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In The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, Isabel Millar uses films, online message boards, corporate discourse, and recent philosophical works about Artificial Intelligence (AI) to show us what we're really doing when we design, fetishize, fear, glorify or fantasize about the particular kind of subjectivity that we deem artificially intelligent. Although Millar is not a clinician, her use of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory brings her reader beyond what mere philosophy and media studies are capable of, in order to show how the self-referential work of conjuring AI into existence (if only in fantasies and fiction) reveals fleshly, embodied, human intelligence and subjectivity.
As with most psychoanalytic inquiries worth their salt, The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence relentlessly pursues the primal scene of its subject. What is discovered there is at turns uncanny, unexpected, sexy, and terrifying, as the process of conjuring and coding new subjectivities into existences evokes a multitude of fantasies about conception and development, and all the acts and desires associated therein. Mercifully, the terrors Millar depicts do not echo the tiresome annihilation predictions that circulate in headlines today, but delightfully reveal what we don't want to face about our own subjectivity. Spoiler alert: for me, it was the vicious sadism evident in commonplace fantasies of instrumentalizing AI as sexual slaves for some kind of perpetual, pervy lifestyle of continual orgasmic pleasure, but for you, it might be something else, like the fact that the other always remains truly unknowable, whether that other is human, alien, AI, undead, creaturely, or otherwise.
Indeed, our use of AI instantiates a kind of master/slave dialectic, whereby the AI slave seems to us to exist as a kind of instrument for producing knowledge about ourselves and our world.