The basilisk and the zombie: exploring the future of life with AI through the medium of popular culture

Abstract

We are living in an era of technological transformation, characterized by a qualitative acceleration of time. Rather than time literally moving faster, it is seemingly becoming denser, characterized by an ever-closer temporal clustering of noteworthy events. As Nick Land (2011) put it, “the current time is a period of transition, with a distinctive quality, characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age – is coming quite rapidly to an end.” The catalyst of this transition – technology – is the most likely candidate for the essential feature of the coming epoch. We explore various visions of technological society, found in our pop culture as well as certain scholarly works, with a particular focus on two main motifs that seem to reflect an unconscious apprehension at the inevitability of the technological transformation of society. To this end, we will attempt to explore and interpret the commonly recurring motifs of unfriendly AI usurping humanity as the “apex of existence,” which we designated as “the Basilisk,” and the reduction of humanity to automata, dubbed “the Zombie.” We use these motifs and their portrayals as a vehicle for the exploration of the future consequences of widespread AI technology and our society’s attitudes toward them.