Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI

This edited collection spans philosophy, social science, history, science-fiction and art criticism at the cross-roads of two questions: What is a decision? What is a machine? And can the rich material and intellectual history of China’s engagement with these questions provide insight into trajectories of artificial intelligence unveiling itself across the planet?

Visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Cold War as culturally-specific models of intelligence, speculative traditions, and thought experiments come up against the emergence of novel forms of cognition that cannot be reduced to any historical cultural tradition.

This uniquely-positioned volume provides expert insight into this tension, using China as a touchstone for rethinking ‘artificiality’ and ‘intelligence’ as sites of difference in a way that is already present in the difficulty of precisely translating the Chinese term 人工智能.

Tracking the history of Chinese AI from the pre-Cultural Revolution to the post-Deng Xiaoping eras right up to contemporary debates surrounding facial recognition, the writers in this collection draw on a mixture of speculative thought experiments and cutting-edge use cases to offer singular views on topics including AI and Chinese philosophy, AI ethics and policymaking, the development of computational models in early Chinese cybernetics and the aesthetics of Sinofuturism.

Book forthcoming from Urbanomic in 2025.

Excerpts featured in a Zheng Mahler solo show here.