Free shipping on orders over $99
Singular Creatures

Singular Creatures

Robots, Rights, and the Politics of Posthumanism

by Mark Kingwell
Hardback
Publication Date: 15/10/2022

Share This Book:

  $60.75
or 4 easy payments of $15.19 with
afterpay
Anxiety about non-human intelligent machines is a longstanding theme of cultural production and consumption. Examples range from tales of golems and Frankenstein's monster to the evil overlord scenarios of contemporary film and television franchises: Star Trek, the Alien series, and the Terminator sequence, as well as Her, Black Mirror, Blade Runner, Ex Machina, and many other less mainstream cultural artifacts. The source of this anxiety is clear. Non-human conscious entities may turn out to be superior to any biological form of life, allowing a stride across human ambition in a moment dubbed "the Singularity" by AI insiders. This is the turning point when non-human entities advance and reproduce in a manner that surpasses and subjugates biological forms of intelligent life. Although today's artificial intelligences fall notably short of this level of sophistication, Mark Kingwell argues that we are already more than human in important ways, and likely to become more so as time goes on. In Singular Creatures Kingwell plumbs the depths of cultural and political meaning in the apparent transition to posthuman life. Our immersion in technology, now comprehensive to the point of invisibility, has altered forever what it means to be alive. The politics of posthumanism flow directly from our own situation, at once dependent on technology and afraid of its effects on current and future experiences.More than a century after playwright Karel Capek coined the word robot - rooted in the Czech robota, meaning "servitude" or "drudgery" - in his 1920 allegory about the alienation of forced labour leading to a violent workers' revolt, Capek's central question continues to haunt us. Can humans and their own creations co-exist in a new cyberflesh world, or is a struggle for superiority inevitable? Singular Creatures is an attempt at sketching the field before any deadly battle is joined.
ISBN:
9780228014348
9780228014348
Category:
Social & political philosophy
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
15-10-2022
Language:
English
Publisher:
McGill-Queen's University Press
Country of origin:
Canada
Dimensions (mm):
234.95x158.75x19.05mm
Weight:
0.52kg

This title is in stock with our overseas supplier and should arrive at our Sydney warehouse within 1 - 2 weeks of you placing an order.

Once received into our warehouse we will despatch it to you with a Shipping Notification which includes online tracking.

Please check the estimated delivery times below for your region, for after your order is despatched from our warehouse:

ACT Metro: 2 working days
NSW Metro: 2 working days
NSW Rural: 2-3 working days
NSW Remote: 2-5 working days
NT Metro: 3-6 working days
NT Remote: 4-10 working days
QLD Metro: 2-4 working days
QLD Rural: 2-5 working days
QLD Remote: 2-7 working days
SA Metro: 2-5 working days
SA Rural: 3-6 working days
SA Remote: 3-7 working days
TAS Metro: 3-6 working days
TAS Rural: 3-6 working days
VIC Metro: 2-3 working days
VIC Rural: 2-4 working days
VIC Remote: 2-5 working days
WA Metro: 3-6 working days
WA Rural: 4-8 working days
WA Remote: 4-12 working days

Reviews

Be the first to review Singular Creatures.