster has a kind heart, a curious mind, and a compassionate soul. A common thread running through all these artificial intelligence depictions is that AI is a metaphor for children. The default setting for an AI in these books shows that for the most part, AIs are always initially kinder, humbler, more curious and more empathetic than human adults. They embody an inherent wisdom and creative wonder before they are corrupted by other adults.
In the fiction from Shelley to Blackman, to Shusterman, to Ishiguro, the best traits of their AI seem to be self-taught—not learned from the ‘parent’ figures. In Frankenstein, the ‘creature’ tries to join the family of a blind man, who is kind to him because the man can’t see his physical deformities. However, the blind man’s family lashes out at the creature in ignorance and fear— which begets violence. In these novels, when things go badly with AI, it is due to human error, failure of judgement, and prejudice. Maybe in the real world, we should be asking if we fear AI, precisely because we humans created it. While AI is a repository of what is the best and the most forward thinking in us as a species, it can highlight our regressive nature, and our worst selves, too.
Dr Rose Roberto, MLIS, FHEA is Teaching Resources Librarian and Part-time Lecturer in History at Bishop Grosseteste University
Recent publications include Roberto, R. and Alexiou, A. Eds. Women in Print: Design and Identities, Volume 1 Oxford: Peter Lang Ltd 2022.
Roberto, R. ‘Working Women: Female Contributors to Chambers’s Encyclopaedia’ IN Archer-Parré, C., Hinks, J, and Moog, C. Eds. Women in Print: Production, Distribution and Consumption, Volume 2. Oxford: Peter Lang Ltd 2022.
Books mentioned:
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, Penguin Classics, 978-0141198965, £7.99 pbk
Robot Girl, Malorie Blackman, Barrington Stoke, 978-1781124598, £7.99 pbk
Scythe, Neal Shusterman, Walker Books, 978-1406379242, £8.99 pbk
Thunderhead, Neal Shusterman, Walker Books, 978-1406379532, £8.99 pbk
The Toll, Neal Shusterman, Walker Books, 978-1406385670, £8.99 pbk
Gleanings, Neal Shusterman, Walker Books, 978-1529509540, £8.99 pbk
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber & Faber, 978-0571364909, £8.99 pbk
Shulevitz, Judith (2018) ‘Alexa, Should We Trust You?’ The Atlantic, (November)
