Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character offers a new theory of realist character through character’s unexpected afterlife: the intelligent machine. The book contends that mid-twentieth-century versions of artificial intelligence (AI) offer a theory of verisimilitude omitted by traditional histories of character, which often focus on the development of interiority and the shift from “flat” to “round” characters in the Victorian era. Instead, by reading character through AI, Megan Ward’s Seeming Human argues that routinization, predictability, automation, and even flatness are all features of realist characters. Early artificial intelligence movements such as cybernetics, information theory, and the Turing test define ways of seeming—rather than being—human. Using these theories of verisimilitude to read Victorian novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, Seeming Human argues that mechanicity has been perceived as anti-realist because it is the element that we least want to identify as human. Because AI produces human-like intelligence, it makes clear that we must actually turn to machines in order to understand what makes realist characters seem so human.

Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character

Computers & Technology

Ward, Megan

Computer Science

Ohio State University Press

Literature & Fiction

United States

We all have a natural desire to be happy, no one has to tell us to 'be happy'. We only need to look at young children's absolute joy, happiness and their ability to be present in each moment. So what happens to us as we get older? Why do most of us live with a degree of anxiety about the future, our relationships, financial security, our self-worth and life purpose? There is a logical pathway to understanding the true nature of our minds. This has the ability to liberate us from all uncertainty and anxiety and reveal the happiness that we seek. All that is required is a mind that is willing to explore and question. This book will strip away the layers that have been built up over a lifetime and that are currently obscuring our potential, our passions and the abundance of unconditional happiness that is ours to experience in this lifetime. We will discover we are not our minds, we are so much more.

A State of Mind

Religion & Spirituality

Michael Hanrahan Publishing

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Books by Ward, Megan