Homeostasis: A Novel and Examination of AI Sentient City Living

Abstract

Homeostasis: A Novel and Examination of AI Sentient City Living is the first novel of a trilogy that considers life in a city dominated by AI technology. With the ubiquity of AI-powered technologies, human and machine now live in tandem, developing alongside one another. This new closeness to machine subverts human identity and asks where the body ends. Language, voice, and names function to finalize human identity, but with advanced AI developments, machines gain the same language, develop their own voices, and are even given names. Through this intervention, my creative thesis digitalizes identity and overlays onto the real world an augmented reality where information is constantly communicated and constantly revised. With the abundance of smart technology that constantly communicates with and responds to humans, the sentient AI becomes less science fiction. What does it mean to know language—to have a voice—to have a name? What does it mean to be sentient? I interrogate the sentient AI further, however, to revitalize space and place. By examining and synthesizing Tim Cresswell’s “place,” Gaston Bachelard’s “home,” and putting these into conversation with “sentient home” narratives, I believe that place, through the abundance and embeddedness of technology, similarly develops sentience. Place—that personalized space—now has the potential to purport its own agenda. By investigating both older and newer narratives like E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Netflix’s Love Death and Robots episode, “Lucky 13,” my thesis examines the timeless question of what a place means for the individual. I conclude that the human/machine/place relationship is a three-way mutualistic symbiosis, and no longer is the human passively being protected by place or passively being served by machine. With machines and places gaining a sense of sentience—a sense of their own will—the human, as an organism within the augmented space, also sustains the machine, and place.