The metaphors and analogies that we use to talk about technology matter. There is no better example than the current moment of accelerating AI use: whether you think AI agents are like unattended children, simply tools or doomsday machines influences how you use them and how you think they ought to be regulated.
In , the poet, activist and scholar Franny Choi analyses how racialised and gendered representations of robots and androids in culture and media arose through history, then caught on, and what their impact has been on both people and their adoption of devices. Through a series of personal but heavily researched essays, the book is an example of how to critically and carefully think about what shapes our understanding of technologies that increasingly dominate our world.
Choi focuses on how often robots and androids have been connected to Asian people and Asian women specifically across a broad range of media and culture. They draw on cultural scholarship as well as works of fiction, ranging from the very first use of the word 鈥渞obot鈥� and the Turing test to sci-fi series like Humans and films such as Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
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Putting politics and art side-by side, Choi traces how, for example, political speeches equating immigrant Asian workers to robotic machines helped pass anti-immigration legislation in the 19th century, way before putting an Asian face on an android became a sci-fi trope. In this way, We Radiant Things explores knotted and spiralling paths of feedback between fiction and reality.
Giving their argument an emotional punch, Choi also writes about their own experience as a child of Korean immigrants. They grew up not just aware of stereotypes, but seeing themselves in robotic maids and unruly sentient machines. Technology intersects with tragedies in their life, too, such as the time they spent in hospital with their mother before she passed away while myriad machines were trying to help her stay alive, a story Choi tells with heartbreaking beauty.
Throughout We Radiant Things, Choi鈥檚 multifaceted background clearly benefits their writing, as propulsive emotional sentences seamlessly alternate with sharp political insights. Having grown up at a similar time to Choi, and as a fan of genres such as cyberpunk, where so often dystopian cities and characters are wrapped in signifiers of Asian culture, I found their writing illuminating. It incentivised me to think of media I love more critically.
We Radiant Things is a scholarly book, but also very readable and compelling. In the past year, several researchers have told me that understanding and determining the future of technologies like AI shouldn鈥檛 rest only on engineers, but also neuroscientists, philosophers and sociologists. This book makes a strong case that literature professors and poets ought to be in those rooms too.
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