Cultivating Seriousness: Science Fiction, Spectacle, and the Rise of AI

Abstract

Media coverage of new machine learning technologies, which has oscillated between evangelising and doomsaying, has drawn on science fiction’s tropes, imagery and vocabulary in their reporting. This has created an attentional feedback loop whereby, SF provides tropes, imagery, plots and potentials to the news media – not to mention spectacle and attention – while the news media may provide a measure of credibility and authority to SF’s speculations, particularly the cultural expectation for SF to predict, or warn about, particular futures. This phenomenon conspicuously illustrates ideals of seriousness in SF: the attribution of, expectations and anticipations that result in ideas of ‘Serious SF’, or some quality of seriousness, that reflects on the worthiness of a text for serious attention. Seriousness is a high-stakes game, and the means by which attentional energy is unevenly distributed to particular futures – or threats to them – require similarly serious attention. This includes, for example, the use of SF to stoke fears of AI. In this paper, I focus on the dynamic between seriousness, spectacle and AI in SF’s discursive culture, focusing on a spate of references to James Cameron’s Terminator franchise following a series of apocalyptical warnings about AI and emergent consciousness that dominated discussion of the technology for a number of weeks in 2023.