Bringing the Past to the Future: Slavery and Artificial Intelligence on the Battleground of Popular Culture

FAIN: DOC-299609-24

University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT 06269-9000)
Anna Mae Duane (Project Director: October 2023 to present)
Stephen Dyson (Co Project Director: August 2024 to present)

Development of a podcast series and scholarly book chapters analyzing how persistent narratives of slavery and servitude have influenced popular understanding of artificial intelligence and humans’ ethical engagement with emerging technologies.

Our goal is to investigate how legacies of slavery, as a set of emotional frameworks for determining the parameters of the human, are shaping the perception and reception of conversational artificial intelligence (AI). Much of this framing is done, we aver, through popular culture and the discourse it provokes regarding the scope of human rights. Our key activities are the research, production, and dissemination of six digitally accessible research conversations and two book chapters. Our expected final outcome is to bring past and present conceptions of slavery and servitude, as mediated by popular cultural representations of conversational AI, into the dialogue surrounding the ethical development of AI. This work is vital as we move into a future in which concepts of human dignity and freedom will be reshaped by AI in ways fraught with both danger and opportunity. As the Director and Associate Director of UConn’s Humanities Institute, we are applying as a collaborative team.