CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERARY STUDIES
CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERARY STUDIES

Summary/Abstract: ‘Twas ever thus, unfortunately–the higher humanity is in a technological hierarchy, the more we present with an age-long predilection for the exploitation of the fair-use classes in the humanities. It is no doubt an almost incurable affliction and a curious case of the confounded transposition of what is meritorious to what is meretricious. In the words of the ever-topical W. H. Auden: “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, silence the pianos and with muffled drum. Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.” However, the immensity of loss and grief echoed in Funeral Blues is rooted in our feeble moral and ethical fibre eminently in the face of a dehumanizing device of our own making, viz. AI. The phenome of artificial intelligence has captured the imagination of many an author, and they all seem to have been ensnared in the endless loop of fear and a sense of futile inevitability. In the Dune book series, Frank Herbert essentially propounds the notion of thinking machines intent on eradicating mankind and sounds a clarion call: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind". Yet, the fictional characters in the books did, and now, so have we. Intriguingly, the same trope is found in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation oeuvre, and of course reimagined, repurposed and rebooted countless times for television and cinema screens for entertainment purposes and heftily lucrative ends.

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