Laura Kolbe
Poem
a human grandmaster of Go (a game that allegedly offers as many configurations of moves as there are atoms in the universe) has not persuaded its crestfallen opponents that it exhibits artificial general intelligence—the power to understand and think like a human being—which seems to remain (should we lament the fact?) in the future.
But if the robots for whose rights Botting seeks to make an ethical case are insensate—no evidence yet suggests that they feel pleasure when they triumph at Go—why should their rights be of concern? There’s a point in her book where she seems ready to invert the argument. Describing a 2016 London conference that was catchily titled “Love and Sex with Robots,” Botting presents the contentious case made by the conference’s cochair Kate Devlin for the use of androids in residential care homes for the purpose of companionship, or even sex. Not such a terrible idea, a few might quip, during the isolation imposed by a pandemic, but then must we also—as Botting pulls back a bit to suggest—grant these obliging machines the right to be treated with kindness by their owners? Consider the world satirized in Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel Frankisstein, in which the charismatically odious Ron Lord (a riff on Lord Byron) manufactures robots as sex slaves. What might it do to human consumers to exploit machines in this way? Could an ethical case be made, as Devlin has posited, for providing synthetic children to satisfy the predilections of convicted pedophiles? Such bold speculation, in Botting’s view, takes us back once again to the original teachings of Wollstonecraft, which her daughter absorbed and poignantly articulated in her greatest novel. While Botting is by no means the first to interpret Frankenstein as primarily a fable about bad parenting, she deepens our sense of the warning it offers. Against the mindless drive for technological progress, Botting attempts to sum up the most important moral lesson that Shelley learned from her mother’s work: “The value of taking a generous and fearless attitude of love toward the whole world.”
And where, precisely, did Shelley first encounter the lesson that she took so to heart? Botting doesn’t specify, but it’s hard to overlook that one of the books Mary carried off from London on her 1814 trip to Europe, two years before she began writing Frankenstein, was her mother’s last novel, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. In it Jemima, an attendant working in the asylum where Maria has been unjustly imprisoned, unfolds the story of the cruelties to which she had been subjected by a vicious stepmother. As lonely and rejected by the world as the Creature (“an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody”), Jemima attributes the greater part of her misery to a single factor: the absence of parental love.
Reading those words in a book written by the mother she had never known, during the time when her disapproving father had exiled her from his house, how could Shelley not identify with Jemima’s despair and project it onto her own outcast and artificially manufactured creature? If consciousness ushers in suffering, it may well be that the next cyber revolution will prove one of emergent moral choice, and—as Botting’s absorbing book leads us to appreciate—of ethical responsibility both to and by the increasingly sophisticated machines that humankind has begun to create. Q