In a fascinating new article in Glass Bead Journal, Louis Chude-Sokei (2019) begins by challenging the parallels between humans and machines that David Levy (2007) mobilizes in his controversial book Love and Sex with Robots. The parallels Levy sets up, Chude-Sokei maintains, have been “less controversial than his book’s assumptions of and possible impact on gender relationships, and his nonchalant relationship to ethics.”

Yet, it is precisely the “ease” of establishing these parallels and “how natural they are” that Chude-Sokei targets in his analysis, arguing that, “it is through these facets that we can make sense of how and why the very question of ethics has become central to public conversations about human relationships with machines.” Chude-Sokei is the author of The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics and was a participant in our Cyborg Futures workshop in 2017. You can find his article, “Machines and Miscegenation,” in Glass Bead Journal, Site 2. Dark Room: Somatic Reason and Synthetic Eros.