Smart and Cruel. Cities in the Thrall of Artificial Intelligence in the Fiction of William Gibson and Cory Doctorow

Abstract

Cyberpunk speculative fiction constructs literary visions—almost always dystopian—of the intersection of “the human” and momentous technological transformations of our age. These visions are increasingly grounded in fact in the era of OpenAI’s GPT4 barreling towards self-aware thinking machines. The birth of cyberpunk sci-fi in the 1980s is linked to the emergence of neoliberalism. In it, rogue, super-empowered individuals pull the strings of dystopian, post-post-industrial societies (and cities) for profit, revanchism, or out of sheer malice. The chapter traces the development of automation and AI as a prelude to William Gibson’s and Cory Doctorow’s cyberpunk urban geographies of trans-humanism and late-capitalist accumulation in the post-Anthropocene “age of neural-network ubiquity.” The connective tissue among all these speculated-upon perils is the thickening web of information technologies that enable, empower, and accelerate transnational capital accumulation at the expense of rights and equity. The novels reflect upon the future implications of IT advances outstripping society’s ability to develop ethical frameworks for its evaluation and control. When paired with society’s inability to manage, contain, or develop alternatives to late capitalism, IT’s ascendancy as AI takes the form of an existential, planetary crisis.