ENGD50H3: Fake Friends and Artificial Intelligence: the Human-Robot Relationship in Literature and Culture

This course will explore the portrayal of the human-robot relationship in conjunction with biblical and classical myths. The topic is timely in view of the pressing and increasingly uncanny facets of non-divine, non-biological creation that attend the real-world production and marketing of social robots. While the course looks back to early literary accounts of robots in the 1960s, it concentrates on works written in or after the 1990s. The course aims to analyze how a particular narrative treatment of the robot-human relationship potentially alters our understanding of its mythical intertext and, by extension, notions of divinity, humanity, gender, animality, disability, and relations of kinship and care.

1.0 credit at the C- level in ENG courses
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Arts, Literature and Language