"Sinister Fruitiness": 'Neuromancer,' Internet Sexuality and the Turing Test

Abstract

Yeah. I saw your profile, Case.... You ever work with the dead?(1) immediate subject of this essay is a set of anxious, confusing, and at times threatening questions posed by computer-mediated communication technology, popularly known as and most immediately recognizable in the Internet. It also takes as its subject a related set of perhaps more abstract questions about the possibilities of within our computers. I have chosen to analyze in this essay three moments within the culture of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the development of cyberspace, moments that might be classified as either fiction or real (inasmuch as those categories hold steady under the optic of the narratives and textual spaces they share) but that symptomatize how we come to know intelligence by the anxiety, confusion, and threat underlying those questions. Some would argue that computers cannot be intelligent; they're not alive. But granted that computers aren't in any readily recognizable sense alive, might we imagine that they could be cognizant? conscious? sentient? metrics by which we measure are closer to our experience than we might think: we are already used to dealing with digital, life in the form of digital representations of other humans. A good number of us set our biological clocks by when we are able to login and when we can read our e-mail. We are used to narrativizing our lives, ourselves, for our on-line friends, many of whom we've never met; it's a small step to asking how we know that our correspondents are cognizant, conscious, aware, real. How do we know that they're intelligent? How do we know, by what heuristics do we discover, that our correspondents are sentient? By what standard of measurement could we gauge, in this age of the intelligent machine, that our interlocutors are, in a word, human? These questions, and the measures by which we answer the questions, are implicit, and at times, explicit, in the work of William Gibson, the early short story, The Gernsback Continuum, to the Cyberspace trilogy, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. plot of Neuromancer is roughly as follows: Case, a twenty-four year old former cyberspace cowboy, worked as a thief, [who] worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data (p. 5). Case has been nerve-damaged by employers he stole from, rendering him unable to jack into cyberspace. He is recruited and healed by a man named Corto who wants him to steal a digital copy of Case's now-dead cowboy teacher, McCoy Pauley, and with Pauley's help, break into the Tessier-Ashpool's corporate/family computer matrix. Corto, who was formerly a military officer named Armitage, is controlled by an AI named Wintermute. Wintermute wants to merge with his other half, an AI represented in Tessier-Ashpool's systems as a young, beautiful boy, Neuromancer. Case, his bodyguard Molly, the sexual psychopath Peter Riviera, and Corto/ Armitage eventual succeed in releasing Wintermute and Neuromancer the hard-wired constraints that keep them melding and evolving into a higher form of sentience and intelligence. characters of Gibson's Neuromancer, Wintermute, Neuromancer, McCoy Pauley, Case, the Finn, and later books, Bobby, Colin, Angie, and eventually the matrix itself, when it comes to know itself, are all entities who live to one degree or another in the machine, in cyberspace, or to use Gibson's formulation, in the matrix of human knowledge from the banks of every computer in the human system (p. 51). They are all, to put into play another of his frequently-used words, personalities. Most are reproductions, digital representations (or manifestations) of someone who was already alive, already human, and in that sense already someone who thinks. …

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