Abstract
Representations of digital sentience in film and television are ambivalent about the prospects of sharing the world with such entities. Like popular discourses of transhumanism, they participate in fantasies of extended life and superhuman abilities, but simultaneously express fears of human obsolescence. Such texts illuminate questions raised by the Turing test regarding how one distinguishes ‘real’ from ‘simulated’ intelligence, explore the criteria for being considered ‘alive’ rather than a machinic thing, and examine the blurred boundary between human and machine that seems the inevitable consequence of digital sentience. Filmic representations of digital sentience can be organized into two categories — supercomputers and distributed network artificial intelligences (AIs)1 — with inevitable overlaps between these loose boundaries. This chapter focuses on representations of digital entities that are designed to have or evolve sentience, and traces the shifting cultural anxieties they articulate in tandem with a changing technocultural context.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Sherryl Vint
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vint, S. (2015). ‘Change for the Machines’? Posthumanism as Digital Sentience. In: Hauskeller, M., Philbeck, T.D., Carbonell, C.D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430328_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430328_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57701-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43032-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)