Asian Canadian futurist writers speak on Asian Canadian speculative fiction and artificial intelligence.
With the rapid development of large language models and the availability of AI systems including Chat GPT, Watson, and DeepMind and the burgeoning competition especially with China’s DeepSeek around the development and building of such systems, insufficient thought has been given to the range of possible uses and misuses and next generation developments in the technology. Even less has been given to the ethics and the social consequences of deploying such systems across a wide range of contexts.
However, speculative fiction has had a long history of thinking about AI: consider Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot or William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The genre also has a long and venerated tradition of extrapolation as Ursula LeGuin has taught us. By virtue of the fact that Asian people, particularly Asian women, have long been problematically figured as dolls, robots, cyborgs and AIs, and that we have been fighting back against such figuration by taking up our own subjective locations and incorporating these figurations as a matter of reclaiming them, we are now uniquely positioned to speculate on what the future might hold in relation to these technologies.
Asian Computations will be a one-day symposium to do this speculative work, featuring:
- Neil Aitken
- Lydia Kwa
- Vivian Li
- Natasha Ramoutar
- Ai Jiang
- Linda Zhang
Moderators:
- Sophie Feng
- Larissa Lai
There will be a cash-only book table at the event.
Organized by: Sophie Feng, Dora Lu, and Larissa Lai
Supported by the School of Cities Urban Challenge Grant 4.0, the Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies, and the Canadian Studies Program at University College
