What Can Fiction about Artificial Persons Tell Us about the Human Brain?

This episode features popular culture critic Dr. Despina Kakoudaki, author of the book Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People. Dr. Kakoudaki, a professor at American University, discusses how fantasy and science fiction imagine artificial persons. She discusses how literary and cinematic art depict machines as having human-like, or even super-human, intelligence and behavioral capabilities. In our wide-ranging discussion, we consider the implications of these ideas about the machines that science and technology are developing. We discuss how concepts of machines’ human-like tendencies are affecting current culture, definitions of personhood, and ideas about human evolution. We close with a discussion of how knowledge about the operation of the human brain has contributed to the development of artificial intelligence, and how, in turn, the development of increasingly sophisticated models of artificial intelligence may contribute to knowledge about the human brain.